Using Business Analysis to Achieve Organizational Goals

SPEAKER(s):

Kevin Brennan Vice President, Business Analysis - Body of Knowledge IIBA

ABOUT THIS SESSION:

Business analysis involves understanding how organizations function to accomplish their purposes and defining the capabilities an organization requires to provide products and services to external stakeholders. It includes the definition of organizational goals, understanding how those goals connect to specific objectives, determining the courses of action that an organization has to undertake to achieve those goals and objectives, and defining how the various organizational units and stakeholders within and outside of that organization interact. Over the last five years, IIBA has worked to understand and define the increasingly critical role of the business analyst. This session will summarize the results of that research, help you understand what business analysts do, and how they can help organizations be successful. What you will learn:




• What does a business analyst do?

• What are the most important skills a business analyst needs to have?

• How can business analysts become more effective in their role?

• What are the factors that have driven the growth of the Business Analysis profession?




• What do you need to consider if you are a Business Analyst – or want to be one – both today and tomorrow?





ABOUT THE SPEAKER(s):

Kevin Brennan, CBAP, PMP, serves on the Board of Directors as the Vice-President, Body of Knowledge, as well as acting as the IIBA’s Manager of Information Technology. He is responsible for the development of the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK®) and was also one of the authors of the CBAP exam. He is a frequent speaker on business analysis, project management, and software quality assurance topics at conferences. Kevin has over a decade of experience as a business analyst and project manager across several industry sectors, including regulated professions, utilities, automobile manufacturing, courier services, and mortgage banking. During this time he has performed just about every task a business analyst could be expected to do, from developing corporate and product strategies to being paged by end-users looking for technical support.

Kevin has taught project management and requirements analysis at Humber College, and has a B.A. degree in History and Political Science from the University of Toronto. He is also a graduate of Second City’s improv comedy program.

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Capturing Business Rules - From Facilitated Sessions, From Great Big Book and From Application Code

SPEAKER(s):

Gladys S.W. Lam Co-Founder & Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC Publisher, BRCommunity.com

ABOUT THIS SESSION:

Business Rules should come from the business. However, you cannot simply ask business people to come together and then multiply rules.

In this session, Ms. Lam will present a comprehensive approach for gathering business rules from business experts using facilitated sessions. Ms. Lam will also discuss the steps required to harvest rules from great big source documents and share her experience on reverse engineering business rules from application code. This session discusses:




• How to coordinate facilitated sessions to collect business rules, including preparation, objectives, agenda and documentation for each session

• The four primary business model deliverables – Policy Charter, Workflow, Fact Model, and Business Rules

• Techniques for capturing, presenting and documenting the deliverables

• A pragmatic way of harvesting rules from great big source documents

• The steps for reverse engineering rules from application code

• The differences between process rules and decisioning rules




• Lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid





ABOUT THE SPEAKER(s):

Gladys S.W. Lam is Principal of Business Rule Solutions (BRSolutions.com), the most recognized company world-wide in business rules, decisioning, and related methodology, publications, consulting services and training. She is the co-creator of the Proteus®, the BRS methodology for business analysis, decisioning and business rules, which is used by companies world-wide. Ms. Lam actively leads business rules and decisioning projects of all sizes across a variety of industries.

Ms. Lam speaks internationally at conferences and other professional events. She co-presents public seminars through AttainingEdge. She is also Executive Director of the Business Rules Forum, the premier international conference on business rules and decisioning.

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Smart Use of Rules in Process

SPEAKER(s):

Kathy Long President Innovative Process Consulting, Inc.

ABOUT THIS SESSION:

Do you have volumes of paper with pictures of processes that no one ever uses?

Many organizations are involved in “Process Improvement” efforts and create process models that become meaningless due to the time and resources required to keep them current. What You Will Learn:




• How to avoid process models that are created and referenced once then never used again

• How the documentation of Business Rules as part of the process influences the elements of reuse, adaptability and flexibility in the models themselves




• Through hands on experience in simple workshops, how to document business processes with techniques that will enable an organization to keep their models current well beyond their initial creation





ABOUT THE SPEAKER(s):

Kathy A. Long, a Principal of the Process Renewal Group, and President of her own company, Innovative Process Consulting, has been helping organizations understand and improve their business performance through improved processes since the mid-1980’s. She has experience improving processes in a wide variety of industries worldwide, including leasing, manufacturing, customer service, telecommunications, banking, petrochemicals, government and retail. Ms. Long brings a very practical, common sense approach to process improvement, applying a variety of techniques and the application of innovative concepts to help move organizations forward with better more effective and adaptable processes. Working with clients, she has enabled them to increase the efficiency of their processes by literally thousands of percent.

