Decision Management Methodology
Improving your decisions involves change management as much as technology. Fair Isaac can help you not only develop and deploy new decision-making systems faster, but take a holistic and systematic approach to improving the way your business makes decisions.
With literally thousands of projects under our belt, for companies around the world and across a spectrum of industries, Fair Isaac has identified best practices for decision management. We have used this experience to develop a structured methodology for helping any business - your business - advance its decision management.
What does this mean for you? It means that you can more quickly identify those areas of your business where Decision Management will yield the greatest benefits. It means that you can more quickly realize those benefits. And it means that whatever area you choose to advance, you have a better understanding of the next steps needed to make your decisions pay off.
Our Decision Management methodology provides a flexible, iterative approach for conducting strategic consulting and planning engagements, as well as application-based and custom system development projects. The methodology itself is Fair Isaac's intellectual property, but the broad phases are described below. The complete methodology contains 25 steps that range from front-end "value discovery" efforts through to the running, monitoring and enhancing of a client decisioning environment.
Note: Your project may not require every phase or step of our full Decision Management methodology. Many engagements use only part of the overall methodology, because that's what the project calls for. We design every engagement to deliver what you need in your timeframe.
Strategy & Plan Phase - "Where are we going?"
During the Strategy & Plan Phase, we work with you to identify specific opportunities and initiatives. The result may lead to a strategy engagement, such as to help you become more customer-centric. This phase may also lead to the identification of specific decisions or processes and an estimation of the tangible improvements needed, along with the benefits that would arise.
Listening is a critical aspect of this phase. This phase is about identifying possibilities, and selecting the ones that will have the greatest potential benefit.
The end result of this phase is a high-level plan that articulates specific opportunity areas to pursue. Pilot projects may be selected to validate the viability of these opportunities. Finally, each opportunity area is quantified in terms of potential benefit to your organization.
Design Phase - "What will it look like when we get there?"
During the Design Phase, we analyze the opportunity area(s) identified during the Strategy & Plan Phase; assess your capabilities (technology, business process, and organizational); and create the roadmap required to develop the capability set required to capitalize on the new opportunities.
We define your future decision environment in terms of business processes and rules; the software application environment (including custom solutions); the technical infrastructure; and the organizational environment. This business architecture becomes the blueprint for what is developed during the Build Phase.
The end result of this phase is a list of the detailed requirements necessary to ensure the successful development (or enhancement) of your decision environment and its integration into your overall business environment.
Build Phase - "What capabilities must be developed?"
During the Build Phase, all the requirements defined in the Design Phase are converted into business capabilities. New approaches and business processes are defined; necessary data elements are sourced and integrated; analytic models are developed or enhanced; new software solutions are created and tested; organizational changes are defined and endorsed; and training programs are enacted.
Detailed solution components are created, including those capabilities that enable integration within your decision environment and those that enable integration with the overall business environment. Program management is essential - including project tracking; communication vehicles spanning all aspects of the program; and a thorough plan for integrated testing, training and organizational roll-out - especially for those engagements with a broad scope involving significant custom work, and impacting multiple areas of your organization.
The Build Phase ends when new capabilities are integrated into your business environment. We monitor the new systems or tools to ensure they are working properly, and to address any immediate issues that surface.
Run Phase - "How do we ensure continual improvement?"
During the Run Phase, the decision environment is operated and monitored for effectiveness.
During this phase, we gather and assess results to confirm that you are realizing the business benefits defined during the Strategy & Plan Phase. We use this analysis to help you identify potential changes to the decisioning environment. These new opportunities are then routed, as appropriate, to another phase.
The Run Phase is ongoing, and can lead to multiple iterations through the preceding phases, so that you can continue to improve the benefits you achieve through Decision Management.
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