IBM Product Overview
Business agility and efficiency.
As the optimal solution for ensuring operational agility and creating a framework for strategic advantage, IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) can authorise a loan, decide on promotional offers or detect a cross-sell opportunity with high precision and personalisation. IBM ODM is a comprehensive decision automation solution that helps you manage the entire lifecycle of business decisions. Line of business users can capture, manage, automate and monitor business decisions on premises or on the cloud.
- Collaborate to discover, model, and validate decisions using a graphical, guided experience.
- Test, secure, and govern decisions within a business environment.
- Execute decisions with speed and consistency, at scale.
- Monitor the outcomes of decisions in real time.
Product names relevant to this briefing include IBM Integration, IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM).
Business Drivers
To stay competitive and meet ever rising customer expectations in today’s fast moving digital world, businesses need to make better decisions, faster. Most waste time and money gathering unactionable insights and relying on rigid applications. Businesses need advanced analytics combined with business rules to turn insights into effective, personalised, and immediate customer actions to generate measurable business results. For example, banks are looking for ways to personalise customer onboarding, drive upsell/cross-sell opportunities, and predict fraud. To make these complex decisions in real time and in context requires a digital decisioning platform with insight, decision, action and evaluation capabilities.
“By 2022, 20% of large, new business solutions will rely on DMS [Decision Management System] implementation to scale the detection of, optimise the fulfilment of business moments.” Gartner 2018
IBM ODM enables businesses to grow by driving customer loyalty and personalisation, maximise efficiency by reducing cost and improving responsiveness, and complying with regulations with transparency. IBM is recognised by global analysts as a leader in digital decisioning platforms (DDP) and decision management suites (DMS).
Key Capabilities
- Powerful no-code decision modelling to intuitively capture and express of decision logic.
- Built-in testing and simulation.
- Simplicity and ease of management.
- Built-in governance process.
- Role-based permission management.
- Support for multiple deployment form factors (on-prem, System z, private cloud, SaaS, embedded)
Why would you be interested?
In any business process where a decision is made repeatedly such as a “loan agreement” the decision needs to be repeatable and audited so it can be refined over time and consistently implemented. These types of rules often become embedded inside one or more applications or “people’s heads” and are difficult to change as they require IT development and testing to alter them. ODM provides a central location where business decisions are stored and actioned. The rules that make up the decisions can be edited by business analysts using natural language and tested before deployment by non-technical staff. Additional rules can be implemented around the business process to “flag” fraudulent activity, or an escalation such as up selling.
If you are concerned about;
- Providing a consistent customer experience across different channels (offline and online) of customer interactions.
- Automating complex business decisions.
- Managing high risk of customer churn.
- Making frequent changes in operations because of market conditions.
- Managing and meeting complex compliance requirements.
- Inability to identify where their decisions are today and difficulty in changing the decision process to meet new requirements.
- Inability to deliver on personalisation promises at speed because of siloed applications.
- Difficulty showing how each customer request is handled in an auditable way to prove compliance.
- Lack of consistency in how decisions are made across distribution channels or inside the organisation.
Business analyst or subject matter expert
ODM has the capability to update business policies at ease with minimum IT involvement.
Enterprise Architect
ODM offers a uniform and centralised repository of business decisions. Decisions and rules are abstracted out of the code base to make business changes faster and easier.
Operations Manager
ODM offers a highly scalable and performant runtime with strong governance across process and decision development, staging, and production systems.
Application Developer
ODM reduces the complexity of application code and reduces testing requirements. The application concentrates on gathering the required data and calling the decision engine for an answer and perhaps some additional data for the next stage of the application process. Decision rules can be developed in parallel with the application development and refined independently of the application.
Dr. Pankhuri Gupta is Responsiv’s Sales Manager working with our Banking, Healthcare, and Local Government customers. Her role is to add value through collaboration with strategists and technical leaders to understand business imperatives and work with them to shape and deliver IT projects. She specialises in innovative networking, bringing together the right specialists from Responsiv and our customers, to enable informed decision making, and deliver practical outcomes
Pankhuri is a qualified Dentist, who brings significant “on the job” experience of working in healthcare and with specialists of all kinds.
