Increasing sales velocity though Enterprise Social Networks: FICO

At the interface of main street and Wall Street, FICO (previously known as Fair Isaac) caters both to consumers and businesses and delivers a wide range of predictive analytic solutions. The company generates more than half of its B2B leads from digital marketing through a very deliberate use of social networks both, private and public.

The main reason social networking is so important to FICO is that it enables both prospects and customers to educate and inform themselves by communicating with other similarly minded people in a safe and semi-structured environment, in their own language, 24/7. My strategy was to build FICO’s own private enterprise social network, decisions.fico.com, and to use public social networks like YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/user/FICOTechTalk#p/u, LinkedIn and Twitter to attract potential participants. This strategy, coupled with a user interface focused on maximizing positive user experience, has been very successful. In a very short period of time, we’ve managed to attract thousands and thousands of professionals to join FICO’s online-community the world over.

This project is a real-life example of how to put cloud computing to work to enable and facilitate customer engagement: By inviting our customers to become our most valuable collaborators with regard to defining new product requirements and other enhancements to our services.

FICO’s private enterprise social network, decisions.fico.com, was launched in a matter of weeks. It uses Salesforce Ideas and Lithium Customer Community applications. It integrates with Six Apart’s Typepad, Amazon EC2 and Sharepoint. The vision that lead to this strategy sprang from the marketing team working in very close collaboration with the CIO. The bulk of the implementation for this cloud-based composite application was outsourced to Salesforce’s partner, Reside.

The community is open to everybody using or evaluating FICO technology and services such as Chief Risk Officers, business analysts, developers and many others. Demos, free trials, and best practices are all a click away. Expanding he FICO community from the physical world to the digital world has been a very worthwhile investment! And, let’s not forget that for the customer‘s experience to be successful, the interaction must be multi-channel and consistent both on-line and in-person.

Tribute to a giant: Art Rosenfeld, the father of energy efficiency

I had the honor and privilege of meeting Art several years ago at the launch of what was then called the Stanford Institute for the Environment. The launch constituted of several days of fascinating world class presentations and conversations about- you guessed it- the environment and climate change. I have great memories of all the speeches but none as vivid as Art’s presentation. Art had very few slides and the ones he had weren’t very polished. However, his knowledge, passion, style and above all humor were absolutely riveting. Bear in mind that Art was talking about how to make cities more energy efficient… I couldn’t wait to meet him. Which I did after the crowd around him had subsided. He generously spent half an hour with me discussing the economic merits of energy efficiency vs. renewables.

A few years later, I called him at the California Energy Commission to help me launch the then fledgling Clean Tech Open - The mission of the California Clean Tech Open is to encourage the development of clean technology companies that foster a healthy natural environment. Yet again, I was struck by his generosity and kindness. He took the time to understand what we wanted to achieve, provided guidance and made many invaluable introductions at the C-PUC, LBNL and PG&E. He also accepted very graciously to be a keynote speaker at the launch of the Clean Tech Open at San Francisco city hall, on March 21,2006. He has remained a staunch supporter of the Clean Tech Open and I could not thank him enough for his support. Art will once again be the keynote speaker at the Feb 26, 2010 national launch of the competition!

Art received his Ph. D. in Physics under Enrico Fermi and later formed the Center for Building Science at LBNL. He received the Enrico Fermi award in 2006 and co-founded the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. He is stepping down from the California Energy Commission and he will be sorely missed.

Recently I installed a “cool roof” on my own house, an action of which Art is a big proponent. My daughters love our new “cool roof”, as well as, the many other energy efficient design features we are incorporating into our current home renovation. Thanks to people like Art, with his passion, vision and incredible intellect kids today are more inspired and aware of energy use issues than ever before.

Consumer empowerment and FICO scores

Understanding FICO scores is critical for Consumers who want to take back control of their credit. Indeed, FICO scores are now used not only by lenders when purchasing a car, buying or refinancing a house but also by more and more employers as a measure of character and financial responsibility! In the Forbes video below with Quentin Hardy, I share where to get help to keep your FICO scores up so that you can get the best possible deal on your mortgage and the job you want.

