The Five Pillars of a Decision Management Platform

It’s widely accepted that the most successful market-leading organizations often share many common attributes.

In fact, many continue to record success and top-performing business results by embedding a culture of continuous learning and innovation. New strategies are constantly developed and tested via simulated to enable experimentation, often with radically new approaches in a low-cost and low-risk environment.

The sentiment of innovation creates an edge by enabling top performers to continually develop a deep understanding of not only customer behavior, but also the constraints and trade-offs inherent in their business that are required to rapidly deploy new AI and machine learning-enabled offerings.

It means new-to-market innovations can then be rapidly developed and deployed to meet shifting customer needs and expectations to achieve the desired results.

A platform approach makes competitive differentiation far easier by providing an enterprise-wide suite of core capabilities and services that are used to create the organization’s “brain and central nervous system”. Such a platform should span everything that’s needed — from exploring and orchestrating disparate data to uncovering deep new customer insights, from modeling effective decisions to operationalizing these decisions at scale across the organization.

Decision management platforms are typically underpinned by five key pillars.

1. Data Orchestration         

Information is key. Organizations need to combine data provided by customers with data available internally and externally, from a range of sources. The platform provides a range of options to effectively merge and handle the insights data provides.

2. Predictive Analytics        

Decision management platforms enable the fast deployment and use of a range of predictive models.  A top-performing platform provides the capabilities to derive characteristics from the available data. Characteristics are grouped in libraires enabling smart and effective model development.

3. Business Rules  

Business rules are used to implement the strategy as defined by a company or business unit. The business rules use the power and insights derived by predictive analytics. Models are then used to drive the actions and treatments — including product entitlement, cut-offs, pricing and more. The platform provides capabilities that define, manage, test and automate multiple sets of business rules. Simulation capabilities also empower business users to configure and run a number of scenarios to understand the business impact before putting the strategy to work. Once tested, business rules are deployed and made available via microservices, also called decision services.

4. Optimization     

The optimization capabilities of the platform support business users to select the strategy that best meets their objectives, while balancing defined constraints and maximum risks. The solver underpinning the optimization module enables execution of a larger number of scenarios in a very short time, to help quickly find the optimal business strategy.

5. Application Development           

Business applications can be created using the Rapid Application Development capabilities of the platform. They drive the decision services and other microservices. Logic is converted into business processes that handle orchestration of automated and manual tasks. This then enables the creation of a case manager or implementation of a customer self-service portal.

By effectively adopting all five pillars of the decision management platform, organizations can roll out new business capabilities in a matter of weeks.

The FICO Platform already has a proven track record in successfully enabling the roll-out of innovative solutions in insurance, financial services and banking sectors. The mass of benefits is recognized by Industry analysts like Forrester, as highlighted in its Forrester Wave report. For more information about the FICO platform click here. Or contact us directly here.