Results

Fair Isaac Corporation

08/12/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 08/13/2024 07:41

What Is a Decision Intelligence Platform

For years, FICO has been helping banks, financial services firms, insurers, and clients in other industries automate and optimize their decision-making with FICO Platform as part of their digital transformation efforts. Because a platform touches every department, application, and user across an enterprise, explaining it to clients and prospects can be a lengthy and cumbersome exercise. So I was impressed with the new Gartner report, Market Guide for Decision Intelligence Platforms. In the 23-page report, Gartner does a very thorough job defining and explaining the nuances of:

  • Decision intelligence (DI) - A practical discipline used to improve decision-making by explicitly understanding and engineering how decisions are made and how outcomes are evaluated, managed and improved by feedback. The Gartner report noted that, "one-third (33%) of the organizations surveyed for the 2024 Gartner CDAO Agenda Survey have already deployed DI, with 17% committed to pilot within six months, 19% considering deployment in six to 12 months and 25% investigating deployment in 12 to 24 months. Only 7% stated no interest."
  • Decision intelligence platforms - Software used to create solutions that support, automate, and augment decision-making of humans or machines, powered by the composition of data, analytics, knowledge and artificial intelligence techniques. Decision intelligence platforms must have collaborative capabilities for decision modeling, execution, and monitoring. Decision intelligence platforms are used to design decision-centric solutions, explicitly model decisions, orchestrate decision execution flows, and evaluate and govern decisions and audit their outcomes.

As someone who spends a lot of time meeting with top execs at some of the world's largest banks and insurers about their digital transformation and user experience goals, there were five points in the Gartner report that I found to be particularly illuminating and consistent with my own decades of experience with decisioning platforms:

Business decision-making is increasingly complex, interconnected and continuous in most organizations, due to global competition, more disruptions, more demanding customers, the accelerated pace of digital business, as well as growing awareness and regulatory pressure regarding fairness and transparency. As a result, Gartner wrote, that "with more disruptions, more competition, more digital business, more regulation and more demanding customers, decisions need to be more accurate, contextual, transparent, responsive and scalable - all at the same time." FICO shares this perspective; as clients proceed on their digital transformation journey, we encourage them to "work backwards from the decision." This helps them identify all of the inputs and decision assets that must be continually updated, verified, and synchronized to ensure optimal decisions even amid rapidly evolving market conditions.

The overall demand for decision intelligence platforms is expected to grow, driven by pressure on organizations to make their decisions more scalable and transparent, yet more contextualized and personalized, in the general context of more complexity, disruptions, global competition and emancipated consumers and citizens. These Gartner findings certainly mirror our experience at FICO: the number of companies using FICO Platform for enterprise decisioning has grown from a dozen to 130+ in the past 48 months or so; clients are quickly achieving dramatic results in their application development, customer acquisition, and efficiency ratio KPIs.

To improve decision quality, it is not enough to offer fragmented and non-context-specific, data-driven insights through business unit-level dashboards, data science predictions or a variety of other, siloed analytical and AI applications. At FICO, we help clients implement a unified, scalable decision platform across the enterprise to optimize and monetize decision-making. By unifying and leveraging all available information and applying a collection of different techniques and algorithms, a platform connects the dots and fills in the holes in decisioning processes to ensure better decisions at every customer touchpoint across the lifecycle, to iteratively improve the quality of decisions over time. This also ensures a cohesive, all-inclusive customer experience that promotes customer engagement.

The growing power of AI offers game-changing opportunities to bring decision-making to a higher level of strategic competitive differentiation. However, most organizations find it challenging to turn the promise of AI into reality, often due to a disconnect between technological possibilities and actual business decision-making. Gartner further recommends that, "Bring decision-making to a higher, more situational and adaptive level by using the power of more advanced DIPs that incorporate techniques such as simulation, AI agents or GenAI. This will allow for more cross-functional decision optimization and for greater resilience and autonomy in business operations." By empowering business users to create and manage the decisioning strategies, rules and analytics that drive decisions and actions - without dependence on IT - a platform combines the "book smarts" of the technology organization with the "street smarts" of business users, to enable companies to build and test a wider range of scenarios faster than ever before and swiftly respond to shifts in business conditions. And of course, makes for a personalized, highly relevant customer experience.

Decision intelligence platforms are seen as critical in dealing with 21st century challenges of existing decision-making as well as in enabling novel ways of decision-making. Gartner further mentions that "by combining the power of human ingenuity with the ability of AI to deal with much more data, dimensions and decision factors than any one human can, higher and game-changing levels of decision-making lie within reach." Again, we think FICO's vision of not just a human-led, but a business user-led enterprise decisioning strategy ensures all of the benefits of a symbiotic people/ process/ technology approach to decisioning and digital maturity. Gartner said that, "with growing versatility and sophistication of decision intelligence platforms, more automation and augmentation of decision making become ever more feasible."

We think this report reinforces what we at FICO have been advocating for years, the need for a holistic approach to making decisions, powered by innovations in data management, AI, analytics and more.

FICO Platform Is a Pioneer in Decision Intelligence Platforms

In our opinion, Gartner deserves kudos for explaining decision intelligence and decision intelligence platforms in such deep detail and great clarity. I would encourage anyone in the midst of a digital transformation effort or exploring an enterprise decisioning solution for their company to get a copy.

Speaking of third-party analyst validation, Forrester also publishes an excellent review of offerings in this space, called the Forrester AI Decisioning Platforms Wave. While the Gartner report lists the names of 30 vendors in the marketspace, the Forrester version provides in-depth Consumer Reports-like ranking and comparison of the top dozen or so. And I am proud to add that FICO is the only vendor to earn "Leader" status in every Forrester AI Decisioning Platforms Wave since they've been published.

The choice to implement an enterprise decisioning solution is a wise one. And with resources like those published by Gartner and Forrester we feel it's becoming a much easier one, too.

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