Decision Management: Turning Data into Insights, and Insights into Action

Our mission, at INFORMILI - The Rules People, is to help our customers turn data into insights, and insights in action, by bringing together business, technology, and science—data, or otherwise.

Roughly speaking, businesses live by executing a number of customer-facing (or -supporting) processes that need to provide business value to their customers—more so than the competition—and create value for their shareholders! To deliver the best value to the customers for the fewest bucks, we need to make our processes smarter, through a combination of automation, and customization/adaptation.

Know thy customer

That is the first commandment for organizational success: you need to know the needs of the target population that you wish to serve to design your products and services properly, in the first place. This is true, whether you are a bank, selling loan products, or an insurance, selling insurance policies, or a government agency, managing a benefits or subsidy program. Once those customers come in touch with your organization through any of the channels (a call to a call center, a web site navigation, an-email inquiry, walking into the office/store) you need to, first, figure out which products best address their needs, and second, customize/parameterize those products to the specifics of the customer (needs, risk level, ability to (re)pay, etc.).

Operationalize your insights

Translate your acquired knowledge about your customer into policies that govern how you process customer transactions, and implement those policies in such a way that:

• the implementation is traceable to the underlying policies (traceability)

• policy changes can be implemented in a timely fashion (agility)

• they produce consistent results (automation)

• the decisions concerning customer transactions can be explained (rationality)

• the expression of the policies is understandable by all the stakeholders (visibility)

• the implementation is compliant with the applicable regulations, and can be shown to be (auditability)

Coming around full circle

Once your customers purchase your products, or subscribe to your services or benefits, you need to know how the <customer, product> match is working out:

• How the customer feels about your product

• How is the customer using your product? are there unintended usages, or unexpected outcomes?

• Is the product performing as expected? Are there better ways to get the most of those products/services?

• Is the product truly the best fit for their needs? are there better products or services

• Was your characterization of the customer correct? did you miss an important characteristic?

• Was your risk assessment accurate?

This feedback should enable you to refine your understanding of your customer, and of the market in general. This should, in turn, help you:

• Refine your target customer base

• Refine the definition of your products and services

• Better tune the parameters of your products to the customer at hand

What is coming ...

Future blog entries will come in two main flavors:

1. business cases: our experts will discuss a number of business cases that illustrate the Data Insights Action cycle, and highlight the mix of technologies and disciplines involved

2. methodological and technical issues involved in implementing any of the steps of the cycle.

We are interested in your own stories, as well as your feedback about our blogs.

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