By definition, expertise implies someone makes better decisions than most everyone else.  To create expertise takes not only baseline knowledge but the judgment, intuition, and a highly developed sense that can only come from many experiences.  To reach this level of great decision making in any area requires lots of time and many trials and learnings.

So, the challenge for companies is the time required to develop firm specific expertise.  This creates a decision quality gap for the organization between the best and the less experienced.  Until now, you could not scale your expert with a precision that would be equal to your expert sitting alongside those making the same subjective decisions.  It has been impossible to reliably and repetitively close this decision quality gap.

What would it mean to you if you closed the decision gap throughout your company, putting your best person, your internal expert, on everybody’s team? Companies know the dramatic impact it would have on their results.  They are aware of the potential—they just have not been able to effectively or efficiently capture their experts’ expertise.  And it is not from a lack of trying.  Expert elicitation efforts have been around for a long time. 

Meet TOM – the new tech solution

Here is where our approach has generated the breakthrough.  We do not attempt to grind through billions of pieces of data to come up with an answer that approaches a human’s capability to make subjective decisions.  We let the human expert do all of the “computing”, and our technology identifies how they organize and weight the variables of their decisions under different circumstances. This decoding process is almost the opposite approach of big data today.

Typically the process takes less than two weeks – from first interaction with the expert to producing a digital virtual expert. Our technology decodes their judgment by interacting directly with the expert, not data.  Once decoded, virtual experts can be created as an app, downloaded to your phone or your tablet where you can simply enter the parameters of the current challenge and the virtual expert returns what the expert would say.  This technology is called a Tacit Object ModelerSM – we are calling it TOMSM.

Remember that your experts make really good decisions, not 100% perfect decisions 100% of the time, but better than everybody else and at a much higher rate.  So, what if TOMSM can help your other decision makers to be at least as good as your expert for any consequential decision you want to improve?  There would be exponential improvement in results that matter for your firm.  Improvement can begin literally within a matter of weeks from start to when the virtual expert is in your hands.

Applications for financial services

There are substantial numbers of applications for this technology throughout financial services, wherever expert subjective decisions need to be made.  As an example, in a bank, we addressed a serious problem with client retention. We drew from the experts with the best client retention records.  How much easier is it to go to the personal banker who is the bank’s most successful at retaining their clients and decode their assessment and strategy for identifying and retaining clients?

Another application that may be of interest is fraud or money laundering detection. Current technologies, with tremendous sophistication, seek out scenarios that appear to match these scenarios. In most cases, exceptions go to humans to investigate and make decisions regarding the right next step. Should it be passed on, does it need further research, or should it be escalated?  Our technology can model the best fraud investigators and render expert assessments in real time.  Once the experts’ decision making is decoded and digitized, it is ready to be integrated into existing systems and dashboards.