Enterprise sustainability in the real world...

FICO is on its way to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% over three years with no incremental budget, only leadership and vision. This Forbes video with Quentin Hardy is a quick exploration into how it all happened!

Branding as a refocusing exercise: FICO

"March 10, 2009: In the interest of clarity and consistency, Fair Isaac Corporation today announced that it has officially adopted the brand FICO as its corporate identity." This corporate renaming qualifies both as adoption of initials, and elevation of a product brand to the corporate level.

What, or who, is a Fair Isaac? A nice guy, in the credit rating business? As a name, it scores at the top in "whimsical," if not positively cuddly. Turns out, however, that there were two guys, Bill Fair and Earl Isaac, who in 1956 founded "Fair, Isaac and Company" (whence the initials FICO). The comma got lost in 2003, when the legal name Fair Isaac Corporation was adopted. But "Simply removing the comma changed nothing," says Chief marketing Officer Laurent Pacalin; "journalists would still talk about Fair Isaac as 'the guy who did FICO'."

And what is a FICO? Fair Isaac's principal product is the "FICO Score," a credit worthiness number carried by virtually every American, and the leading measure of consumer credit risk in the U.S. It is a number thus central to both crisis and recovery.

This is what Tony Spaeth, Corporate Brand Matrix, had to say about the brand work that we did here at FICO! Read more here.

Three ways to shrink Systemic Risk

Wikipedia defines “financial systemic risk” as, “the risk of sudden collapse of an entire system or market…due to potentially catastrophic instability in that interlinked and interdependent system or market.” That’s a fine definition, but few of us need to look it up. It’s been nine months and counting since systemic risk erupted, and the global financial system is still tiptoeing around the smoking crater. As the worst recession of our lifetimes grinds on, institutions and governments are working feverishly to build strategic and regulatory protections against future systemic risk cataclysms.

In my view, government regulators and financial executives will have the greatest chance of success in managing and mitigating systemic risk if they understand and act on three related lessons that are emerging from the trauma that began in the autumn of 2008:

 First, beneath the fearsome complexity that can obscure the working of markets, the value of all financial relationships is still defined by the quality of the underwriting – defining underwriting in the broadest possible sense. The old rules still rule: Know your borrower. Know your lender. It’s a simple concept, but the market environment in recent decades has made it harder and harder to execute. We must repair the markets in a way that enables 360-degree underwriting based on clear, transparent, trustworthy data and relationships.

 Second, of all the characteristics that define economic activity, connection is the most important. Institutions considered “too big to fail” are in reality “too connected to fail.” The web of interdependencies that girdles the globe, linking the boardrooms of Wall Street to the kitchen tables of Main Street, can be the economic system’s greatest vulnerability – as Nassim Taleb argues in The Black Swan – or its greatest strength. Job No. 1 for leaders of the world’s financial institutions and market-regulating bodies is to design the architecture of systemic connection to assure strength. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2Ve-8f3W4

 Third, despite the enormity of the task facing us, there is a good place to start where we can gain swift traction, and that is with microdecisions – the innumerable individual economic decisions financial professionals and consumers make every day on a global basis. To be clear, I’m not talking about trivial mini-decisions. Microdecisions are the fundamental building blocks of the economic system on all levels. “This [financial] crisis started one mortgage at a time,” Dr. Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law School professor who chairs the Congressional oversight panel on government bailout spending, told The New York Times on June 18.

Searching for the Triple Bottom Line

Fair Isaac owner of the FICO scores has launched a Sustainable Enterprise Initiative whose objective is to reduce the carbon footprint of the company. As the chief marketing officer I have been in an ideal position to support the CIO, Christopher Rence, in his successful efforts to green up Fair Isaac data centers through IT virtualization and leverage of cloud computing.

It is always very re-assuring to see that significant results can be achieved under the right leaderhip!