A new software release gives businesses in multiple industries the same power, precision and control that Fair Isaac solutions provide today for credit card management, fraud control and other areas. Enterprise Decision Manager™ system is the first software that combines sophisticated predictive analytics, business rules technology and business control capabilities into a toolkit for decision management applications.
The software forms part of Fair Isaac’s holistic approach to the discipline known as Enterprise Decision Management.
“We’re in the business of helping businesses automate and improve their decisions,” says Lori Sherer, vice president of Enterprise Decision Management at Fair Isaac. “While our biggest wins have been in areas like risk management and fraud detection, we believe our tools, our analytics and our understanding of decision processes hold the key to solving a much greater range of business problems.”
A toolkit for advanced decision management
Enterprise Decision Manager accelerates the development and deployment of decision management applications. These applications improve the consistency, relevancy, speed and precision of customer decisions, deriving more value from every customer interaction. By using Enterprise Decision Manager as the foundation for decision management applications, businesses can reduce IT development and maintenance costs for these applications by up to 80%.
“Organizations require greater consistency in the way decisions are made,” says Henry Morris, group vice president for Applications and Information Access at IDC. “This is important both for competitive reasons and, increasingly, for compliance reasons—companies must demonstrate that decisions are not arbitrary but rather that they follow established procedures.
“While traditional business intelligence (BI) does not address these issues, decision-centric applications are beginning to expand out of their initial foothold in financial services. Fair Isaac is notable among analytic application providers in delivering high value in industry-specific, decision-centric applications. With its Enterprise Decision Manager platform, Fair Isaac is well-positioned to extend into new industries and new domains.”
Enterprise Decision Manager is different from most Fair Isaac solutions, which address specific industry problems—such as TRIAD™ adaptive control system for credit account management and Falcon™ Fraud Manager for fraud control. With Enterprise Decision Manager, Fair Isaac is providing application-neutral software, which can be used to automate and improve decisions related to virtually any high-volume decision area. It could be used in product configuration and cross-selling, lending, insurance underwriting, customer relationship management, insurance claims processing, retail consumer marketing and supply-chain management, and other areas.
As such, Enterprise Decision Manager is an evolution of our strategy to provide tools as well as solutions for particular industry problems. We are enabling businesses to build their own highly customized applications using the same software tools we use to develop the world’s leading models and decision management applications. These tools—including Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor for rules management and Model Builder for model development—are available as part of the Fair Isaac Business Science™ suite.
With Enterprise Decision Manager, we have leveraged these proven tools to give businesses a single, integrated software product they can use to build their decision infrastructure and improve their business decisions. Enterprise Decision Manager includes road-tested functionality for rules management, model development, application deployment, data-driven strategy design and strategy optimization. As part of the integrated product, Enterprise Decision Manager 2.0, now available, enables the deployment of models within a rule set.
Using Enterprise Decision Manager, businesses can:
- Get more control over decision logic. Business users can define the rules and decision strategies needed to automate decisions, and can change them when and as needed, without re-coding.
- Improve the quality of decisions. Analytic modelers can create insightful, data-driven predictive models, which improve business decisions based on exhaustive analysis of customer behavior patterns.
- Create more effective strategies. Business users and analysts can refine and improve decision strategies through data mining, simulation and optimization.
- Speed the implementation of decision management. Models, rulesets and decision strategies can be easily linked with the required enterprise data and production applications, enabling the business to make smarter, more consistent decisions in real-time or offline environments.
Functions such as accessing required data, adjusting rules or decision parameters, updating models, deploying models in a production environment and auditing decision results are all made easier through the software. By implementing new models 4-10 times faster, and allowing business users to control changes to rules, companies can get new strategic initiatives, products, campaigns and pricing to market faster, and turn speed-to-market into a recurring competitive advantage.
Future releases of Enterprise Decision Manager will introduce a stream of innovations to the way users manage decisions, including the analytic technique of “bootstrapping,” and the generation of Cobol or C code from Enterprise Decision Manager. “We believe that the combination of world-class predictive analytics and business rules technology in Enterprise Decision Manager delivers a level of precision, consistency and agility that no other software can match,” says Tom Grudnowski, CEO of Fair Isaac.
Built for beginners and leaders alike
Enterprise Decision Manager leverages a company’s technology investments in data warehousing and business application systems to empower consistently smarter decisions fueled by Fair Isaac analytics. Simply speaking, Enterprise Decision Manager puts corporate data to work.
Enterprise Decision Manager enables businesses to create the decision management applications that will make their decisions faster, more precise and more consistent.
“Businesses and industries have adopted decision management technology at very different rates, with financial services—and credit cards in particular—being the most advanced,” says Todd Davis, vice president of Business Science at Fair Isaac. “In designing Enterprise Decision Manager, we sought to build a tool that would deliver value whether you’re just getting off the ground with decision automation or you’re a global player that wants to take your technology to the next level.
“For many companies, the big benefit of Enterprise Decision Manager will be the automation of business rules, and the opportunity to improve their existing decisions with analytics. For those who already use models and rules engines, Enterprise Decision Manager offers a way to speed the deployment of models, to make changes to decision strategies faster, to link decisions across channels or decision areas, or to more rapidly extend decision management into new parts of their organization.”
Enterprise Decision Manager also represents an evolution of Fair Isaac’s plan to standardize its solutions on a common technical architecture. Many of our industry-standard decision management applications, including Falcon™ Fraud Manager, use the same rules engine that is at the core of Enterprise Decision Manager. Similarly, Fair Isaac modelers have adopted the Model Builder software, part of Enterprise Decision Manager, to build all our custom and industry-specific predictive models.
“Over time, we will release product roadmaps for our major solutions to leverage the Enterprise Decision Manager platform,” says Michael Chiappetta, vice president of product development. “This will help our clients deploy, extend and link decision management applications for multiple business problems, while reducing IT costs.”
Complete support for Enterprise Decision Management
For companies looking to transform the way they manage decisions, the Enterprise Decision Manager software is just part of how Fair Isaac can help.
“For all the interconnected disciplines of EDM—analytics, rules management and business control—we can provide not only software tools but applications, custom projects, technology transfer and consulting,” says Sherer. “We are building an Enterprise Decision Management services team that augments the world-class analytic delivery we provide through our Strategy Science and Predictive Science services.”
A good first step for many companies is the EDM Diagnostics service. This is a short-term consulting engagement, in which our EDM experts review your current decision management processes and compare them to best practices. They create a roadmap for improving your use of automated decisions, while identifying the initial decision areas where you can realize the greatest benefit.
The EDM Diagnostics service examines five core business levers:
- Analytics, including existing rules and strategies
- Data management practices and processes
- Alignment of resources, organizational structure, incentive systems and skill sets
- Core business processes across the customer lifecycle
- Technology infrastructure and how well it serves your business goals
“These areas are critical to the success of customer decisions in any field,” says Sherer. “Because of our experience across financial services, retail, insurance, telecommunications and other industries, we can benchmark a company’s decision management against best practices and show them the next steps to take.”
Businesses can also take advantage of specific services to help them speed their learning curve with the Enterprise Decision Manager software. Fair Isaac has defined a structured, six-step approach to automating and improving decisions that will help clients swiftly realize value from rules management and modeling projects. In addition, Fair Isaac provides in-depth EDM Best Practices review for financial services providers.
Read more about Enterprise Decision Management
Contact us about Enterprise Decision Manager at edm@fairisaac.com