Posts tagged as:

champion/challenger

First Look – FICO Xpress and Business Rules

February 17, 2010

Optimization is a mathematical process for finding the best decision for a given business problem – usually highest profit, lowest cost given a set of constraints. Involve applying an algorithm to data, decision variables, constraints and an objective function. In financial services and insurance optimization is still fairly new (unlike, say, supply chain) but the [...]

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First Look – TRIAD 8.5 and Decision Graph

February 15, 2010

TRIAD 8.5 has just been released and is the latest version of FICO’s combined account manager and customer manager platform for financial services companies (its focus is on accounts/customers where credit risk is a critical issue). I got an update recently focused on Decision Graph. Decision Graph is  one of the new capabilities. Decision Graph [...]

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First Look – SAS Enterprise Miner/Model Manager

December 3, 2009

The folks from SAS gave me a quick update the other day on SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS Model Manager, two of SAS’ data mining/predictive analytics products. I often blog about SAS, as you would expect, but I have not done any product posts. SAS’ Business Analytics Framework is focused on helping organizations find the [...]

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Business Rules Forum 2009 – Day 1 #brf

November 4, 2009

It’s the end of day 1 of the Business Rules Forum/Enterprise Decision Management Summit and time to write a wrap up post for the day – no live blogging today as I have too much on as track chair to sit behind my keyboard!
Today I got to attend Jim Sinur’s keynote and sessions from Roger [...]

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A reader asks about champion/challenger testing

May 27, 2009

A little while ago I got an interesting question from a reader about champion/challenger testing  – an element of adaptive control. Check out this brief on Adaptive Control or read the chapter in Smart (Enough) Systems for details on the approach. Anyway, here’s the question:
When testing a champion strategy with challengers, I assume sample [...]

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Chordiant Decision Management Update

May 19, 2009

I got a chance to sit down with Rob Walker last week for an update on Chordiant Decision Manager. Rob covered some of the new features in Chordiant Decision Management 6.2 as well as some general background that has not appeared in any of my posts before (check out First Look – Chordiant Decision Management [...]

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First Look – Incanto

March 13, 2009

I got a chance to look at a new decision product this week – Incanto from Qualia Systems in the UK. Incanto is a decision modeling tool and the founders of the company describe their objective as providing both a “scribble pad” where you could have a continual development process, moving pieces around until what [...]

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Decision Services as agile, intelligent agents

December 19, 2008

Two articles I saw recently (Is SOA Enabling Intelligent Agents? and Three Keys to Enabling Agile Business Services) made me think about decision services in the context of agility and of so-called “intelligent agents”. Clearly SOA, web 2.0 and network-centric…

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First Look – Predigy

November 20, 2008

Predigy is a technology originally developed by Intelligent Results (founded in 2001) that was acquired by First Data in 2007. It was originally focused on the military (particularly on the analysis of unstructured data) but has subsequently moved into commercial applications. Predigy is now a decisioning platform with some applications in banking, collections, telecommunications and [...]

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Hotwire.com Revenue Management

October 28, 2008

Darren Koch presented on Hotwire.com’s use of ILOG business rules in revenue management. Summary:

Ongoing segmentation and optimization help businesses serve customers
Smart testing + flexibility = better service = higher profits
Continues to show ROI that is increasing over time

Hotwire.com was founded in 1999 to help travel partners (who invested) sell excess inventory without driving down prices [...]

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Evidence-based (decision-centric) CRM Processes

October 22, 2008

Graham Hill wrote a piece on Evidence-based CRM that focused on evidence-based CRM programs and it made me think about evidence-based CRM processes.
To me, evidence-based CRM means customer relationships, and thus customer treatments, that are based on evidence (data) and not judgment, hope, guesswork etc. It means

making offers that you have evidence this customer will [...]

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Here’s how to get started with decision management

June 12, 2008

When I talk to folks about decision management they sometimes seem intimidated by the complexity of the problem and the sophistication of organizations that have invested heavily in the approach. Here, then, are some thoughts to help you get started.

Begin – even if the first version is not perfect or even close.
Automate the decision even [...]

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Live from InterACT – Changing the game

April 30, 2008

A collections session next with folks from Adeptra, Fair Isaac and GE Money talking about GE’s vision for virtual collections. The collections environment is extremely bad this year with massive growth in the need for collection agents. Delinquencies are up, problems are up, consumers are stressed. Scores are worsening (credit profiles are worse), payments are [...]

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Live from InterACT – Ian Ayres

April 28, 2008

I started with an interesting breakfast this morning with Ian Ayres and Larry Rosenberger. Ian is the author of Super Crunchers (reviewed here in the wiki) and Larry is a research fellow and ex-CEO of Fair Isaac. The two of them were great conversationalists and we ranged across randomized testing (adaptive control), the power of [...]

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Some thoughts on Adaptive Decision Management

April 22, 2008

Paul Haley wrote an interesting piece last week on Adaptive Decision Management. This is a really good piece and I highly recommend it. I do have a couple of things to add, however.
While Paul is correct that Fair Isaac did not talk about “decision management” until after the HNC merger, Fair Isaac had a long [...]

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Here’s my contribution to the IT Services Stack

April 1, 2008

Jack van Hoof has a nice post this week on IT Services Stack: collaboration experiment in which he outlines an IT Service Stack and invites participation from those with opinions to try and flesh out a common set of definitions. I liked the overall stack but I have a couple of suggestions. Here are my [...]

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Using EDM to effectively allocate resources

February 5, 2008

Continuing my series on using EDM to manage in a recession, allocating resources effectively. In a recession resources are, almost always, constrained and so the proper and effective allocation of resources can be critical. Enterprise Decision Management, EDM, is particularly useful in allocating resources to customers. This plays out in a couple of key ways.
Firstly, [...]

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Decision making traps

January 24, 2008

My friends over at Big Sky Thinking had a great series of posts on the decision making traps as discussed in a classic Harvard Business Review piece (that you can buy from amazon here: The Hidden Traps in Decision Making (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition)). First, here are the links to their posts:

Decision-Making Traps Part 1: [...]

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