How to Get Your Customers to Say “WONDERFUL!” (and mean it)
“WONDERFUL. It is more logical and works the way I think when I’m planning a vacation.” Group RCI customer
 
Join us to learn how Group RCI, the global leader in vacation exchange and largest European vacation rental provider, modernized their mainframe applications – extracting 35 years of [...]

(Guest post by James Taylor of Decision Management Solutions)
One of the best things about being at DIALOG was the opportunity to meet a bunch of ILOG customers and learn how they are making better decisions in their organizations. It seems to me that every one of these customers is, in a very practical way, helping [...]

I participated in four out of the five very different optimization clinics that took place during Dialog ’09. They spanned most of the range of issues that PS faces during the development of a project, and brought some useful light on how to deliver best results to our customers.
Two of them had a very technical focus, [...]

DIALOG 09 was all about “Essential Agility” and “Future Readiness.” Out of the 60+ conference sessions at this year’s event, Dr. James Canton’s keynote “The Realtime Enterprise” on Wednesday morning particularly captured my imagination.
Dr. Canton (Dr. Future to his friends) began by mentioning an announcement he’d read in the Financial Times about the launch next [...]

ILOG and IBM is focused on providing agility for the enterprise applications that are running on System z.   This session focused on how you can achieving the promises of SOA in your IMS applicaitons by externalizing and managing your business rules separate from your COBOL code.  You have two options for ILOG BRMS on System [...]

This was a very interactive, hands on workshop using Rules Solutions for Office.  Colleen McClintock demonstrated how business users can utilize Rules Solutions for Office to author and maintain their business rules and upload them to the Rule Team Server Repository for management and deployment.   Then, each of the attendees were able to use Rule Solutions [...]

This was an excellent session for those that are both new and old to business rule authoring.  Jerome and Pierre presented some key techniques that can be easily applied to get the maiximum productivity and meet buisness needs and requirements.  Some key take aways were:

Think about how you want to classify structure your rule project as [...]

I think that rule engine performance must be one of the most talked about topics in this industry. Today, most engines perform ‘good enough’, and the tooling around the engine (what turns a rule engine into a BRMS) is a more important factor when choosing among the vendors.
Wednesday’s keynote was by ‘futurist’ James Canton who [...]

(Guest post by James Taylor of Decision Management Solutions)
Another panel, this time on how business rules fits into an agile IT infrastructure. British Airways, PMI (mortgage related services), Swiss Medical (Argentinian health insurance) and Wyndham Group were represented. Panels are tough to blog so here’s a list of takeaways:

Start small and in a well known [...]

(Guest post by James Taylor of Decision Management Solutions)
I took some notes from an interesting panel on governance and change control. Panels are always tough to blog so this is a summary of my takeaways not a record of the panel:

Executive sponsorship and active evangelism are key
Build expertise - centers of excellence - within the [...]