Our Approach: Decision Management

The Discipline of Smarter Decisions

Decision Management is an approach that automates, improves and connects decisions to enhance business performance.

It automates decisions for speed and consistency, constantly improves the targeting, relevance and results of decisions, and connects decisions across customer views, functions, and channels for maximum value.  Through Decision Management, businesses can increase customer profitability,  build stronger customer relationships, reduce fraud and credit risk, and lower the costs of making decisions.

Decision Management is a closed-loop approach that systematically improves decisions so you can inject learning directly into processes, and use insights from point solutions to make better decisions across your enterprise. It gives you the control you need over decisions that are growing more complex all the time.

Businesses that take a systematic approach to managing their decisions not only make more intelligent decisions. They also make more consistent decisions across the enterprise and react faster to changes in market conditions, the competitive landscape and regulations.

Decision Management entails all aspects of designing, deploying and managing the decisions that an organization uses to guide interactions with customers, employees and suppliers. With Decision Management, customers are managed to higher levels of satisfaction and value, changes in business priorities are quickly and comprehensively disseminated throughout the organization, and business leaders have greater control over the decisions that represent the execution of strategy.

Why Decision Management?

Making business decisions today is increasingly complex. Companies need to make decisions faster, across more channels and product lines, leveraging more data, under greater regulatory demands and competitive pressures, and with more complicated constraints and trade-offs.

Organizations are adopting Decision Management because they must:

• Achieve a higher return from previous infrastructure investments
• Manage increasing business decision complexity
• Face competitive or regulatory pressure that calls for more sophisticated decisions
• Take advantage of increasingly short windows of competitive advantage.

How Decision Management works

Combining data, business rules and advanced predictive analytics in powerful decision services, Decision Management gives your most critical, high-volume, operational decisions greater precision, consistency and agility. It draws a new measure of value from decades of IT investments. 

• Business rules, written by business users, determine what action to take for every customer and circumstance. These rules can be further refined through data mining and strategy optimization.
  
• Predictive models analyze customer data to segment populations of customers according to their likely future behavior. These models work within the business rules to target each decision for greater success. Predictive analytics can also be used offline to identify the strategies and actions that will optimize results.
  
• A decision service accesses the right rules, models and data (internal and external) to deliver highly targeted decisions, often in real time, to operational systems and customer contact channels.

Fair Isaac's Decision Management approach

Fair Isaac has been the leader in taking the science of Decision Management from the theoretical to the practical. Today, we help thousands of companies in financial services, retail, insurance, telecommunications, healthcare and other fields use Decision Management technology to improve business results.

Businesses turn to Fair Isaac to improve their decisions because:

• We offer the most comprehensive portfolio of applications and technologies for Decision Management, ranging from fraud systems and customer management systems to software for business rules management and model development
• We have created the standards in decision technology, including business rules management and predictive analytics
• We have helped thousands of companies worldwide increase the success of their decisions, and often yielding multi-million-dollar gains for our clients
• We understand the ROI on decisions, and have developed the Decision Yield metric that focuses on the precision, consistency, agility, speed and cost of decisions.
• We give you a variety of delivery options, and the choice of buying and / or building Decision Management solutions for each application and decision area
• We integrate business rules management technology with predictive analytics
• We enable you to link, extend and expand applications throughout the enterprise, using a common Decision Management architecture

Fair Isaac enables organizations to start from wherever they are in decision-making sophistication and create substantial new value. While businesses adopt different technologies and approaches to Decision Management in different sequences, many see the benefits arising from three different stages:

Automate high-volume operational decisions
Using business rules management software, companies take control of their operational decision-making. They reduce the time needed to make changes and introduce offers and products, reduce the cost of their decisions and often make decisions in real-time.

Improve decision quality and results
Using predictive analytics, decision analytics (optimization) and adaptive control for closed-loop testing, companies can segment their customer base and target decisions using more precise assessments of risk and opportunity. This leads to improvements such as increases in customer profitability, reduced fraud losses, and higher cross-sell penetration.

Connect decisions across channels, systems and the customer lifecycle
Using reusable and open components, businesses can connect their systems; similarly, advanced analytics such as decision models can explicitly balance the trade-offs between different decisions. More sophisticated control over decisions delivers stronger alignment of execution with business strategy and ensures channel and product-line integration.

"Organizations require greater consistency in the way decisions are made. This is important both for competitive reasons and, increasingly, for compliance reasons. While traditional business intelligence 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."

- Henry Morris, Group Vice President, Applications and Information Access, IDC

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 1.888.342.6336 (US / Canada). International: From overseas, please call 1.408.535.1500 or contact your local Fair Isaac office.
• Want details? Request info