White PapersSome kinds of change require a change to a process in response. For instance, if a particular locality introduces regulations into a previously unregulated process, a compliance step might need to be added. If a new call center is opened to handle a particular class of customers, then a new branch and new steps will need to be added to the processes to handle customer interactions.
When core processes, such as order to cash, are changed, there is typically a significant impact on the organization as a whole. The changed process and the changed definitions in a BPMS are unlikely to be all there is to it. Organizational change, and perhaps new auditing, will likely be required. This kind of change is hard to make agile and will always be fairly time consuming.
FOR MORE phone from US worldwide email web INFORMATION 1 888 FICO EDM +1 408 535 1500 edm@fairisaac.com www.fairisaac.com/edm A F A I R I S A A C W H I T E P A P E R Rules for Smarter Business Processes June 2006 Summary: As more and more companies adopt business process management systems (BPMS), the role of business rules and of business rules management systems (BRMS) needs to be examined and resolved. This paper will outline why business rules should be managed separately and why they should be considered alongside business processes. It will also outline scenarios for the different ways in which the two systems can and should be used together. Business rules are key when using BPMS to automate business processes. Some frequently asked questions include: If I automate a process, how do I control it? If I outsource a process, how do I customize it? If my process has manual intervention, how can I get straight-through processing? If I run a process for many customers, internal or external, how can I make it efficient for all and yet custom for all? If I automate a process, how do I automate the decisions within it? One point to note when thinking about the combination of BRMS and BPMS: While there is much to gain from using a BPMS to automate a process that has high value each time it is executed but has low execution volume, the combination of BPMS and BRMS is ideal for delivering value in a process with high volume and a smaller potential value each time it is executed. This comes from the ability to automate a far higher percentage of the transactions with the combination allowing for more straight-through processing, which has great value in high volume processes. Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. i Table of Contents Some Definitions...........................................................................................................................................1 Business Process Management............................................................................................................... 1 BPMS........................................................................................................................................................ 1 Workflow ................................................................................................................................................... 1 Business Rules......................................................................................................................................... 1 BRMS........................................................................................................................................................ 2 What Is Agility ...............................................................................................................................................3 Process Agility .......................................................................................................................................... 3 Decision Agility ......................................................................................................................................... 3 Process and Decision Agility .................................................................................................................... 4 BPMS, BRMS and Keeping Them Separate ................................................................................................4 Risks of BPMS without BRMS.................................................................................................................. 4 Benefits of BPMS with BRMS................................................................................................................... 5 Why separate products?........................................................................................................................... 6 Some Use Cases ..........................................................................................................................................7 A complex business decision ................................................................................................................... 8 Additional Information is required............................................................................................................. 9 A decision causes a process.................................................................................................................... 9 An example of BPMS and BRMS Integration: Marine vessel underwriting............................................ 10 Changing the Rules of BPM........................................................................................................................10 Performance Management ..................................................................................................................... 11 Commoditization..................................................................................................................................... 11 Legacy Modernization............................................................................................................................. 12 Complex Event Processing .................................................................................................................... 