Empowering Organizations to Improve the Quality and Speed of Key Business Decisions

Goli Tajadod of FlexRule tells us about their mission to empower all the organization leaders to improve the speed and quality of their business decisions.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Goli Tajadod: We are doing OK! But we miss our family overseas while hoping Australia’s border restriction is eased and see our family again soon. 

Apart from that, we are, of course, quite relieved as the restrictions are lifted in our state after a very long time.

We believe innovation cannot happen over Zoom; it requires a human touch. We are very happy to get back to our office to work face to face with our team and put all our efforts into the growth of our business and ourselves by adapting and evolving.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded FlexRule.

Goli Tajadod: I am the co-founder and VP of customer success at FlexRule. I ensure customer success for our customers by providing help and support throughout their digital and decision transformation journey and leading the high-performing and talented customer success team.

I was always keen to work for big corporates and companies. I believed that the meaning of success and social status is about working in well-known corporates and not the feeling about what you do. Typically, we tend to celebrate successes in business and personal lives and talk about them more openly, but not our failures. Therefore, working in a start-up felt like a huge risk and was scary. But I realized quite early on what I was missing out on by not being a part of a start-up like FlexRule that I didn’t know would become my home!

I was completely drawn to the idea of FlexRule, where we build everything from scratch and the impact it can have on the customers and the technology industry at large. I officially joined FlexRule in May 2016, and since then, this has been the most unique experience I have ever had in my entire career.

A little background about us: FlexRule was founded in 2008 with the vision to enable organizations to respond to infinite and frequent changes in business operations and decisions effectively and efficiently and deliver the real business value. Around 4 years ago, we launched an end-to-end decision automation platform commercially. Since then, we have worked with diverse customers globally, such as terrorist screening for a security screening in the Netherlands, anti-money laundering for a business consultancy in Portugal, office automation using decision robotics for a legal firm based in Melbourne, and import/export foods and drugs company in the Middle East and North America. For over a decade, we have built the right set of skills and expertise to provide end-to-end decision automation technology that caters to our customers from government agencies, banking, financial services, insurance, healthcare, energy, and utilities. 

How does FlexRule innovate? 

Goli Tajadod: We prioritize the democratization of advanced decision-making technologies and our mission to empower all the organization leaders (business, technology, and operations) to improve the speed and quality of their crucial business decisions in changing environments.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Goli Tajadod: For us, it slowed things down a bit and warranted transforming the usual way of working. The business-as-usual approach would not have worked perfectly as we liked, especially in day-to-day operations and team collaboration. 

We improved our day-to-day operations with streamlined processes and productive systems that cater to both customers and the internal team. We embraced the reality and continue to deal with it (weaknesses, problems, and mistakes).

We improved team collaboration and provided clear visibility of the planned projects as per the set goals and priorities, empowering the team with collaboration tools to deliver value.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Goli Tajadod: “No decision is, in itself, a decision.” – William James. Our principle is that a decision needs to be taken even it is difficult.

We saw many projects getting canceled during the pandemic due to budget cuts or the initiatives being scrapped or delayed. This put us in quite a tough situation. At the same time, interestingly, we did not see a huge increase in ‘NO DECISION’ during the pandemic compared to the year before. While facing the rapidly changing business requirements during this time, e.g., changing consumer behavior and preferences, regulations, and policies, increasing amounts of data, companies had to keep the business running simultaneously, importantly so even more efficiently and with greater agility. 

This means there is a strong need for our technology, and companies see an advantage in our unique value proposition. As a team, we just needed to be patient, adapt to change, and move forward; and in the meantime, take a lean budgeting approach to stay afloat and fully functional.

When I look back at the decisions and the way we operated, I still believe that was the most difficult decision we took, but it helped us be who we are now! Now we stand steady and much stronger.

What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?

Goli Tajadod: We are in constant communication with our existing customers and keeping abreast of their requirements. Additionally, we are leveraging insights and best practices from industry experts in technology and different industry verticals. We also gather detailed understanding and inputs from our potential customers that help us stay focused on what they need and enable them to achieve desired business results.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Goli Tajadod: We provide the most comprehensive decision automation platform, a unified, low-code, go-to platform to successfully deliver end-to-end decision automation aligned with an organization’s business objectives that gives our customers the comfort and insurance against their unknown requirements. In this space, we compete with large organizations worldwide listed in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Decisioning Platforms in the last year. 

Additionally, our transparent and straightforward commercial model allows our customers to utilize all technology parts without worrying about the cost. The customers’ requirements are also naturally the core driver of our product development.

Your final thoughts?

Goli Tajadod: Organizations are constantly challenged to respond to changes arising from multiple areas: market dynamics and volatility, regulations and policies, as well as data and information. Organizations’ ability to sense environmental changes and respond to them effectively and efficiently will determine the future of the organizations. A new future and different challenges during post-COVID-19 seem inevitable. However, the question is how ready the organizations are to embrace the new future and what is their approach to becoming a ‘Future Ready Business.

The organizations’ ability to adapt to changes and make optimized, customer-centric, and situation-aware decisions is vital to being a Future Ready Business. This also determines the future of organizations –they lead or die.

Your website? 

 www.flexrule.com