Product Management, out of the box

Posted by Carole-Ann Matignon

I have met many of you over the years at industry shows or in customer meetings, probably not all of you though, so an introduction may be in order.  I am in charge of Product Management for the Decision Management tools at Fair Isaac, which means that I am responsible for elaborating the vision for our technology products, building the roadmap and making it happen with the collaboration of Product Development of course, and all other necessary functions.  As you will soon discover, I have a real passion for decision management. 

Several customers have insisted over time to have people like me reveal what we do, why we do it and how you will benefit from it.  As this blog is changing hands, we have decided to finally give you this insider story directly from the Product team.  It is an exciting opportunity to share my perspective and my excitement on our products, what new features are to be released and how we thought they would help you.  I have also convinced by dear friend and colleague Carlos, head of Product Development, to join me on this blog.

Another area I would like to explore with you is our take on the direction of the marketplace, and our vision of how new technologies or new trends are impacting our industry,

Being in product management, I can't help myself...  and have to ask for your feedback : -) That also includes anything else you would like me to blog about!

I am not afraid of speaking my mind but that does not mean that I am not also interested in a constructive argument: I encourage you to speak up and share your views on the blog, or for a private discussion send me an email at caroleannmatignon@fairisaac.com.

I look forward to our lively discussions. 

Carole-Ann

Comments

[Peter Lin]

One thing that is missing in Blaze is integration with application servers like Weblogic, Websphere, Tomcat and other products. It would make it much easier for developers, if the tool provided an easy way to deploy directly to a server.

The user interface look and feel also feels dated. One thing the decision table lacks is the ability to sort the rules based on one or more columns. Also, adding the ability to link table columns to other tables like excel pivot tables, would make it easier for users to see the relationship between decision tables.

peter

[Carole-Ann Matignon]

Thanks peter for your reply. Let me provide some insights on what we are doing regarding those aspects.

In the early days (late 99 / early 2000), my colleague Carlos Serrano-Morales, then Chief Architect, identified the need to reduce the amount of code necessary to deploy into common application servers. Every single implementation required the same code, with some variance for each target environment. So Engineering implemented what we call Quick Deployers. After a short interview collecting information on the platform, the type of deployment (web service, EJB, etc.) and so on, a wizard automatically generates the integration code, deployment scripts as well as deployment documentation and a test client. We regularly update the list of application servers to make sure that all current platforms are covered. If you would like to learn more about this feature, feel free to reach out to your Fair Isaac contact, or to shoot me a private email.

I would agree with your comment on our user interface. It looks a bit old. This is due mostly to constraints we have imposed to ourselves to support Java, .NET and COBOL from a single environment. We are moving on though with the announced Eclipse IDE. I am personally making sure it will look modern with state of the art interactions. An exciting and promising project!

I am also intrigued by your idea for decision tables. Would you like to chat live? We have upcoming capabilities that may or may not be related to what you are talking about. I'd like to explore this further.

Thanks for getting the dialogue started!

Carole-Ann