For those that do not know that yet, James Owen created Rules Fest a couple of years ago. Back then it was called October Rules Fest though. The show still happens in October but we lost the word in the name.
James is always controversial and had to beat us up for coming up with the BRMS hype. No hard feelings though. We love him.
The topic at hand is rules-based forecasting. This is obviously something we are interested in from the stand point of Predictive Analytics. There are many technologies that can be used to predict the future – Scorecards, Neural Nets, Bayesian Networks, etc. Some of them translate into Business Rules. I wonder if this is where James is going…
Preparer and User
Slides should be available soon. You will find there details on the required abilities for each one of those roles as well as the interactions.
As I mentioned in my talk this morning, I am big on “rules of engagement”. It is as important to define clear roles and responsibilities between IT and Business Users as it is to define them between Analytics / Forecast Preparers and Users. This is a trinity I have been involved quite a bit in the past 15 years (wow… 15 years already…). It is amazingly unnatural for those 3 groups to work well together but it can happen. And when it happens, it typically brings huge return on investment (ROI).
Back to the presentation… Lots of nuggets on the challenges and solutions of forecasting. My favorite topic here is Uncertainty (of course) — including the assessment of accuracy.
All those formulas remind me of profiling techniques that identify quite elegantly trends and outliers for effective treatment by business rules. A very powerful combination indeed.
One question for you, James… Where is the Texan flag?
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