Fair Isaac

Book Review – Business Rule Revolution: Running Business the Right Way

August 1, 2009

Business Rule Revolution: Running Business the Right Way by Barbara Von Halle, Larry Goldberg
The book is a collection of chapters, not necessarily designed to be read in sequence. The chapters include:

A great summary of various rules projects surveyed by KPI showing the focus on agility, consistency, knowledge management, legacy modernization, business control (though interestingly not [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – FICO Blaze Advisor 6.7 and Decision Simulator

June 1, 2009

Back in March FICO released 6.7 of their BRMS Blaze Advisor. I got a chance to catch up with the release just recently. The focus of this release was the business user experience – an improved out of the box experience for business users. The business user experience has become increasingly critical as business users [...]

Read the full article →

Predictions for 2009

December 18, 2008

I just went back to check and found no predictions on the blog for 2008 (so I get a 100% accuracy rating with no errors) so I thought I would make some for 2009. In no particular order then:

Cloud computing will impact decision management.
There are already at least two decision management vendors offering decisions in [...]

Read the full article →

First Look Blaze Advisor 6.6

December 4, 2008

Blaze Advisor 6.6 is an incremental release to Fair Isaac’s business rules management system that has just become available. As Fair Isaac has used the product more extensively as the basis for its decisioning applications its own experience has driven a variety of useful features and this, combined with the Blaze Advisor team’s usual focus [...]

Read the full article →

New Approaches to Creating, Simplifying and Visualizing Rules

October 30, 2008

Stuart Crawford from Fair Isaac’s R&D group presented on New Approaches to Creating, Simplifying and Visualizing Rules. While decision trees can be very clear, they can also become very complex. His group has been working on algorithms for simplifying decision trees. Because decision trees often have repeating sub-trees – pieces of the tree that are [...]

Read the full article →

EDM Summit – Day 2 Begins

October 29, 2008

Getting ready for my keynote and wanted to post a few quick things. Firstly other bloggers: Sandy Kemsley, Paul Vincent and Mike Kaviz are all here and are/will be posting. Here are the links I found so far:

Business Rules Forum: Vendor Panel
Business Rules Forum: Mixing Rules and Process
Business Rules Forum: Ron Ross keynote
Business Intelligence meets [...]

Read the full article →

Last chance for the EDM Summit

October 16, 2008

There are only 12 Days Left to register for the first Enterprise Decision Management Summit so get off your butt and register!

Neil and I Co-Chairs and readers of the blog can get a discount. We are presenting twice – A Pre-Conference Tutorial Succeeding as a Decision-Centric Organization and a Keynote Competing [...]

Read the full article →

New Community for Fair Isaac customers and others

September 30, 2008

The folks at Fair Isaac pointed me to a new community they have just released – dmtools.fairisaac.com. I have not had much of a chance to check it out but it looks useful and I look forward to participating. One thing is new – you can download trial versions of Blaze Advisor. Have fun…

Read the full article →

An interesting poll on data miners and PMML

August 7, 2008

PMML – The Predictive Modeling Markup Language – is the primary XML format for describing predictive analytic models so that a modeling tool can share a model with either another modeling tool or, more usefully, with a deployment environment. The folks over at KDNuggets recently ran a poll asking their readers about their use of [...]

Read the full article →

First thoughts on the IBM/ILOG announcement

July 28, 2008

I got a chance to speak with ILOG today and do some thinking so it’s time to write more about the IBM and ILOG announcement. As it is an acquisition of one publicly traded company by another neither company can legally say very much. As a result I, like everyone else, have a bunch of [...]

Read the full article →

Q: What do you get when you cross EDM and a raptor?

July 15, 2008

A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zDwIfSDQiE
(Falcon, by the way, is the name of Fair Isaac’s fraud detection product that combines a neural network – a form of predictive analytics – with business rules and dynamic profiles to make real-time decisions about credit card fraud).

Read the full article →

Bringing a business domain to bear on decisions

May 9, 2008

Mike made an interesting comment in response to my recent post on the future of application development. He said:
Are business domain tools necessary to enable a non-trivial development role for businesspeople?
Like many good questions the answer is complicated – in a way, both yes and no. I do agree with Mike that a non-trivial role [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – ILOG Scorecard Add-on

May 7, 2008

ILOG today announced a Scorecard modeler as an add-on for ILOG JRules ® (which I first saw at DIALOG). As their press release says, this add-in allows customers to “incorporate statistical scorecard models directly into decision services” – a key tenet of enterprise decision mangement or EDM. ILOG is targeting financial institutions clearly but apparently [...]

Read the full article →

Live from InterACT – Closing Keynote

April 30, 2008

Ted Iacobuzio of TowerGroup gave the closing keynote, expanding on the survey results Fair Isaac announced today. More than 100 of the InterACT attendees took the survey – clearly this is top of mind. Some highlights:

Lenders appreciate the need for integrated customer information and multi-product decisioning
Lenders are not all at the same speed in implementation
Respondents [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Live from InterACT – Optimal Pricing

April 29, 2008

Last full session today is Lisa Kart and Jean Zoch of Fair Isaac talking about optimal pricing – balancing profitability with competitiveness. Lisa’s focus, she says, is on what makes price optimization work. Price optimization is a very broad topic, even in financial services, but their focus is on being able to target price for [...]

Read the full article →

Live from InterACT – Using Risk Applications to Drive Growth

April 28, 2008

Next up Discover and Fair Isaac talking about Discover’s Enterprise Decision Management initiative. Dave Wodall from Discover co-presented with Xun Shao of Fair Isaac. Discover use Blaze Advisor (rules), Model Builder (analytics) and Decision Optimizer (portfolio optimization). Discover was launched in 1985 and, like Amex, has both the network and the consumer relationship. 50M members, [...]

Read the full article →

Live from InterACT – New Approaches to Strategies

April 28, 2008

Next up was Stuart Crawford, part of Fair Isaac’s extensive research staff, on new approaches to the creation, visualization and comparison of decision trees or, as Fair Isaac calls them, Strategies. Stuart has been working at Fair Isaac for many years and has a lot of background in analytics. This work is about how to [...]

Read the full article →