Resources in Business Decision Management (BDM) / Business Rules (BR)

The BDM topical home page serves Practitioners with an interest in successful BDM approaches and how they complement BPM. This Business Decision Management section offers great variety in Business Process Management-Business Decision Management expertise, technology, and opinions. Like multiple generations peacefully co-existing, there are no biases, no judgments, no wrong answers. Instead, we share every tip, technique, opinion, and approach that really works.

Displaying 21 - 30 of 278 resources matching your criteria.

Beyond DMN1.1: What’s Next?

Contributed by:Brian Stucky, Managing Director, Business Decision Management, Allegiance Advisory Group

With the (almost) official release of DMN1.1 we find ourselves at an interesting crossroads in the industry as the concept of consistently modeling decisions becomes more widespread. It seems clear that we’ve moved from questions of “What is this?” to “How can we effectively leverage it?”. A plethora of companies have developed platforms to support DMN or at least support it through some kind of adapter. Gartner has commented on it and MISMO (Mortgage Industry Standards and Maintenance Organization) is moving towards adopting it as an official standard for exchange and interchange in the mortgage industry.

This crossroads also includes fundamental questions surrounding what we can do, what we can’t do, and what we should be doing with the standard. I’ve seen this manifest itself in two primary ways:

Modeling vs. Implementation
Methods to implement, share, disseminate and execute decision logic

These will both be discussed here.

The Systems Approach to Performance Improvement: A Personal Experience

Contributed by:Alan Ramias, Partner, Performance Design Lab

In the late 1970’s, I was a training manager in charge of teller training at a bank in the Midwest. I read Geary Rummler’s article “You Need Performance, Not Just Training” and experienced a Eureka! moment because I had just witnessed the exact scenario described in the article: an inept attempt at engineering the desired performance of tellers. This is the story of what happened before and after I applied Rummler’s principles of systematic performance improvement.

White Space Forever

Contributed by:Alan Ramias, Partner, Performance Design Lab

The title of the book that made Geary Rummler and Alan Brache authorities in the emerging field of process improvement and management back in 1990 was Improving Performance, but it was the subtitle (How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart) that caught attention. Decades later, people still refer to it as the “white space” book; that was why Geary’s 2009 follow-up to Improving Performance was entitled White Space Revisited.

Today the term “white space” has entered common parlance. There are even a couple of consulting firms using the term in their names. It’s come to mean any general lack of connection between things that should be connected. But its original meaning still has value for BPM and Operational Excellence.

Simplify Your Processes with Decision Modeling

Download this whitepaper to see how you can reduce the complexity of your process models to increase participant understanding and ensure consistent, optimal execution.

Within business processes lie important decision gateways that direct workflow. These gateways are just as essential to the success of your processes as the process models themselves, and they deserve equal attention. In this whitepaper you will learn how Decision Modeling Notation (DMN) 1.0 gives organizations a standardized way to model decisions, connecting them seamlessly to the processes they drive.

Collaboration is Not a Four Letter Word

Contributed by:Brian Stucky, Managing Director, Business Decision Management, Allegiance Advisory Group

Collaboration and agility have always been noted as key benefits of business rule systems – collaborate and be agile! This has typically been discussed in terms of rule management – enabling business user control over an established rule base. But this often overlooks how we first get to a baseline rule base.

Building the Modern Business Architecture, Decision by Decision

Contributed by:Gagan Saxena, VP Consulting & Principal Consultant, Decisions Management Solutions

How your organization makes decisions drives the rest of the business environment - processes, events, data and the org-chart. A decision-centric view of Business Architecture is an essential organizing principle to deal with the data-driven, knowledge-based economy of the times.

First, clarify the 'modern' view on Business Architecture

There is no generally accepted definition or common understanding of business architecture because it is essentially a set of 'views', 'perspectives' or 'lenses' that consider how a business operates. Some views are common, like a process-based view - and others not as much, like an event-based view. The choice of business architecture views to be created and managed is generally dependent on current business priorities or concerns. And this practical approach to business architecture is certainly appropriate and prudent.

Leveraging Organizational Knowledge with Decision Modeling

Contributed by:Gagan Saxena, VP Consulting & Principal Consultant, Decisions Management Solutions

Organizational decisions are not as effective because we have not been able to explicitly connect organizational Knowledge to decisions. Formal decision modeling helps deploy existing knowledge and highlights knowledge gaps that need to be filled.

Knowledge is diffused across the organization

How do we know if we are making good decisions? When we are confident that we have used all available knowledge in making that decision.

How can we tell if our knowledge is good or bad? There is no clear measure of knowledge but its value is understood and appreciated. We know that there is a lot of effort and investment in increasing organizational knowledge. Procedure Manuals, Training Programs, Collaboration Sites, Intranets, Portals, Share point and others are all geared towards making organizations better through pooling and managing the communal knowledge.

Decision makers are supposed to become knowledgeable on their own

Making Decisions Operational

Contributed by:Brian Stucky, Managing Director, Business Decision Management, Allegiance Advisory Group

My last posting (“Transitioning to a World of Decisions”) began presenting observations of decision modeling, implementation and management as they have moved from theory to practice. These observations have been made from both the Business and IT sides of the Enterprise. Although the sample size is still relatively small, some definite trends are beginning to take shape. While the previous article focused primarily on testing, I also alluded to some difficulties arising from a strict reliance on using decision tables for ALL rules. I have observed this on several projects.

Finding Agile (In Decision Management Tech Implementation)

Contributed by:Gagan Saxena, VP Consulting & Principal Consultant, Decisions Management Solutions

Even though Decision Management technologies are built upon agile development principles, implementation projects frequently get bogged down in traditional approaches. Let us embark on a journey in the hopes of Finding Agile in those murky waters.

Decision Management Technologies are Center Stage

Most of the new advances in technology are aimed at making the systems more intelligent by having them do more knowledge work. These collection of technologies are the Decision Management technologies - that includes business rules, analytics and optimization. Since decision-making is amongst the most fluid aspects of an organization and the logical place to plug knowledge in, all related technologies are experiencing a surge in demand.

Transitioning to a World of Decisions

Contributed by:Brian Stucky, Managing Director, Business Decision Management, Allegiance Advisory Group

As the concepts of decision modeling and management increasingly move from theory to practice, it has been interesting to note how it is perceived and approached by both business and IT. Perhaps not surprisingly, my experience has shown this to be a smoother transition for business. This is something we should expect as it presents a more natural representation of the business for the business. The IT side has certainly had a variety of tools available in numerous platforms to support this approach and the emergence of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard now brings a cohesive view across industries. However, it does seem to present a few challenges to IT in this early stage of evolution.