Live from InterACT (not really): Wired for Action

Now back from InterACT and trying to catch up on sessions I attended. Michael Chiappetta, Fair Isaac's VP Product Development, gave a presentation on the development of an Enterprise Decision Management architecture for Fair Isaac's application stack. As anyone in retail banking / credit knows, Fair Isaac has a range of market-leading solutions for Marketing, Originations, Customer Management, Collections and Recovery and Fraud detection (credit and identity fraud). Like many companies Fair Isaac built these on a variety of platforms at various times and is now bringing them together onto an Enterprise Decision Management architecture.

Some of the key points Michael made:

• Once you have a business rules management solution that supports all your platforms (in his case Blaze Advisor supporting .NET, Java and COBOL) you can create a common repository of business rules across your software products. This improves reuse of core rules, allows for a faster cycle-time for new policies and so on.
• Fair Isaac's work to create its own analytic modeling workbench (Model Builder) to allow its 300 analytic modelers/scientists to leverage new and specialized techniques has made it possible to further standardize how models are made and make it easier to inject analytics into all applications.
• A common set of decisioning technologies has made it easier to move development resources around and to have experts work consistently across solutions to update rules and design effective decisioning strategies.
• Solution connectivity, increasingly of interest to customers, is easier to deliver as fewer distinct technologies are being used.

I enjoyed listening to Michael as it showed again the value of "eating your own dog food" or, as one of my French colleagues likes to say, "drinking your own champagne". When your own company uses your tools and approaches to improve its own solutions, you get some great proof points about it working.