Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to Using Business Rules and Predictive Analytics: A Practical Guide to Using Business Rules and Predictive Analytics (IBM Press)

"A very rich book sprinkled with real-life examples as well as battle-tested advice.”
—Pierre Haren, VP ILOG, IBM

"James does a thorough job of explaining Decision Management Systems as enablers
of a formidable business transformation.”
—Deepak Advani, Vice President, Business Analytics Products and SPSS, IBM

Build Systems That Work Actively to Help You Maximize Growth and Profits
Most companies rely on operational systems that are largely passive. But what if you could make your systems active participants in optimizing your business? What if your systems could act intelligently on their own? Learn, not just report? Empower users to take action instead of simply escalating their problems? Evolve without massive IT investments?

Decision Management Systems can do all that and more. In this book, the field’s leading expert demonstrates how to use them to drive unprecedented levels of business value. James Taylor shows how to integrate operational and analytic technologies to create systems that are more agile, more analytic, and more adaptive. Through actual case studies, you’ll learn how to combine technologies such as predictive analytics, optimization, and business rules—improving customer service, reducing fraud, managing risk, increasing agility, and driving growth.

Both a practical how-to guide and a framework for planning, Decision Management Systems focuses on mainstream business challenges.

Coverage includes

• Understanding how Decision Management Systems can transform your business
• Planning your systems “with the decision in mind”
• Identifying, modeling, and prioritizing the decisions you need to optimize
• Designing and implementing robust decision services
• Monitoring your ongoing decision-making and learning how to improve it
• Proven enablers of effective Decision Management Systems: people, process, and technology
• Identifying and overcoming obstacles that can derail your Decision Management Systems initiative

James Taylor is the CEO of Decision Management Solutions, and is the leading expert in how to use business rules and analytic technology to build Decision Management Systems. James is passionate about using Decision Management Systems to help companies improve decision-making and develop an agile, analytic, and adaptive business. He has more than 20 years working with clients in all sectors to identify their highest-value opportunities for advanced analytics, enabling them to reduce fraud, continually manage and assess risk, and maximize customer value with increased flexibility and speed.

In addition to strategy consulting, James has been a keynote speaker at many events for executive audiences, including ComputerWorld’s BI & Analytics Perspectives, Gartner Business Process Management Summit, Information Management Europe, Business Intelligence South Africa, The Business Rules Forum, Predictive Analytics World, IBM’s Business Analytics Forum, and IBM’s CIO Leadership Exchange. James is also a faculty member of the International Institute for Analytics.

In 2007, James wrote Smart (Enough) Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions (Prentice Hall) with Neil Raden, and has contributed chapters on Decision Management to multiple books, including Applying Real-World BPM in an SAP Environment, The Decision Model, The Business Rules Revolution: Doing Business The Right Way, and Business Intelligence Implementation: Issues and Perspectives. He blogs on Decision Management at www.jtonedm.com and has written dozens of articles on Decision Management Systems for CRM Magazine, Information Management, Teradata Magazine, The BPM Institute, BeyeNetwork, InformationWeek, and TDWI’s BI Journal.

He was previously a Vice President at Fair Isaac Corporation, spent time at a Silicon Valley startup, worked on PeopleSoft’s R&D team, and as a consultant with Ernst and Young. He has spent the last 20 years developing approaches, tools, and platforms that others can use to build more effective information systems.

He lives in Palo Alto, California with his family. When he is not writing about, speaking on or developing Decision Management Systems, he plays board games, acts as a trustee for a local school, and reads military history or science fiction.