Informs Practice is one of two annual conferences of Informs, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. A group extremely vested in building strategic decisioning systems with thousands of practioners around the world, definitely worth spending a couple of days with. What impressed me the most is the ability of this community to address business needs with smart, pragmatic, mathematical and computer-based solutions. A great example of the benefits of Business Analysis and a great lesson or inspiration for IT as a whole.

My goal was to leverage the experience we gained building both optimization and rule-based systems to generalize some fundamental best practices applicable to the implementation of decisioning systems in general, what ever technology is involved. When you look at such systems, here are some common characteristics which come to mind: 

Yes, some decision processes are non deterministic and a decision made through different paths. In other situations, some users change their mind in the way they make decisions and want a computer to assist them in the process. That makes decisioning systems hard to test. In some situations, decisions are made on intangible elements, or intuition, a challenge for our usual way to model things and implement heuristics. Or the human brain is just too powerful and outperform the computer (e.g. visual pattern recognition, optimized way to allocate resources developed over years of experience). Some decisions are not black and white, some are based on fuzzy information, some others are really complex either in terms of number of variables involved or the type of search algorithm. Some users or policies require the decisions to be explained or traced. Some rules are unwritten. And to complicate things even further, decisioning systems are usually involved in processes which are subject to frequent change, for instance a change of policies (internal or external), strategy, organization or business model.

Such qualifiers clearly would not apply to a standard accounting or record-management application such as a CRM system, or an embedded real-time program such as in an ATM or your car ABS.

Although technology can help addressing many of these above challenges, and object-oriented programming in particular, it is not the only solution. Project Management has also to adapt and leverage new paradigms to make sure these projects can cope with so many potential hurdles.

Here are our top-5 picks in ISIS which we will develop further in subsequent posts:

1. Iterative development. Ultimately, you want to put a working system in the hands of your end-users every 4 to 6 weeks. So they can provide early feedback to avoid late discoveries of misunderstood needs or help uncovering mismatch with changing requirements. This is the key concept of the Unified Process, as well as the Agile Manifesto. An approach which is unfortunately not natural in the IT industry yet, but clearly a plus to handle the challenges identified in the above picture.
2. Focus on Time To Profit. It is key to define iterations which each bring some value to the business to anchor the project on the right track, get acceptance and traction from the business and solidify the business case of the solution under development. Business-driven iterations as opposed to purely technical and/or contractual releases or builds like we too often see in classical project life cycle such as the waterfall approach.
3. Intelligent tracking. Most of the IT projects get in trouble because of non realistic tracking. Weeks after weeks, you hear the usual “I’m 80% done” and the percentage keeps the same… Even more so with decisioning systems, estimates need to get revised to account for changes and implementation challenges. Not only you need realistic “pictures” (a project status at a given time), but you need to juxtapose these pictures to make a “movie” and highlight trends which will help you resetting expectations or reevaluating the scope and objectives. In ISIS we have added charts to our weekly status report to explicit potential drifting in workload estimate or track the quality of a deliverable through the evolution of issues found, analyzed and fixed.
4. Project governance. Governance has definitely got a lot of spotlight since the Enron debacle, and a lot of negative connotations for many people since then. However, increased scrutiny surely helped businesses avoid costly mistakes. There are all sorts of governance (e.g. corporate governance, IT governance, SOA governance, rule governance); the project governance should be seen as a positive oversight, an assistance to the project manager to maximize the chance of success. In particular, a steering committee can help the project manager negotiate changes with the business or suggest mitigation actions to address implementation-related issues. ISIS provides checklists and guidelines to make such a governance process work for all the stakeholders.
5. Risk management. We sometimes hear “if we only knew what we know” and this is indeed the title of a great book on knowledge management. Unfortunately, we actually know much more than we want to admit when we start an implementation. For instance, in ISIS, we have a tool to evaluate 193 pre-identified risks and 48 classical project management mistakes. Needless to say, with such a long list, the saying should become “if we had known what we knew then…” Definitely worth spending time in a fair, transparent and upfront risk analysis.

These are only 5 of many foundations of ISIS but key ones to ensure success. As we have seen over the past 20 years and learnt from hundred of projects. They do require quite some discipline though, but the rewards of getting a decisioning system used for many years make them worth the effort!

What is this blog about?

Since ILOG’s inception in 1987, ILOG consultants have been involved in thousands of projects, helping our customers making the best use of ILOG technology. All these projects share a key characteristic: they are all about decisioning or decision-support. Leveraging computers and smart software to help you, our customers, make better decisions, faster, while managing change and complexity. Not an easy task but we are proud of the unmatched success of our customers in this area, and have learnt a lot in the process, over the past 20 years. We have actually assembled more than 5,000 pages in our PS (Professional Services) methodology and you, ILOG customers, partners, prospects, have asked that we share some of it with you. So, here we are, opening Pandora’s box.

What is ISIS?

ISIS stands for ILOG Solution Implementation Standard. It is a repository of documents gathering and organizing best practices used by our consultants to deliver the best quality in all their engagements based on ILOG technology. It is our Consulting methodology, a process tailored to the implementation of ILOG-based decisioning systems. It is not the dead Egyptian goddess anymore but a very living organism, evolving on a daily basis. It spans from software engineering and program management to product-specific tips and vertical/domain knowledge. It reflects the broad range of decisioning systems that can be built with ILOG products. Technically, it is an extension of the Open Unified Process (OpenUP), but we will come back on this in future posts.

The open-source and Web 2.0 waves

In some way, we follow big trends with this blog, although it is not about source code here but know-how, ideas and concepts. We have actually already made a major step in this area earlier this year with a contribution to the Ecplise Process Framework (EPF) open-source project, in the form of an OpenUP plug-in called Agile Business Rules Development (ABRD). We do hope that the communication will work both ways and you will tell us what you think, share your own experience on a particular topic, what worked or did not work for you and some lessons learnt, useful to anyone implementing decisioning systems in general.

Where can you expect this blog to go?

We plan on navigating across various parts of ISIS and here are some topics which you can expect to be addressed over the coming weeks and months:

• More details on OpenUP and EPF and how we have leveraged them in our implementation process, and our ABRD contribution,
• Benefits of iterative development, the key foundation of ISIS,
• The specific challenges and opportunities in implementing optimization and rule-based decisioning systems,
• Rule governance, a strategic area addressed by BRMS,
• Project governance,
• Improved techniques to track project progress,
• The specific roles involed in the implementation of decisioning systems, on the supplier and customer sides,
• Best practices around testing decisioning systems (e.g. test plan, delta testing),
• Praxeme, an open enterprise modeling method,
• Tips to leverage the BRMS approach and benefits in implementing SOAs,
• Discussion around the right level of documentation to remain agile, how to properly document use cases,
• The benefits of risk analysis and management, and the associated discipline.

There will be more as we comment market news and trends and also as you rise questions and new ideas in your comments. We count on you to keep the communication loop closed and live!

Who are we?

Jean, Pierre, Jerome, Maurice, Julio, we are the team behind ISIS. Leveraging our combined 50 man-years with ILOG implementing decision-support systems based on our four product lines and with the help of 200 consultants on hundreds of engagements, we keep adding new tips and best practices to the ISIS repository, learning from the stimulating and challenging projects our customers come to us with. This is a team blog and you will see contributions from the 5 of us, covering some of the many facets of our methodology.

With this introduction, and in the midst of this Spring of 2008, let the discussion begin and flourish!

The ISIS team.