ALX Development Corp. was formed in 1983 to exploit the combination of artificial intelligence and proprietary methodology in bank financial analysis. The company has evolved into a personal service organization which employs the original technology as a productivity tool.

ALX Development Corp. was founded by John R. Segerstrom, a graduate of San Jose University and Harvard Business School. His company serves banks (about 90% of the customer base), banking consultants and regulatory agencies helping in the areas of risk management and problem anticipation. The ALX System was awarded the 1991 Award for Innovation by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

Although ALX Development Corp. provided excellent customer service and was recognized for their technical expertise, they had failed to achieve significant market penetration. Bootstrapping their way to profitability (1991 was the first consistently profitable year), management decided they needed some help to determine how to allocate newly available financial resources. Because of their familiarity with the benefits of expert systems they turned to Business Insight.

They answered Business Insight's questions regarding products, prospects and resources and then reviewed the recommended strategies. Mr. Segerstrom says, "We simply would not have been able to perform this analysis ourselves, it isn't our area of expertise." Using the Business Insight analyses, ALX Development Corp. embarked on a focused marketing program. Today, "Our revenue growth is beginning to strain our service resources, the problem we have dreamed of having and which we are eager to solve. The marketing effort has been supplemented by professionals in areas where we are weak and Business Insight has dramatically reduced the risk by providing standards which allow us to direct and measure their efforts. However, the program is basically driven by ALX Development Corp. staff and is therefore culturally integrated into the company from the start. An important fact is that very little of the company's recent expenditure for marketing has been wasted due to mistakes or failures. This is not trivial, as most of our previous efforts have been thus classified."

"Our experience has been that our expert system could say things about a bank that no one in the bank itself dared say, and get away with it! Business Insight has performed this function for ALX Development Corp. Having addressed the marketing program, we then turned to control and finance (areas in which we consider ourselves experts). Business Insight's comments caused us to realize we had been suppressing some fundamental disagreements in the interest of organizational harmony, which had resulted in several real weaknesses. These are now being discussed and, solutions being attempted, in an atmosphere of greatly improved communication, as the result of the acquisition and use of Business Insight."

"No one sees everything. No one is good at everything. Business Insight is a tool to expand vision, to provide context and structure to complex business relationships. There is no business that couldn't benefit from Business Insight. Even in the rare case in which a business meets all the Business Insight tests, valuable information has been gained."