She is regarded as realistic practitioner who believes people are one of the critical factors for success in any process improvement initiative and coined the phrase, “People are the Process”.

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Event Processing 2010: Past, Present and Future

SPEAKER(s):

David Luckham Emeritus Professor Stanford University

ABOUT THIS SESSION:

This tutorial on Complex Event Processing (CEP) will cover six topics.


1. Developing markets for event processing — a short survey of the growth of CEP in enterprise management applications and Business Activity Monitoring.

2. History — Event processing 1950-2000.

3. Adopting event processing — how to analyze your event processing requirements and plan a solution.

4. A survey of basic CEP concepts and their applications.

5. Crossing the Chasms — the four stages in the development of event processing from 2000 to 2050. The need to improve the CEP technology in commercial tools and applications.




1. The age of ubiquitous CEP — event processing goes global and disappears under the hood. Scenarios of current and future applications.
   
   What you will learn:
   
   
   

   • What Complex Event Processing is

   • How to apply CEP to solve business problems and improve your BI operations

• How CEP enhances Service Oriented Architectures, Business Process Management, and Business Rules systems

ABOUT THE SPEAKER(s):

David Luckham, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University – Author of “The Power of Events”, has held positions in mathematics, computer science and electrical engineering at eight major universities in Europe and the United States. He was one of the founders of Rational Software Inc. in 1981. He has been an invited lecturer and keynote speaker at many international conferences.

His research and consulting activities in business and software technology are aimed at building real-time event-driven enterprises. Topics include event-driven systems, complex event processing, business activity monitoring, enterprise middleware, multi-processing and business process languages, event-driven systems architecture modeling and simulation, and artificial intelligence (automated deduction and reasoning systems).

He has published four books and over 100 technical papers; he has received two ACM/IEEE Best Paper Awards and US Industry and Government awards. His latest book, “The Power of Events”, deals with the foundations of complex event processing in distributed enterprise systems.

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Business Rules from A - Z: What You Need to Know

SPEAKER(s):

Ronald G. Ross Co-Founder & Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC Executive Editor, Business Rules Journal

ABOUT THIS SESSION:

What are business rules, and how can you apply them effectively in your organization? What pitfalls have other organizations encountered, and how can you avoid them? How can you get up to speed about the very latest in the field?
This tutorial tells you what you need to know to get into the express lane for business rules. It provides clear, authoritative insight into the essential concepts, techniques and tools. Find out what you need to know to be successful in your organization on a point-by-point basis, amplified by far-ranging professional experience.
Cut through the hype about technology, methodology and standards. Learn about the key areas of practical importance to your company. If you are looking for a way to get the latest and best scoop on what’s happening, this tutorial is for you. Come prepared with questions you want answered! What You Will Learn:


• What business rules are and why they matter

• How business rules will help you achieve true agility

• How to capture and manage business rules

• Fitting business rules into requirements process … and into your organization

• Pitfalls, lessons learned and best practices




• The latest trends and emerging standards





ABOUT THE SPEAKER(s):

Ronald G. Ross serves as Executive Editor of www.BRCommunity.com and its flagship publication, Business Rules Journal. He is a sought-after speaker at conferences world-wide. He gives popular public seminars through AttainingEdge (www.AttainingEdge.com) and IRM-UK (www.IRMUK.co.uk).

Mr. Ross is recognized internationally as the “father of business rules.” He has served as Co-Chair of the annual Business Rules Forum Conference since 1997. He was a charter member of the Business Rules Group in the 1980s, and an editor of the two landmark BRG papers, The Business Motivation Model: Business Governance in a Volatile World and the Business Rules Manifesto. He is active in OMG standards development, with core involvement in SBVR.

Mr. Ross is Co-Founder of Business Rule Solutions, LLC (www.BRSolutions.com). At BRS, Mr. Ross co-develops Proteus®, its landmark business requirements methodology, including the popular RuleSpeak®. Mr. Ross is the author of eight professional books. His newest are: Business Rule Concepts (2009), a just-released 3rd edition of his popular, easy-to-read 1998 handbook, and Principles of the Business Rule Approach, Addison-Wesley (2003).

