I’m continuing my blog series, taking a deeper dive into the core concepts of the keynote I delivered at FICO World 2016 in Washington, DC. Those concepts capture the five critical areas that organizations need to improve, to fundamentally enhance operational decision-making:
1. Capturing subject matter expertise 2. Intelligent solution creation 3. Faster insight to execution 4. Building institutional memory 5. Greater analytic accessibility
Let’s look at the critical effect of gaining faster insight to execution, and how modern software solutions like FICO® Decision Management Suite 2.0 (DMS) catalyze this advantage.
Fresh Insights
Business isn’t run on a static set of facts; the knowledge we use to make business decisions is constantly evolving. At FICO we build solutions to reflect that reality by giving business users the ability to quickly adapt, test and modify strategies. Business analysts may want to test how previous decisions can be improved with champion/challenger, and when fresh insight is generated they need to quickly incorporate it into execution plans, operationalizing new knowledge.
To react nimbly, business users can’t wait in long IT queues to operationalize that knowledge. Business teams need the tools and capabilities to execute on their own, and IT needs to feel comfortable that those tools are going to work well in the overall IT environment. Having the right decision infrastructure is what allows the fresh insight to be generated and operationalized with minimal IT involvement.
Five Steps to Operationalize Insight
To realize the concept of “faster insight to execution,” FICO has focused on five key capabilities:
- Insights from decision data: Analysts and domain experts want to be able to look at and analyze the data available, including the data from previous decisions made. They need the right tools to generate insights.
- Strategy design and change by business users: Analysts will want to test out their ideas, to check the likely impact they might have on key business performance metrics. Techniques like simulation or champion/challenger are fundamental to testing and learning.
- Deployment of rules and analytics without IT: Business users should be able to push most changes to existing rules and strategies into production with minimum IT involvement, thus both avoiding and reducing IT’s backlog of projects.
- Real-time or batch decision execution: New rules and analytics should be pushed to wherever these decisions need to be used, in real-time interactions with customers, or overnight in massive batch executions that will generate decisions to be used by downstream systems.
- Learning loop for decisions: Finally, business users should be able to start all over again, analyzing the data on how customers are now reacting to the new decisions, in a continuous learning loop.
Watch this video on the Decision Management Suite 2.0, to see how easy it is for business users to drive faster insight to execution with the right tools.
In my next blog I’ll talk about how the importance of building institutional memory.
