October Rules Fest

— Posted by Carole-Ann The very first occurrence of October Rules Fest happened in Dallas a couple of weeks ago. The objective was to get all kinds of business rules techies in one room and cover all kinds of topics…

— Posted by Carole-Ann

The very first occurrence of October Rules Fest happened in Dallas a couple of weeks ago. The objective was to get all kinds of business rules techies in one room and cover all kinds of topics from rule algorithm details and innovation to enterprise deployment considerations to decision management. James Owen and team assembled a fantastic panel of presenters if I may say so myself.

Despite the slowdown in the economy the attendance was pretty good — around a 100 or so senior architects and CIOs from large enterprises from all around the world. Given that they did not do any marketing, this illustrates the power of blogs!

Everyone was very engaged in the sessions. Lots of great conversations during and after the sessions. It was friendly, competition was respectful and most of us stayed at the technical level (no sales pitch).

Being one of the early Decision Management pioneers, I decided to provide education on Predictive Analytics. I changed the title to “Demystifying Predictive Analytics” by the way. From the feedback I received it seems that it stroke a cord with the audience. Too often, modelers and IT do not talk (that is if they know each other at all!) and do not value each other’s contribution. My talk intended to provide enough background on what models are, how they are being constructed and what they can be used for. It took us years at Fair Isaac to get mutual respects. Sharing our scars will help the industry at large “grow up” faster.

Carlos Serrano-Morales and myself had the opportunity to present again on Thursday afternoon. We focused this time on Enterprise Deployment. We admit this is boring stuff to some extent but this is also what business rules evangelists need to understand to really exploit the whole value of business rules, and avoid architecture pitfalls.

Charles Forgy presented also the latest and greatest innovation on parallel Rete. I can tell that all the vendors were taking notes! Aren’t we lucky to have him working for us? Priceless.

Again, based on James Owen blog, it seems those three sessions were quite well appreciated by the audience. I encourage you to read his blog report on the sessions. The slide decks will be available soon I believe. They also taped the talks. I am waiting for the videos any day now.

I loved the show. I hope that James and Rolando will do it again next year. It was a great place to discuss the “technical” stuff without the marketing. It felt like a high school reunion, just missing a couple of the “usual suspects” (Paul Haley and Ernest Friedman-Hill).

Feedback from our customers was also very positive. So this is not just my opinion…

I also want to thank Andreas for the picture of me presenting. If you are interested in what I am showing on the screen, it is a pretty cool data discovery report from Model Builder. I am explaining the weight of evidence sparklines.