Developing and managing IT systems in dynamic business environments involves significant costs and complexities. IT is being looked to drive increased automation, ensure consistency in application of business policies, reduce time-to-market and deliver personalized experiences to Customers. In pursuing these objectives, IT managers have to manage development and maintenance costs for complex systems, leverage existing investments and increase the flexibility and reusability.

Adopting an Enterprise Shared Platform (SOA) enables an Enterprise reduce costs and time for new development and modifications, by reusing existing application components and assembling them into new applications to meet new functionality needs. Additionally, there is a need to:

• Externalize process definitions from applications and host them in a specialized system (Business Process Management software) to make them more accessible by all applications, thereby enabling true end-to-end process automation within and across functional areas.
• Externalize decisions that govern the processes into a specialized system (Business Rules Engines). This will help organizations implement “dynamic processes” that are context/situation sensitive i.e. respond to each situation appropriately.

Process automation and dynamic processes help organization achieve straight through processing and respond to Customers faster, thereby eliminating delays and significantly boosting efficiencies.

• Enterprises also need to enhance effectiveness by automating knowledge-intensive decisions.

Being effective and accurate in determining which Customer to do business with, what price to charge, what level of service to provide based on life-time value, which insurance claim to investigate more closely, which Customer to give a loan to, which market segment to focus sales efforts in, which risk to select - can have a significant impact on the bottom line. These high-impact decisions, which in the past required a good deal of human participation, can now be automated using decision systems.

While, popular programming languages such as Java are procedural in nature, automating even simple decisions requires a tremendous amount of code development and associated maintenance.

Organizations can implement automation systems for these knowledge-intensive decisions with specialized infrastructure such as Business Rules Engines, Product Configuration engines, Price Engines, and Constraint solvers. In addition to reducing the total amount of code, Decision Engines also enable business users participate in authoring the business logic rather than always depending on programmers for coding the logic.

ValueMomentum Services
In response to these challenges, Enterprises are increasingly Consolidating, Externalizing and Automating Decisioning. ValueMomentum is at the forefront in the Insurance & Lending industries, assisting several Insurance Carriers and Lenders leverage Business Rule Engines (BRE) to rationalize, consolidate and create reusable decisioning capabilities. We have a strong track record of production installations in decision areas such as:

• Risk Decisioning, Underwriting



• Product Life Cycle Management



• Rating & Dynamic Pricing