12 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................12 About Fair Isaac..........................................................................................................................................14 Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 1 Some Definitions Before we get started, some definitions are called for. If you know what all these terms mean, feel free to skip ahead. All definitions are based on Wikipedia1 unless otherwise noted. Business Process Management The term business process management (or BPM) refers to activities performed by businesses to optimize and adapt their processes. Where business process reengineering (popular in the 1990s) dealt with one-off changes to the organization, BPM deals with the continuity and embedding of process orientation in the organization. BPM has evolved as technology has caught up with management processes to the point that technology should no longer be the limiting factor in BPM. BPM encompasses other process elements, such as total quality management, Six Sigma, performance management, etc. BPMS A BPMS or business process management system is a software tool that allows for the direct execution of the business processes without a costly and time-intensive development of the required software. In addition, these tools can also monitor the execution of the business processes, providing managers of an organization with the means to analyze their performance and make changes to the original processes in real time. Using a BPMS the modified process can then be merged into the current business process atmosphere. Workflow Workflow at its simplest is the movement of documents or tasks through a work process. More specifically, workflow is the operational aspect of a work procedure: how tasks are structured, who performs them, what their relative order is, how they are synchronized, how information flows to support the tasks and how tasks are being tracked. As the dimension of time is considered in workflow, workflow considers throughput as a distinct measure. Workflow problems can be modeled and analyzed using graph-based formalisms like Petri nets. While the concept of workflow is not specific to information technology, support for workflow is an integral part of document management and imaging software. Business workflows are more generic, being able to represent any structuring of tasks, and are equally applicable to task scheduling within a software application server and organizing a paper or electronic document trail within an organization. Their origins date back to the 1970s, when they were purely paper-based, and the principles from that period made the transition to modern IT infrastructure systems. Business Rules Business rules are abstractions of the policies and practices of a business organization. The business rules approach is a development methodology where rules are in a form that is used by, but not embedded in, business process management systems. 1 http://www.wikipedia.org Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 2 The business rules approach formalizes an enterprise s critical business rules in a language the manager and technologist understand. Business rules create an unambiguous statement of what a business does with information to decide a proposition. The formal specification becomes information for process and rules engines to run. Business rules or business rulesets describe the operations, definitions and constraints that apply to an organization in achieving its goals. For example a business rule might state that no credit check is to be performed on return customers. Others could define a tenant in terms of solvency or list preferred suppliers and supply schedules. These rules are then used to help the organization to better achieve goals, communicate among principals and agents, communicate between the organization and interested third parties, demonstrate fulfillment of legal obligations, operate more efficiently, automate operations, perform analysis on current practices, etc. BRMS A BRMS or business rule management system is software to manage and support the business rules of an organization or enterprise. The Blaze AdvisorTM business rules management system is a leader in this category. Blaze Advisor is a complete solution for enterprise business rules management through rule service design, authoring and testing, and rule service deployment and maintenance. A rule service is defined as a monolithic view of all the conditions and actions that need to be considered in performing a self-contained, callable decisioning process as a service function from a larger application. Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 3 Rule services are defined using the Blaze Advisor" system s integrated development environment (IDE). The Blaze Advisor IDE is a complete environment for rule service design, rule authoring, rule testing, creating rules management applications, and for specifying design templates for rules. Blaze Advisor" rule maintenance applications allow controlled rule editing and creation by non-technical users through standard web technologies. Business rules are maintained in a repository that provides the runtime service with the latest definitions of rules, and is updated by the development and maintenance applications. The rule service is executed using the Blaze Advisor" rule server and engine, which manages scalability, multiple service requests, rule updates, and more. Blaze Advisor" accesses any necessary data sources to obtain information as needed to perform the service. What Is Agility According to Wikipedia: Agility in business, often defined as the ability of a firm to sense and respond to business opportunities in order to stay innovative and competitive in a turbulent and quickly changing business environment. An agile firm (one that demonstrates agility) has the capabilities and processes to respond to unexpected environmental changes. When we think about how a business might respond to changes, we can define two kinds of response changing a process or changing how a decision is made within a standard process. Let s consider each of these in turn. Process Agility Some kinds of change require a change to a process in response. For instance, if a particular locality introduces regulations into a previously unregulated process, a compliance step might need to be added. If a new call center is opened to handle a particular class of customers, then a new branch and new steps will need to be added to the processes to handle customer interactions. When core processes, such as order to cash, are changed, there is typically a significant impact on the organization as a whole. The changed process and the changed definitions in a BPMS are unlikely to be all there is to it. Organizational change, and perhaps new auditing, will likely be required. This kind of change is hard to make agile and will always be fairly time consuming. Processes around the edge of a company with lower volumes, less repeatability and more manual steps do need to be easy to change as they are likely to change often. How calls are handled from very largest customers, for instance, might be entirely defined by a custom contract that requires a distinct process. Decision Agility Decision agility is needed when change is required within a process, but the process itself does not change. For instance, if a change is made to the rules for determining price discount eligibility, the process will likely not change at all at the same point in the process, the discount will be determined and applied. Yet the decision as to what discount to offer will change. Being able to quickly change the decisions within a process, with or without a matching process change, is key to decision agility. This tends to matter most in core business processes that, while they are fairly stable in terms of steps and outcomes, can have significant variation in decision making over time. Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 4 Process and Decision Agility Both process agility and decision agility are required and they often appear together. Clearly if a new sub-process is added to handle a new class of customers, it will likely also change the decision logic for segmenting customers to put the right customers into this new sub-process. Changing the way risk management decisions are handled might create new needs for external verification or reports, which will need their own processes and so on. Not all decision changes require process changes, but it is common for process changes to impact a decision. Only manual processes in which everything is handled by people and worklists are likely to be exceptions. BPMS, BRMS and Keeping Them Separate At a fundamental level, BPMS and BRMS are different things. BPMS is about how something, once decided, should be carried out, while BRMS is about what should be done. BPMS BRMS Standardize processes How should a process be carried out? Facilitate collaboration and compliance Process automation around decision making Workflow definition and management Activity monitoring and exception alerts Process reports Integration broker Standardize decision making What should the decision be based on? Facilitate decision automation and maintenance Replaces manual decision making Business rules definition and management Centralized business rules repository Decision broker The use of the word decision sometimes causes problems as there are at least three different kinds of decisions within a process: business decisions, processing/routing decisions and decisions about responding to events. In general, business decisions are what a BRMS focuses on, and most, if not all, business decisions within a process should be managed with one. Business decisions would not change if you completely re-architected your processes. Routing decisions are the rules executed by a BPMS, e.g., to decide which branch to take in a flow. These are not true business decisions as they are dependent on the implementation of the process. Lastly there are the decisions involved in business activity monitoring, or BAM. Some of these are very processing or system-centric and should be implemented in the BPMS or a related BAM product. Others represent real business decisions, or rely on business decisions, and the logic for these should be kept in a BRMS. Risks of BPMS without BRMS There are a number of risks inherent in adopting and implementing a BPMS without considering also implementing a BRMS. Business rules become an afterthought Business rules need to be treated as first class objects when designing your business. Implementing a BPMS without a parallel focus on business rules and a BRMS will focus on processes as first class objects and rules only as an afterthought. Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 5 Business rules are re-buried into the new process One of the reasons for adopting a business rules approach and a BRMS is to avoid having rules buried in all sorts of code, manuals, people s heads etc. Failing to focus on business rules alongside business processes will tend to bury business rules in the first process that requires them, creating a new generation of legacy systems. New process becomes complex, burdened by the buried business rules One of the benefits of using a BRMS to manage business decisions is that it can simplify a business process. If one tries to use a BPMS to automate a decision, the process will have a large number of steps and paths that are not really about the process but about the decision. This will tend to make the process design more complex and, by failing to consider the two kinds of agility, will make it harder to change either. Inconsistency of business rules is likely If business rules are buried in the first process that uses them, there is a great risk that the next time those same business rules should be used in a process they will instead be repeated. As business decisions and business rules are not the same as business processes, the re-use mechanisms of a BPMS are unlikely to work as well for business rules. Therefore hidden business rules will not get re-used properly. Noncompliance due to problem business rules is likely, leading to fines Many BPMS projects are designed to improve compliance by managing each step in the process. Compliance with business rules, however, is often more about how a specific decision was made (underwriting, origination, claims payment) and not about the process followed. Using a BPMS to demonstrate compliance with this kind of decision regulation will likely be difficult. Benefits of BPMS with BRMS In contrast, there are many benefits to adopting a BRMS and a BPMS in parallel and using both when designing to-be processes. New process is simplified Because business decisions are identified and managed as discrete elements of the new process, the process will be simpler: it will have a single decision-making activity instead of a cluster of reusable components to make the decision in the process design. This will keep the process simpler and will enable the process to be changed more easily for better process agility. Rules are organized into discrete rulesets A BRMS allows the rules to be managed as discrete rulesets and allows these rulesets to be composed into decisions for use in processes. This gives a layer of management and organization that makes it easy to control, update and exploit the business rules being automated. Rulesets are designed using business rule paradigms Some rulesets are best represented as decision tables, some as decision trees, some as rules. Some rules