Ron Shevlin blogged about CapOne’s new Card Lab. Like Ron I really like the fact that CapOne is using the interactivity possible on the web both to let customers find a product that meets their requirements and to gather a whole bunch of useful information about how customers think about credit cards. What strikes me, though, is this wonderful tool is completely reliant on CapOne having applied enterprise decision management and automated the decisions involved in issuing credit cards. Imagine trying to design and build such an environment while decisions were manual or without a rich set of information about the relative risk and cost tradeoffs in cards? Couldn’t be done. This whole exercise in customer engagement is only possible because CapOne has invested in predictive analytic models of its customers, adaptive control to manage continuous testing and business rules to make sure that automation can be pushed out to all of its systems. It shows clearly the power of decision automation to bring a business to a new level and open up new opportunities.