What Are Decision Assets and How Can You Unlock Their Value?

What Are Decision Assets?

Decision assets are artifacts created by business users and data science teams that empower organizations to manage risk in the decision-making process. They work as part of a platform approach for effective decision-making that smart organizations today are using to leverage capabilities across multiple lines of business and use cases. By capturing and reusing their organizational knowledge and expertise applied in business decisions, they are able to store and share these decision assets using a shared platform repository.

Defined more technically, a decision asset is a set of entities managed as a single unit for predictive modeling, design of decision strategies, and decision execution.  A decision asset can also contain other decision assets either physically or by reference.

Examples of Decision Assets

• Analytic models
• Characteristics used in models
• Decision trees
• Rule sets
• Workflows

How Decision Assets Add Value

Reusable decision assets power an organization’s ability to leverage composable capabilities and create a consistent treatment of customers across the enterprise. By reusing common decision assets to build new predictive models and deploy analytics and AI to make decisions on risk exposure, customer treatment, and financial crime compliance, among other areas, executives can swiftly execute responsible decision making and analysis while minimizing risk.

Another key advantage is that the deployment of decision strategies that used to take days or weeks can be executed in near real-time using a comprehensive and defensible set of criteria defined by the enterprise. This speeds up time to value and promotes transparency, traceability, explainability of decisions, and allows organizations to have a complete audit trail for each Decision Asset used across the decision life cycle. This ensures customer trust is maintained, and the AI is deployed in a responsible and ethical way to deliver lasting value.

Decision assets can be reused and composed to support complex business decisions across silos and also in the automation of everyday decisions in decision automation – where a system can be trusted to make decisions responsibly and respond in real-time. This real-time decisioning is a radical change from the status quo because it enables AI-powered customer experiences, and the decision strategy can be adjusted continuously to ensure that each and every automation action drives the achieved business outcomes.

Reusing existing assets ensures teams aren't reinventing the wheel or introducing additional complexity or risk when addressing emerging business problems. Companies can save countless IT cycles and resources by taking the time to create decisions with reuse principles in mind.

There are many real-world examples of how companies are evolving with analytics and decision management:

• Common data pipelines can create a consistent view of the customer data
• Common predictive models ensure that unified cross-organization adaptation of things like risk tolerance or pricing can be done instantaneously
• Common predictive features and data characteristics can be reused to radically shorten the time for development of new AI models and cut third-party data costs.

The ability for business innovators to leverage decision assets across the enterprise is dependent on the ease of finding and consuming those assets. Using an enterprise platform repository and a reference architecture accelerates the development of innovative solutions and inspires teams to collaborate when they are not directly aligned. Stitching these assets together using the collective intellect of the entire organization is what forms the core of a central nervous system for enterprise intelligence. 

Learn More

This post is the first in a series looking at the concepts around the reusability of platform capabilities. In my next post, I will look at some of the strategies that help organizations evaluate the role of a platform approach coupled with decision assets to provide a framework for sustainable growth and lasting innovation. For more information, see our white paper, which covers in further detail seven benefits to leveraging reusability of platform capabilities and decision assets.

How FICO Platform Can Support Your Digital Transformation Journey

• Download the FICO Platform Reusability Whitepaper to learn how decision assets and FICO Platform Repository can provide a scalable solution to managing decision complexity.
• Discover how the FICO® Platform can help you take an enterprise approach to decision management
• Review blog posts by Bill Waid on platform capabilities