Bill Waid

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…

Since its inception, the FICO Decision Management Platform (which we call “the Platform”) held the potential to transform businesses, and the presentations at FICO World this year brought undeniable validation to this fact. I never cease to be amazed at the range of our client solutions being developed by customers using our Platform, and the transformative benefits t…

As digital disruption bears down on financial services providers, companies are wise to quickly formulate their customer centricity and decisioning strategies. History is filled with calamities and failed responses caused by delayed warnings, ignored alerts, and tragic misunderstandings caused by missed, errant, and too-little-too-late information. What if…

Digital disruption, customer centricity, and decisioning technologies have combined to create a dilemma for companies seeking to improve client satisfaction and retention: should they do nothing, and take a wait-and-see approach? Or should they take the initiative and go through the pain of reinventing themselves?  Just as Pablo Picasso once observed that "Eve…

Operationalize Analytics: Xpress Insight turns advanced analytic assets into a fully functioning application for business users. Industry Today recently asked me to contribute an article about getting the maximum value out of analytics. And, in my experience, the biggest hurdle to maximizing the use of data to create greater business value is being able to operationa…

2019 is the year enterprises take a more disciplined approach to analytics to capitalize on this new data-overwhelming reality. 2019 is a year to expect increasing use of artificial intelligence across businesses to fuel further automation and business agility. As such, enterprises will be taking a much more aggressive approach to advanced analytics and expecting mor…

Increasingly businesses today are being forced to implement a more customer centric approach to their business strategy. This is in response to rapidly changing consumer behavior and the compelling move to digital platforms. To be able to respond and make better, faster decisions, business need a clear view of their decision-making strategies and the ability to apply…

Dynamic pricing, a practice started by American Airlines in the 1980s, has now become a common marketing discipline for many corporations across industry sectors. From airlines, hotels, and entertainment events to perhaps the most well-known e-retailer, Amazon, these companies have been using dynamic pricing to improve profitability relative to rapid changes in supply…

Leveraging analytics from insight to artificial intelligence (AI), business leaders can make sense of their rapidly-growing piles of data to improve their operations. Here are some tips for using analytics to create a measurable business impact. #1: Put the decision before the data With a decision-first strategy you define the business objective first, then determin…

Optimization of supply chain operations has become an imperative, as organizations grapple with customer demands, unpredictable events, and spiraling costs. On top of these persistent challenges, complexities are magnified by the myriad of tools required to manage everything from workforce schedules to resource allocation. To meet competitive demands, business decisio…

Thoughts From Gartner’s Data and Analytics Summit This week I was at Gartner’s Data and Analytics Summit in Grapevine Texas, with my FICO team. This is an event we never miss, it’s attended by thousands of experts, analysts, data scientists and analytics leaders. This year’s Summit was dominated by presentations and conversations about data, analytics, explainable a…

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at the Chief Data & Analytics Officer (CDAO) Winter event in Miami. If you’ve ever been to CDAO, you know it is quite a gathering of some of the smartest minds in analytics. Everyone I met had great stories to tell about the innovative work being done with analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). …