Bill Waid

Mathematicians and computer nerds – and I know many – talk frequently about Ray Kurzweil’s “second half of the chessboard,” the exponential explosion that results when things geometrically double in value with each iteration.   As the story goes, if you put a grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard and continue to double it… two on the second, four o…

You might have a banking app on your phone. Your accounts are accessible in real-time, from any smart device. You can check balances, transfer funds and it’s all digitized for your hand-held convenience, anytime. Is this digital decisioning? No.   Your CRM has a sophisticated dashboard with detailed customer metrics, maybe even a few predictive insights use…

In selling situations, software vendors love to promise prospects “a full 360-degree view” of all their customer data.  It’s a popular, throwaway marketing line; almost a cliché, leaving the impression that their product gives you a view of the customers from every possible vantage point: just like a compass. What vendors often don’t tell you is that their “pl…

Towards the end of 2020, Arizent Research and American Banker released a special report on digital disruption and digital transformation in the financial services industry, entitled “Clear and Present Danger: The Threat of Digital Disruption in Financial Services and What Banks Can Do to Vanquish It.”   The report was based on customer interviews, observati…

Successful digital decisioning, customer centricity, and digital transformation force companies into playing the role of a detective.  No matter who your favorite fictional detective happens to be – Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Nancy Drew, etc. – they all have a common methodology that enabled them to solve vexing crimes that elude…

With data suggesting that most digital transformation efforts are doomed to failure, it’s no surprise that these organizations are missing something. One element that’s absolutely critical is a brain and central nervous system that enables the organization to operationalize data-driven decision making across their organization. This is called a Digital Decisioning Pla…

Register for our July 21 Webinar on Personalization: https://bit.ly/2A1xNoG Though written more than 80 years ago – long before digital transformation – Dale Carnegie’s seminal book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, remains one of the top 20 business books of all time.  It has been translated into multiple languages, sold 30 million copies worldwide, a…

Register for our May 19 Webinar:"Turning your IT Platform in a Digital Transformation Launch Pad" Most people know the story of the Tower of Babel. It’s where we get the word “babble,” which means to talk in a manner that isn’t coherent or intelligible. As the story goes, in the late 500s B.C., the people of Mesopotamia decided to build a grandiose tower tall en…

Crossing the COVID-19 Chasm - Key takeaways: The COVID-19 situation exposed glaring weaknesses in businesses’ readiness to operate virtually, especially in areas like decisioning, which require huge volumes of diverse, real-time data Businesses who were already down the path of digital transformation fared better than those who were still in the planning stage…

Digital disruption can often make financial services firms feel like they are surrounded behind enemy lines.  Despite their best efforts to embrace digital transformation and customer centricity, waves of attacks just keep coming from all directions, and from bold new aggressors. Thousands of years ago, if a Roman garrison found itself surrounded by an attacki…

You can’t do research on decisioning technology without having the words digital disruption, digital transformation, and customer centricity jump out at you… to the point they become almost interchangeable.  They aren’t. They are all different vantage points into a common problem: technology is giving an unfair advantage to those who weaponize their data. …

The 2016 film, “The Founder,” about the earliest days of McDonald’s, is brimming with some valuable business lessons.  Not many people realize that before it became the world’s largest restaurant, McDonald's very nearly went out of business in its infancy… were it not for a chance meeting between McDonald's entrepreneurial leader Ray Kroc and a shrewd b…