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A Framework for Selecting Business Rules Platforms

SPEAKER(s):

John R. Rymer Vice President and Principal Analyst Forrester Research, Inc.

ABOUT THIS SESSION:

TBA



ABOUT THE SPEAKER(s):

As an analyst on Forrester’s Application Development & Architecture research team, John R. Rymer covers the market for application platforms, including business rules platforms, the Java/J2EE application servers from BEA, IBM, JBoss, Oracle, SAP, and Sun Microsystems, and the equivalent portions of Microsoft’s .NET platform. Mr. Rymer has 20 years of experience as an industry analyst, business strategy consultant, and software marketing executive. Previously, Mr. Rymer served as vice president of product marketing at IONA Technologies, where he gained firsthand experience in creating and executing market strategies.

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Driving Decisions with Predictive Analytics: The Top Seven Business Applications

SPEAKER(s):

Eric Siegel President (Prediction Impact) & Conference Chair (Predictive Analytics World)

ABOUT THIS SESSION:

The value proposition is straight-forward and proven: Predictive analytics produces business rules that deliver. The customer predictions generated by predictive analytics’ business rules deliver more relevant content to each customer, improving response rates, click rates, buying behavior, retention and overall profit.

Harnessing value with predictive analytics depends on some careful choices: What kind of customer behavior you predict and which operational decisions you automate with it. This workshop will guide you in making these choices, and cover a healthy dose of the core technology along the way – in a “user-friendly” manner that makes the concepts intuitive, illustrating with detailed case studies. What you will learn:




• How predictive analytics automatically derives rules for decision automation by learning from experience

• The top seven business applications of analytically optimized rules




• What business rules produced by predictive analytics look like and how they work





ABOUT THE SPEAKER(s):

Eric Siegel, conference chair of Predictive Analytics World and president of Prediction Impact, Inc., is an expert in predictive analytics and data mining and a former computer science professor at Columbia University, where he won awards for teaching, including graduate-level courses in machine learning and intelligent systems – the academic terms for predictive analytics. After Columbia, Dr. Siegel co-founded two software companies for customer profiling and data mining, and then started Prediction Impact in 2003, providing predictive analytics services and training to mid-tier through Fortune 100 companies.

Dr. Siegel is the instructor of the acclaimed training program, Predictive Analytics for Business, Marketing and Web, and the online version, Predictive Analytics Applied. He has published 13 papers in data mining research and computer science education, has served on 10 conference program committees, and has chaired a AAAI Symposium held at MIT.

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Maximizing the ROI of a Business Rules Investment with Decision Management

SPEAKER(s):

James Taylor CEO Decision Management Solutions

ABOUT THIS SESSION:

Those who want to get the most out of their adoption of business rules technology must adopt a business discipline focused on business decision making. They must understand the kinds of decisions they have, how these fit into their operational environment and how business rules can be used to manage those decisions. This class will cover the principles of Decision Management, its application to critical business processes and decisions and the appropriate use of available technology. It will show you how to identify and prioritize the operational decisions that drive your organization’s success, introduce business rules as a foundation to automate these decisions, link these decisions to data mining and predictive analytics and discuss how to ensure continuous improvement and competitive advantage using adaptive control. The class will cover:


• Introduction to Decision Management

• Decision Discovery

• Decision Services

• Decision Analysis

• Decisions in Processes, Events and Systems




• Getting Started – First Steps





ABOUT THE SPEAKER(s):

James Taylor is CEO of Decision Management Solutions and works with clients to develop effective technology solutions to improve business performance. He has over 20 years experience in developing software and is the foremost thinker and writer on decision management. James was previously a Vice President at Fair Isaac Corporation and was lead author of Smart (Enough) Systems (Prentice Hall, 2007), the book he wrote with Neil Raden. James is a passionate advocate of decision management and writes a popular blog at http://jtonedm.com

James has experience in all aspects of the design, development, marketing and use of advanced technology including CASE tools, project planning and methodology tools as well as platform development in PeopleSoft’s R&D team and management consulting with Ernst and Young. He develops approaches, tools and platforms that others can use to build more effective information systems.

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