Mike made an interesting comment in response to my recent post on the future of application development. He said:
Are business domain tools necessary to enable a non-trivial development role for businesspeople?
Like many good questions the answer is complicated - in a way, both yes and no. I do agree with Mike that a non-trivial role [...]

ILOG today announced a Scorecard modeler as an add-on for ILOG JRules® (which I first saw at DIALOG). As their press release says, this add-in allows customers to “incorporate statistical scorecard models directly into decision services” - a key tenet of enterprise decision mangement or EDM. ILOG is targeting financial institutions clearly but apparently also [...]

Ted Iacobuzio of TowerGroup gave the closing keynote, expanding on the survey results Fair Isaac announced today. More than 100 of the InterACT attendees took the survey - clearly this is top of mind. Some highlights:

Lenders appreciate the need for integrated customer information and multi-product decisioning
Lenders are not all at the same speed in implementation
Respondents [...]

A collections session next with folks from Adeptra, Fair Isaac and GE Money talking about GE’s vision for virtual collections. The collections environment is extremely bad this year with massive growth in the need for collection agents. Delinquencies are up, problems are up, consumers are stressed. Scores are worsening (credit profiles are worse), payments are [...]

Last full session today is Lisa Kart and Jean Zoch of Fair Isaac talking about optimal pricing - balancing profitability with competitiveness. Lisa’s focus, she says, is on what makes price optimization work. Price optimization is a very broad topic, even in financial services, but their focus is on being able to target price for [...]

Paul Daro was next giving some detail around the new architecture (introduced by Bernhard Nann). A number of trends were identified first:

Clearly the move to a collection of services from monolithic applications has fundamentally changed the relationship of vendors to customers - now more about delivering services that can be fitted in to an overall [...]

Next up Discover and Fair Isaac talking about Discover’s Enterprise Decision Management initiative. Dave Wodall from Discover co-presented with Xun Shao of Fair Isaac. Discover use Blaze Advisor (rules), Model Builder (analytics) and Decision Optimizer (portfolio optimization). Discover was launched in 1985 and, like Amex, has both the network and the consumer relationship. 50M members, [...]

Next up was Stuart Crawford, part of Fair Isaac’s extensive research staff, on new approaches to the creation, visualization and comparison of decision trees or, as Fair Isaac calls them, Strategies. Stuart has been working at Fair Isaac for many years and has a lot of background in analytics. This work is about how to [...]

I started with an interesting breakfast this morning with Ian Ayres and Larry Rosenberger. Ian is the author of Super Crunchers (reviewed here in the wiki) and Larry is a research fellow and ex-CEO of Fair Isaac. The two of them were great conversationalists and we ranged across randomized testing (adaptive control), the power of [...]

Paul Haley wrote an interesting piece last week on Adaptive Decision Management. This is a really good piece and I highly recommend it. I do have a couple of things to add, however.
While Paul is correct that Fair Isaac did not talk about “decision management” until after the HNC merger, Fair Isaac had a long [...]