champion/challenger

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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…

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]