Blaze Advisor

Back in 2008 I wrote this post – The small impact of business rules on the big players, bemoaning the lack of serious investment in business rules on the part of major software companies. As we enter 2014 I thought I would revisit this post and consider what a difference 5 years makes. Let’s consider some [...]

The folks at Hyundai Information Service North America are looking for a Senior Blaze Advisor Developer in Irvine. They want someone to handle  requirements gathering, technical planning and documentation, design, development, unit testing, implementation and maintenance for  applications using the Blaze Rules Engine, Java, and Database queries. This will include managing the Blaze versioning system, repository administration, deployment [...]

Decision optimizer is one of FICO’s Decision Management Tools and is designed to address some specific challenges in customer decisioning, particularly that there are often competing objectives and very large numbers of customers (and thus customer decisions) involved. Combine this with the many possible action combinations, uncertainty about what customers might do, as well as [...]

I last got a briefing from Sapiens last year and I recently got an update on Sapiens DECISION release 3.2. Obviously Sapiens DECISION is focused on a robust and complete implementation of The Decision Model as described by KPI. Governance has seen a major update in the recent release. Users create a Business Change Request [...]

Last session for me at FICO World is SulAmerica (part of ING) talking about their work with FICO moving decision management applications to the cloud. Cloud is clearly a growth area for businesses, with much of companies’ IT  investment being pushed to the cloud. This move to the cloud turns applications to SaaS, middleware into [...]

Stuart Wells, the CTO of FICO, came up to give the keynote and talk about FICO’s big cloud announcements: FICO Cloud-based Decision Management Platform (announcement here) FICO Analytic Cloud (announcement here and sign up here) Customer engagement applications  on this cloud platform announcement here (discussed also in this blog post). Stuart began with a couple of stories. [...]

I wrote about FICO Model Central, FICO’s model management product, back in February of 2012. A new release, 3.0, is shipping with a new feature called Model Deployment Accelerator for rapid deployment. To recap, FICO Model Central automates analytic model compliance tasks, provides alerts and visualization to help you identify needed model updates, supports getting [...]

I wrote about Blaze Advisor 7.0 back in September. FICO is about to release Blaze Advisor 7.1 and key themes for 7.1 are a focus on increased business control and flexibility, faster time to deployment and more integrated simulation. The key driver for this comes from the steady increase in business user engagement – the [...]

FICO Model Central is the latest addition to FICO’s Decision Management platform and is focused on lifecycle management of predictive analytic models in the context of an overall Decision Management implementation. The original driver was a growing regulatory requirement in the banking industry to have a regular cycle of model validation and monitoring of predictive [...]

Brooksource in Louisville, KY is searching for a Rules Management Developer for a Fortune 100 client in the healthcare industry. This position is within the Clinical Guidance group and they are seeking someone that has a development background and has experience working with the business side of the house.  This is a unique position that has [...]

Time for a quick session or two at FICO World. Chip Clarke and Andrew Beckman presented on the use of customer-level TRIAD to continuously improve their collection results for their retail banking products – to do “Adaptive Control”. Adaptive control, for those not familiar with the term, means continually challenging the way you make decisions [...]

I got a chance to catch up with FICO to talk about the new release of Blaze Advisor recently. FICO has  a set of decision management solutions consisting of tools (primarily the Blaze Advisor business rules management system, the Model Builder predictive analytic workbench, Decision Optimizer and the Xpress Optimization Suite), applications and analytics (scores [...]

Model Builder is FICO’s predictive analytic workbench remains focused on superior scorecard technology with advanced inferencing and reject inference (described in my review of Model Builder 7.1). Integration with the Blaze Advisor BRMS and integration for common variable libraries remains a largely unique feature. The focus of the newly announced Model Builder 7.2 is on [...]

I got an update from Software AG after they announced webMethods 8.2 and ARIS 7.2.These two releases are the end result of work since Software AG acquired both companies. The releases contain features specific to both products based on their long standing roadmaps but Software AG also invested in improved integration of the two products. [...]

I got an update from the folks at FICO on the new release of Model Builder, their predictive analytics workbench. My last update was for Blaze Advisor 6.9 and Model Builder 7.0 and this release, Model Builder 7.1, is the first point release for Model Builder on the new 7.x platform. For those of you [...]

Humana is looking for a Technology Manager to manage the Clinical Business Rules Team in Louisville, KY. They are looking for “a self-starter and a proven leader” who would “enjoy using your technical knowledge to help empower your team to identify and resolve organizational issues”. Role has 12-25 direct reports and reports to a Technology [...]

FICO had an interesting announcement today – Blaze Advisor, their business rules management system, is supporting Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform for cloud deployments (the press release is here). The announcement is a first step only – at this stage Microsoft and FICO have focused solely on verifying the deployment of decision services built using Blaze [...]

Model Builder 7.0, Decision Optimizer 6.1, Blaze Advisor 6.9 Decision Management remains the core focus for FICO with both a Decision Management platform and decisioning applications. The applications are increasingly built on top of the platform, sharing execution and modeling infrastructure. FICO still sees business rules as the basis for decisions, being improved and extended [...]

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 [...]