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Data Analysis as the Deciding Factor


New Fair Isaac framework designed to help businesses make better decisions

By David Rubinstein
May 1, 2004 — 
Businesses need to automate their decisions to raise productivity, according to Fair Isaac Inc., which later this month will release updates to its Blaze Advisor rules engine and to Model Builder as part of an overall strategy it is calling Enterprise Decision Management (EDM).

Fair Isaac is creating an EDM framework that takes in business rule and model components and decision process designs for the creation and execution of long-running decision services or applications, according to James Taylor, the company's director of product management for decision management software and solutions.

"It's getting harder for businesses to make decisions due to the complexity surrounding those decisions," Taylor said. "They need to get more sophisticated for rating and pricing for a fine-grained segmentation of their customer base."

The ability to do this comes from Fair Isaac's scorecard development technology, in which the company tools provide data access, generate scorecards and create regression models, all designed to help its customers make better business decisions based on the analytics of that data.

Taylor explained that being able to more finely divide a customer base gives a company competitive advantages. Using insurance underwriting as an example, Taylor said,

if one company charges US$1,000 for everyone in a risk category, but a second company can split that level of risk into two and charge $700 for the better customers in that risk and $1,300 for the worse customers in that risk, the second company will attract all the better risks in the group and leave the poorer risks to the first company.

The same holds true for credit-card companies, he added. If a company can offer regular payers better interest rates than slow payers, that company will attract better payers, who also might charge on their cards more because the rates are lower, he explained.

The EDM framework includes a new process designer built into Blaze Advisor 5.5 that ties rules and models together to create a decision application. The tool has been improved to be able to understand the scorecard metaphor to represent business rules, Taylor said, along with better set handling and support for more application servers. Model Builder 2.1 has better mainframe integration and also builds on the scorecard technology, he added. Business management and simulation capabilities have been built in to the modeling environment to allow users to see what happens if the data score changes, and then run a simulation of profitability based on the new data.

The framework allows business rules to be plugged in on-the-fly, giving businesses the flexibility to adapt to changing needs.

"Many apps can never be finished because the business guys can't decide on the requirements because the business is changing so rapidly," Taylor explained. "Decision-making is not a one-time event," he said. "You have to be able to flow decisions back into the system, to see the impact of those decisions. Can you change your risk tolerance, or be more aggressive on [customer] retention" and still turn a profit, he asked.

The EDM platform ranges in price from $400,000 to $500,000, depending upon the number of transactions; large applications could run the cost up into the millions, Taylor said.


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