should best be presented in a fairly technical format and some using templates to hide the complexity and allow business users to manage them directly. A BRMS will have many such metaphors and powerful tools for managing the rules paradigm. A typical BPMS will have a simpler, probably simplistic, view of business rules. Rulesets are tied to business objectives and monitored Rulesets as reusable components can be matched to business objectives, source rules, regulations, etc. This allows for impact analysis in the BRMS (if I change this policy, which rulesets should I Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 6 change?) and for improved control as business users will more readily be able to see which rules are at issue in the face of a specific business change. Although a BPMS offers this for processes, it is unlikely to do a good job for rules. Rulesets are tied to the new process but not buried Although rulesets are tied into the new processes through the decision-making activities, they are not buried in them. This allows them to be re-used more readily. A good BRMS will make it easy to see which processes are using which rulesets and to ensure that the processes being impacted by a change in rules can be easily identified. Rulesets can be tied to other systems not built with the BPMS Not all applications will be developed using a BPMS. Evidence suggests that no more than about 70% of systems can be brought to a single architecture for any definition of the word architecture. This means that business decisions must be made by systems built with the BPMS as well as by legacy systems and perhaps packaged applications. Indeed with the proliferation of different flavors of BPMS, many companies may find they want to use more than one BPMS. Consistently managing the business rules across the various BPMS in use will be critical. Process and rule changes are managed and deployed independently This last point is perhaps the most important. In general rules changes (for decision agility) and process changes (for process agility) are not always linked. For example, there could be a long-running process where one of the decision steps must be compliant with changing regulations that will be different from the initiation of the process and the point at which it reaches the decision step. While there are changes that need to be synchronized, as discussed above, the more common situation will be for changes that are not synchronized. Why separate products? So if it is clear that there should be both BRMS functionality and BPMS functionality to manage rules and processes effectively, why not try to get both kinds of functionality in the same environment? What value is there in having separate, but linked, products to fulfill this? There are three core value propositions in keeping them separate: being able to change the rules for work in process, re-use across systems and the inherent nature of business rules as distinct from process or routing rules. 1. Having the ability to change work in progress Business logic within a process is typically fixed by the BPMS for a particular item of work at the time that it is instantiated. For long-running processes this is a problem as rules may not be current when they are evaluated. If the rules are retrieved from a BRMS at the time a decision is needed, then the rules are current, whereas if the business logic is embedded within the process map, then typically that logic is fixed for a particular item of work at the time that it is instantiated. In theory a product that combined BPMS and BRMS functionality could allow this kind of separation, but in reality it is going to be easier to manage with separate products focused on solving unique deployment and re-deployment issues. 2. Using the same rules engine and rules across multiple applications The same business rules about, for example, how you deal with a customer s order in a particular situation should be applied identically across your CRM system, your BPMS, and any other applications that they might impact. This is important for customer service customers like to be treated consistently but critical for compliance where you must be able to show consistency of behavior. If a particular customer segment used a particular system more heavily, inconsistent treatment across systems could even leave you accused of bias. If all these systems retrieve their business rules from a common business rules repository at the time of execution then you get Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 7 consistency, compliance and greater business agility. This is particularly true if you are one of those companies who need more than one flavor of BPMS for different projects. 3. Business rules are not process/routing rules One of the reasons people get confused about having separate technologies is that they confuse routing or process rules with business rules rules that impact business decisions. Business rules let you automate business decisions such as Complex branching Managing task assignments Triggering processes Eliminating manual approvals Identifying potential fraud Assembling complex datasets Not only don t most BPMS have sufficient functionality in their in-process expression builders to offer true business rules capabilities but these kinds of decisions are typically process and technology independent. You could re-platform your whole business and the rules would stay the same. These rules are so different from what you need in a process that they should be managed and controlled separately. Some Use Cases There are three basic use cases: A business process reaches a point where it requires a complex automated business decision to be reached before continuing, such as origination, underwriting, fraud detection and marketing. To do this it calls upon a rule service to examine the applicable data and recommend appropriate actions recommend products/services to offer, decide who needs to be notified of current status, determine what additional data must be collected. The decision data is used by the BPM process to continue its flow A rule service reaches a point where additional data is needed in the decision process, requiring human intervention. It initiates a BPM process to bring the right users into the flow and step them through the required tasks. When the BPM process finishes, it re-initiates the rule service with a saved state and new data The result of a rule or decision process calls for a complex business process to be started. It calls the appropriate BPM process as the rule action, often while continuing execution of the rest of the decision. Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 8 A complex business decision 1. A BPMS is executing a business process and reaches a point where it requires a complex automated business decision to be reached before continuing 2. It calls upon a Blaze AdvisorTM rule service to examine the applicable data and recommend appropriate actions: Recommend products/services to offer Decide who needs to be notified of current status Approve or reject Determine what additional data must be collected 3. The decision results are returned to the BPMS and used by the process to correctly navigate its flow 4. The BPMS continues with its process execution Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 9 5. A BRMS like Blaze Advisor" is executing a rule service and reaches a point where additional data is needed in the decision process, requiring human intervention 6. It initiates a BPMS process to bring the right users into the flow and step them through the required tasks. This can include: Long running processes Waits for external events like inspections Human decisions or input managed with worklists 7. When the BPM process finishes, it reinitiates the rule service with a saved state and new data A decision causes a process 1. A BRMS like Blaze Advisor is executing a decision 2. As a result a complex business process must be started, either as the end result of the decision or as a side-effect of a decision 3. The BRMS calls the appropriate BPMS process as the rule action and the process then begins executing under the control of the BPMS Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 10 An example of BPMS and BRMS Integration: Marine vessel underwriting This simplified process is designed to show how the two kinds of technology can be used to accomplish the overall tasks of underwriting a vessel. Objective BPMS BRMS 1 Gather customer application Schedule customer visits Manage collection of forms Worklists for coordination Collaboration between staff 2 Validate data Possible manual review Validate data items for completeness and proper values Refer errors for manual review if cannot be resolved 3 Kick out bad applicants Run prequalification rules (managed by business experts) and identify those that fail Execute rejection process to send letter explaining with reasons from rule execution 4 Gather additional data Schedule inspections Manage worklists for inspectors Track completion of inspections Execute rules to order third party data, such as seaworthiness certification, if relevant Execute rules to identify which physical inspections required Invoke physical inspection process(es) 5 Make underwriting decision Include risk analysis with portfolio analysis and other decision factors to make underwriting decision 6 Take underwriting action If can make decision to write loan or decline loan then do so and invoke relevant paperwork process 9 Handling exceptions Manage underwriter worklist to ensure exception handled and invoke any subsequent decisions/processes as appropriate If cannot decide then flag exceptional circumstances and invoke exception handling Changing the Rules of BPM The attraction of using BRMS and BPMS together is that you can truly change the rules of business process management. You can: Create highly agile processes. Ensure that changing the decisions within a process and changing the process definition happen only when the process really changes. Control policy decisions that change frequently by keeping them separate from your processes and focusing on their management more directly. Automate complex decisions using technology designed for that purpose, to reduce the number of manual steps in a process and increase the percentage of transactions that can go straight through the process without requiring a manual step. Allow business user control over decision and process behavior by separating out the process changes and decision changes, to make it easier to identify the right group of users to participate in each kind of change. Reuse rule services across applications whether they are new composite applications being built with a BPMS, legacy applications, packaged applications or others. Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 11 Performance Management There is a lot of discussion today about performance management and how useful it can be in helping you improve your business by improving your visibility into processes and activities. While there is a lot to be said for performance management, there is an issue for some implementations. Some companies have invested heavily in real-time or near real-time monitoring of their business without thinking about the responsiveness of their IT infrastructure. What good does it do to monitor performance and activities so closely if, when that monitoring suggests that a change is needed, you are unable to make your systems reflect that change in a timely fashion? The use of BPMS and BRMS in conjunction can allow for agile systems to be built that will allow an enterprise to respond effectively to what it learns from its performance management systems. The combination of BPMS and BRMS offers many advantages in different circumstances. Commoditization One interesting use of business rules in a business process context is the potential for business rules to help companies exploit and resist the commoditization of process. As workflow, process management and performance management are standardized or commoditized for a process, it is hard for companies to stand out. If you use these processes, and so do your competitors, how can you still differentiate yourself? You could make sure the business rules that drive the decision points in the process are unique and a match for your corporate perspective/attitude/philosophy. Using a business rules management system you can inject automated decisioning into the processes, whether you run it, someone else runs it on your behalf or you use a standard one. Not only will this give you efficiency gains by eliminating manual decision-making steps, it will let you easily change the decision policies within your process, to maximize Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 12 agility, allow for personalization and ensure that your customers still feel they are dealing with you, not a generic enterprise. Legacy Modernization Using BRMS to modernize a legacy application to give the old application a new brain is a classic way to reduce costs and improve business agility without having to rip-and-replace the whole system. Rule