Delivering rules management and decision support to government

Washington, DC, March 28, 2005: TCG and MindBox announced today that they have formed a strategic partnership to deliver industry-leading decision support and rules-based reasoning tools to the government using TCG’s GSA Schedule contract vehicle. TCG is a leading provider of IT and management advisory services solutions to the Federal government and MindBox is the premier provider of advanced rule- and case-based reasoning technology to government agencies.

The use of decision support and artificial intelligence software can significantly accelerate information processing in many government systems, including grants management, bioinformatics, financial management, scientific research, and information management. MindBox’s component-based architecture contains:

• ARTEnterprise: A foundation development environment for building intelligent applications.
• Engine Service Provider (ESP): Core functionality that provides an architectural framework for scalability, as well as efficient and effective operations.
• ARTOptimize, ARTQualify, ARTPrice: Component software, based on ARTEnterprise, that provides additional infrastructure for automating eligibility, configuration, and packaging activities. For Federal grants management, TCG will focus on using ARTQualify for grant eligibility decisioning.
• MindBox Power Editor: A business-friendly rules management environment that provides business users the ability to add, change and retire rules and guidelines.
• The MindBox product architecture separates the business rules from the system code. Using the MindBox Power Editor, business users can make changes as necessary with minimal technical knowledge — decreasing the cost of IT maintenance, speeding the implementation of legislative and policy changes, and putting responsibility for those changes into the hands of the most-qualified staff.

Extensive surveys of the available COTS artificial intelligence tools have shown that MindBox is a leader in the intelligent decisioning marketplace. The product is a hybrid application, combining rule- and case-based approaches to reasoning that provide flexibility in deployment and reduce overall impact of the system to the culture, methods and existing processes of users.

“As the IT industry automates more and more business functions and processes, applying rules and policies to manage these systems becomes paramount,” said Rich Barfus, President and CEO of MindBox LLC. “TCG is leveraging our long history as a pioneer in rules technology, plus our unique abilities to apply case-based reasoning and to edit rules using a true business user interface, to deliver their decision-support products to government entities.”

“The government processes massive amounts of information according to incredibly complicated policies and rules,” said David G. Cassidy, Vice President at TCG. “Through our agreement with MindBox, TCG will deliver cutting-edge tools that help manage and overcome this growing need, and give other integrators GSA Schedule access to the industry’s best rules- and case-based reasoning software.”

About TCG
TCG (Turner Consulting Group, https://stage.tcg.com), a Washington, DC-based company, specializes in delivering grants management solutions to the Federal government, and is responsible for pioneering integration work with Grants.gov, the government’s grants applications portal.

TCG focuses on helping government agencies use the power of the Internet and the Web to better interact with the public, and to generate internal cost savings and efficiencies. TCG projects have won awards for their groundbreaking achievements, including piloting the first inter-agency grants management system, and creating the first inter-agency government system to receive secure information from the general public. That system, Interagency Edison (http://www.iedison.gov), was built in 1995 for NIH’s specific needs. Today the system serves the invention and patent reporting requirements of 21 Federal agencies.

TCG was one of the fastest-growing privately-held companies in the United States in 2001, as ranked by Inc. magazine. The firm has been on Washington Technology’s Fast 50. The company was SEI-assessed at Capability Maturity Model Integration Maturity Level 2 (CMMI Level 2 for Software as defined by the CMMI version 1.1) in April 2004 after an intense nine-month effort and is one of about 701 companies worldwide to have achieved such recognition of process excellence.

For more information, contact David G. Cassidy on 202–742-8471 or david.cassidy@tcg.com.

About MindBox
Based in Greenbrae, Calif., MindBox, LLC is a technology company that helps financial services institutions automate their complex decision processes such as loan underwriting, loan product selection, cross-selling opportunities and feature-based pricing. The ARTEnterprise Product Family is an industry-proven software system that emulates human judgment by using rules and a patented case-based reasoning engine to automate the decision-making process.

MindBox also offers advisory services solutions for the financial services industry and ships a complete suite of applications including ARTOptimize, ARTQualify, ARTPrice, The MindBox Power Editor and Debt Consolidation Advisor. All MindBox products work online and offline to optimize every customer interaction across multiple channels.

More information can be found at www.mindbox.com or by calling (877) 650-MIND (6463).