Automating Smarter Decisions
For companies to be cost- and speed-competitive, the logic that drives business decisions can’t be buried inside individual software systems. It must be visible, easily modified by nonprogrammers, and usable by any application and channel.
Business rules management is taking organizational computing by storm. That's because BRM liberates the logic governing operational decisions from individual applications, where it had been locked within programming code - similar to the way database management liberates data. Business rules management delivers substantial savings in application time to market and total cost of ownership.
Business rules management is an important component of Fair Isaac's Decision Management architecture.
---------------------------------------
If you’re interested in using business rules to guide or automate decisioning, we offer:
- The world’s best rules management solution. Blaze Advisor, a key component of our Decision Management suite of software and services. Blaze Advisor won the Intelligent Enterprise Readers' Choice award in both 2005 and 2006, and was named the #1 business rules management system by IDC.
- Custom rule sets from the Fair Isaac Professional Services expert rules team to solve complex decisioning problems and get you up and running quickly.
- The opportunity to increase your insight, precision and ability to handle decision complexity by adding predictive analytics to rule-based applications. Using Model Builder you can bring scorecards, decision trees and other types of predictive analytics (including regression models and neural networks) directly into Blaze Advisor without coding. Models simply become another decisioning element, which you can see, manage and combine with other decision elements—then execute as a single process in nearly any operational environments.
What are business rules, anyway?
Business rules can be anything your organization uses to make an operational decision. They might include enterprise, divisional, corporate and line of business policies, as well as calculations and formulas, risk thresholds and regulatory authorizations.
Rules are often expressed—in conversation, written text and software—as “if, then” statements: “If the loan applicant does not have a sufficient credit history, then pull a report from a debit bureau.”
Rules management solutions such as Blaze Advisor use a similar intuitive and readable syntax to specify and change rules in decisioning applications. Business users can therefore change how an application operates — immediately and without requiring IT help — just by modifying or replacing rules.
The Old Way vs. The New Way
|
The Old Way |
The New Way |
|
Rules written in COBOL or 3GL programming languages are buried deep in the system code of a single application. |
Rules are written in a simple rule language and managed separately from system code. |
|
Rules can be executed only by the application they were originally written for, in the manner they were originally coded. |
Rules can be used in many flexible ways to reach decisions that can be carried out by virtually any application or business process. |
|
Rule changes, which require reprogramming and can even involve reverse engineering, mean queuing up for IT help. |
Rule changes can be made quickly and inexpensively by business users without requiring help from IT. |
|
New application development takes a long time because programmers must try to anticipate and code for every possible combination and interrelation of variables and conditions. Given today's complex business environment, that's just not possible any more, so long development cycles are soon followed by extended enhancement cycles. |
Rules management solutions enable new applications to be developed quickly, without the need to anticipate every possible decisioning scenario. As new situations and information emerge, enhancements are made by business users. New rules can be added at any time, without interrupting operations and with the rules engine sorting out how and when to execute them. |
|
Adding rules to legacy systems can be risky, given the fragility of some of these systems and the complexity of trying to make them perform functions they were never designed to support. |
Rules management services can be called by existing applications. This enables legacy applications to be reinvigorated with new capabilities without actually having to mess with them. |
|
Extending decisioning across new channels usually requires building a duplicate application, from the ground up, to run in the new environment. |
Decisioning applications can be written once and deployed without modification across most any operating environment. IT can deploy and maintain a single application across multiple channels. |
|
Development and deployment are often delayed because of difficulties translating complex business processes and requirements into code. There's too much opportunity for something to get lost between what the business people say they need and how the programmer interprets that in rules. It usually takes numerous revision cycles to get it right. |
Decisioning applications and services are developed usually by IT or a technically inclined business analyst--using a rules language that closely approximates the way business people talk about policies. Little interpretation is needed, so development goes smoothly. Developers can also let nontechnical business users write many of the rules themselves using graphical trees, tables or Web forms. |
---------------------------------------
Rules management ROI
Using rules management to develop decisioning applications, and to add decisioning capabilities to existing applications, companies are achieving significant ROI. A recent report from IDC details three-year net ROI in excess of 100% through 25-80% reductions in development costs coupled with 5-50% improvements in decisioning outcome and profitability. Read the full Blaze Advisor ROI white paper by IDC.
Fair Isaac's experience with hundreds of customers all over the world corroborates these results: A 25% compression of development time is quite common, along with cost savings of up to 80% for developing new applications and for maintenance of applications of up to 75%.
Business rules management improves every aspect of your decisions:
|
Precision |
Business rules give you the ability to easily segment customer populations, target offers and develop detailed rulesets, in order to make a decision that is more finely tuned to the specific opportunity or circumstance. |
|
Consistency |
With business rules you can automatically ensure that different staff and different systems will make the same decision. |
|
Agility |
It’s easy to change business rules in order to launch a new product, introduce a new offer or change terms and conditions. |
|
Speed |
Business rules automate decisions that must otherwise be made manually. They also accelerate the development of new applications. |
|
Cost |
Automating decisions using rules saves the cost of staff time needed to make operational decisions. In addition, business rules can reduce the cost of developing new applications by up to 80%, and the maintenance of applications by up to 75%. |
---------------------------------------
The leading solutions for business rules management
If you’re interested in using business rules to guide or automate decisioning in your organization, Fair Isaac can provide you with:
- Blaze Advisor, the world’s #1 rules management solution is a key component of our Decision Management suite of software and services. Blaze Advisor is the market leader and the most highest-rated business rules management suite on the market.
- Pre-built rules embedded in our Decision Management solutions. As we use Blaze Advisor to build our solutions, the rules those solutions use are managed in exactly the same way as the rules you need for custom solutions.
- Custom rule sets from the Fair Isaac Professional Services expert rules team to solve complex decisioning problems and get you up and running quickly when there is not a ready to use Decision Management application.
- The opportunity to add predictive analytics to rules-based applications, in order to increase the quality of complex decisions. Using Model Builder you can bring scorecards, decision trees and other types of predictive analytics (including regression models and neural networks) directly into Blaze Advisor without coding. Models simply become another decisioning element, which you can see, manage and combine with other decision elements—then execute as a single process in nearly any operational environments, just as we do in our Decision Management applications.
Business rules management and Blaze Advisor are important components of Fair Isaac's Decision Management architecture.
Need expert advice and solutions?
Fair Isaac Professional Services can develop custom rule sets, rule services or entire rule-driven applications for you. We also provide training and offer rules management partnerships, where our experts work along side your people while transferring our market-proven methodologies.
Looking for more information on solutions for Decision Management?
Visit the Resource Center to access all white papers, customer successes, and all other web-based resources related to this and many other topics.
Ready to put Fair Isaac to work for you?
-
Engage with a Fair Isaac specialist by calling 1.888.FIC.6336 (US / Canada). International: From overseas, please call +800.0030.6406 (internationbal toll-free, no country code required) or contact your
local Fair Isaac office
-