Engaging Business Users with Xpress-Insight

We recently gave James Taylor of Decision Management Solutions a tour of our latest release of Xpress, where we showed off the new visualization capabilities of Insight. James posted a “First Look – FICO Xpress Optimization 7.3” today on his blog and noted:

This kind of environment is important in optimization because the result of a model is often not readily explicable – the best answer is mathematically the best but the drivers for this are too complex to be readily understood. Being able to interact with the model, test the edges, try different scenarios and compare them all helps make business owners feel comfortable with the result – the optimization equivalent of impact analysis. Without this, business owners will not be active participants in optimization (just as impact analysis tools in business rules are essential for business user rule management).

I absolutely agree that it's critical to actively engage the business owner in the solution, and true to form, James is often able to say just what I'm thinking, only better. You can read his full post at http://jtonedm.com/2012/07/09/first-look-fico-xpress-optimization-7-3/.