First Look – Chordiant’s Visual Business Director

Today Chordiant announced their new Visual Business Director (CxVBD). I saw an early prototype of this some months back and got a more detailed look at the finished product at their recent Customer Advisory Board. I really like CxVBD as I think it shows the critical business value of externalizing decisions. I have yet to see anything like it – despite various rules and decisioning platforms offering “simulation” capabilities – and I think business users will immediately see the potential of the product.

The premise of CxVBD is that simulation of a business, especially the decisions that drive a business, is critical to change management, to planning and to devising strategy. Users of Chordiant’s decisioning platform (reviewed here) already have the information available when a decision is made (inputs), the outcome, the responses to the decision and the logic used in the decision. Extending the platform to capture this information allows CxVBD to replay logic, report on and monitor decisions, simulate alternative approaches and provide some look-ahead capability. Here’s a quick screen shot:

In Chordiant Decision Manager all the decisions are managed in a proposition hierarchy and CxVBD allows any part of this hierarchy – down to the atomic decisions being made right now – to be analyzed by customer segment, channel, application and more. Targets can be defined and tracked against and the timeline can be controlled from years to hours to provide the level of detail you want. CxVBD provides an incredibly rich dashboard environment for analyzing and monitoring your decisions.

But it goes much further than that. Allowing you to change your decisioning approaches and see what impact such a change would have had or might yet have is central to CxVBD. This simulation shows the impact of a change not only on the outcome of that decision but on the other, related decisions in the system. If the outcome is what you expect or want, you can put the new approach into production directly turning your dashboard into a true business cockpit.

CxVBD has the power to usher in a new era of business management in which companies are able to measure and fine tune the impact of every customer-facing decision.

There’s also a short article at New Chordiant Cx CRM Simulation Solution Helps Enterprises Swim To Success.