Et voila!
We are now delivering Decision Simulation to the BRMS world. What an exciting day!
Let me give you some insight as to what that means in reality. Up to now, the industry has been focusing on what we call “validation” capabilities. Validation is about running your business rules against test cases, sometimes historical data, and assess how it compares to expected values. You end up with a listing of pass versus fail transactions. Typically you just care about the discrepancies (what failed).
Decision Simulation is a key component of the Decision Improvement loop I always talk about because it offers a real alternative to Business Users. Why do they need an alternative? Because validation tells them IF the new business rules (I often call it a strategy) are what you expected them to be, it does not tell you HOW they will perform, in business terms of course.
In the world we live in now, we cannot afford to make sub-standard decisions out there. If you fail to price new applicants properly, you will lose business. If you grant too much credit to risky applicants, they will not be able to repay and you will lose money. If you process fraudulent claims, you will lose money. If you lose money, you may not be able to stay in business. We see examples every day that lead to bailout plans, mergers and acquisitions, or worse.
Being able to assess the value of your decisions before they hit production is valuable. It may be the most valuable thing to the business owner: boosting his confidence that he is making the right decision. How do you define right versus wrong? It is really up to you: it could be measured in terms of revenue, profitability, risk, etc. With a good set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), business users can chart the business impact of their strategy changes. It assumes of course that your recent historical data is a good enough predictor of what is yet to come.
The tool that we are releasing now provides the kind of insight to the business users that Fair Isaac has provided to its leading customers, mostly in Account Management via TRIAD or our custom Strategy Science engagements that leverage Decision Optimizer. Decades of expertise embodied into a set of out-of-the-box reports. It is really exciting to finally make it available to all of our customers!
If you are an existing Blaze Advisor customer, I will be glad to host you on our Introductory webinar tomorrow (Wed 12/17 noon EST / 9pm PST). If you are not, we will have a session in January that does not assume knowledge of our leading BRMS.