services built with a BRMS for this purpose are ideal for being re-used in BPMS-designed processes as they typically focus on core business decisions that will be needed in the new processes as well. Complex Event Processing A BPMS is good for predictable processes, while complex event processing or CEP is good for responding to events (business activity monitoring or BAM is another term used here). For either of these approaches, to deliver maximum value and to deliver the rapid-response enterprise of the future, decisions must be automated. If you are using BPM to automate a process, need to automate decision points within it to get straight-through processing, you cannot always refer to a person. If you are using CEP or BAM to respond to an event, then need to decide which events are significant, which are not and what to do about the significant ones, again, you cannot always refer them to a person. Regardless of what combination of these approaches you use, you must automate decisions. Ideally you should be able to be fairly relaxed about which approach is going to be best for a given project, and just make sure you get control of the decisions that underpin it. Conclusion So is there a very gray line between process management and business rules? Take an example used in a well known introductory business rules course. Explanation: you can create a model that prescribes that you or an automated system carry out task 1 then carry out task 2 and based on some criteria move to task 3 or 4. For ex: task 1 is to determine if a person is a desirable renter based on his or her financial history. Task 2 is to determine if the person has brought cars back damaged or late or to the wrong destination. Task 3 is to determine if the person is a risky driver based on driving record. These can be modeled and managed as THREE tasks within a bigger process (each task with its own rules) or as ONE task within a process (with a super set of all of the rules), or other combinations. This example is typical and shows why the combination of BPMS and BRMS is so effective. There should be one decision task as there is only one business decision should you offer a car and at what price? This decision might be made available as a service to third parties who resell my car rentals or on my website to let customers get the right price for themselves. That is, it is reusable. In addition you might add or remove decision steps (perhaps a state makes it illegal to use financial history or you decide to add profitability of the selected car to the decision) without changing the process in any way. If you focus on meaningful business decisions, then it is usually pretty clear where the process ends and the decisions or rules start. Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 13 Lastly a note on how the combination of BRMS and BPMS allows you to build for the future. Let's assume you have automated critical decisions within a process using business rules, then enhanced these decisions with predictive analytic models. How would this look? You could use business rule logging to record the critical decisions within a process instance, allowing you to investigate the realities of process execution You could use rules-based and analytic model-based simulation to see how changes in the rules or models would have changed the outcome of processes. Assuming your key decisions were automated, they would determine the outcome of your process at least the outcome that impacts the bottom line, such as the price offered or claim amount paid. This would let you evaluate the business impact of changes in policy. By making the rules easy to change and by combining them with regularly updated, easy-to-deploy predictive models, you could constantly improve the business process. By building a decision model, showing how the rules and analytic models interact, you could run simulations that would let you optimize the process, given the constraints under which you operate. You could end up, essentially, with a transaction that drives the process the data in the transaction, or metadata attached to it, would determine what scores the models would generate and the combination of scores and data would determine which rules fired. That would decide which steps to take to complete the transaction. This inverts the process so that it flows from the customer to the organization. An example of this would be an origination process where the data entered by the customer is used to drive models and rules that determine which products are available and what additional data and steps are required. This kind of customer-centricity with flexible processes based on the specifics of each transaction is the future. BRMS and BPMS used in concert give you the platform. Untitled DocumentRules for Smarter Business Practices Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC) provides the leading solutions and technologies for Enterprise Decision Management, giving businesses worldwide the power to make smarter decisions. Corporate Headquarters: Offices Worldwide: 901 Marquette Avenue, Suite 3200 Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Minneapolis, MN 55402 Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, 1 800 999 2955 from the US United Kingdom, United States 1 612 758 5200 from anywhere info@fairisaac.com email www.fairisaac.com Fair Isaac, Blaze Advisor, and It s just a smarter way to do business are registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation. Other product and company names herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. 2006 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 2182WP 06/06 PDF About Fair Isaac Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC) makes decisions smarter. The company s solutions and technologies for Enterprise Decision Management give businesses the power to automate more processes, and apply more intelligence to every customer interaction. Through increasing the precision, consistency and agility of their decisions, Fair Isaac clients worldwide increase sales, build customer value, cut fraud losses, manage credit risk, reduce operational costs, meet changing compliance demands and enter new markets more profitably. Founded in 1956, Fair Isaac powers hundreds of billions of decisions a year in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, retail, consumer branded goods, healthcare and the public sector. Fair Isaac also helps millions of individuals manage their credit health through the www.myfico.com website. Visit Fair Isaac online at www.fairisaac.com.
