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 31 - 40 of 278 resources matching your criteria.

Field Notes: Decision Analysis and Process Analysis

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

Business Decisions and Business Processes need to be analyzed and improved simultaneously for better business outcomes. Following are some practical notes from the field on the correct perspective for this.

1. Decisions are a network or a hierarchy, not a flow

Decision Analysis does not need a flow-based sequential thinking like Process Analysis. Unlike processes, decisions are evaluated in a network where a number of lower-level decisions are made to aggregate up to the main business decision of interest. This state-less decision can be plugged into a process with the process then flowing on down the time dimension.

What Skills are Needed for BPM Success?

Contributed by:Gregg Rock, Editor & Founder, DBizInstitute.org, BPMInstitute.org & BAInstitute.org

One of the most frequently asked questions (FAQs) on BPM involves the skills needed for BPM success. While most people understand the importance of modeling skills, there’s a lot more involved in succeeding with BPM and it goes beyond skills or aptitude to mental models or attitude.

Earlier this year, Gartner identified 15 skills critical to the success of any BPM project. As depicted in Figure 1, they elected to group these skills into three types of critical competency: transformational, operational and technical.

Figure 1. Top 15 Business Process Management Skills[i]

Discovering Decisions in Your Business

Contributed by:James Taylor, Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and CEO and Principal Consultant, Decision Management Solutions

In previous articles we have discussed Business Decision Management, the role of decision management and decision modeling in reducing process complexity as well as the risks of focusing only on processes without considering decisions. At the heart of these articles is a focus on decisions – high volume, repeatable, operational decisions that can be identified, modeled and managed for improved business results.

Most organizations will initially identify decisions within their business processes – either finding tasks that are clearly decision-making tasks such as those handling validation, approval, calculations, assessments etc – or collapsing process complexity into a decision that was previously obscured by a nest of process gateways and conditions or rules.

Effectiveness: Making BPM relevant for CEOs/CFOs

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

Decision modeling adds explicit effectiveness metrics to the more generally accepted efficiency metrics generated by business process modeling,giving the full picture to the Executive Suite. Process efficiency measures throughput, costs, error-rates and similar, while process effectiveness measures whether the process is fulfilling its purpose - picking the most profitable customers, for example. Most business process management metrics focus on efficiency measures since effectiveness measures generally depend on the decisioning logic embedded within processes. Explicit decision modeling turns a spotlight on process goals and associated effectiveness metrics. Executive leadership can now balance and trade-off efficiency measures like throughput with effectiveness measures like profitability.

The Consequences of BPM without BDM

Contributed by:James Taylor, Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and CEO and Principal Consultant, Decision Management Solutions

When BPM is pursued without pursing Business Decision Management—BDM—in parallel the direct consequence is that decisions become an afterthought in the processes that need them. In contrast, applying BDM techniques and technologies in parallel means that decisions are identified, managed and improved distinct from processes resulting in increased agility, simpler processes and improved consistency.

The risks of failing to manage processes and decisions are:

What About Unstructured Processes?

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

The race to define, standardize, automate and improve processes started with Henry Ford’s assembly lines. This ‘structuring’ of processes has driven tremendous productivity benefits for organizations, and managers are therefore trained to consider the organization to be a sum total of its processes. A key management goal is to drive more structure into business processes with automation being the desired end-state. While most data-driven, transactional processes have been automated over the decades, there is a class of knowledge-driven processes that have eluded efforts to structure or automate them. These ‘unstructured’ processes are variously referred to as Manual Processes, Expert Processes, Case Management, Supervisory Functions and similar. And the goal has been to apply process-centric thinking to structure and automate these pesky but high-value-add processes. This is not working and a new decision-centric approach needs to be considered.

First and Last: A Tale of Two Enterprises

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

Far too often these essays are motivated by an observation of, or conversation with, an organization that has gotten itself into some trouble. Their pain becomes a springboard to discuss how things should be done in the world of decision management and provides an unfortunately steady stream of topics for forums like this. That said I am quite pleased to be able to report some generally positive recent experiences with Enterprises that are making great strides as they embrace business rules and decision management. We will use these as exemplars that other similar organizations might look to as they plot their decision management.

Business Process Management and Business Decision Management: State of Play

While many, most, organizations know they need to focus on business processes, a matching focus on operational decisions is less common. The effective combination of Business Process Management (BPM) with Business Decision Management (BDM) is emerging as a critical element in successful organizations. The Intersection of Process and Decision
Business Process Management is well established in organizations of every size. Many, most, organizations identify, document, model, automate and manage their business processes. Many of these organizations have adopted a technology stack, a Business Process Management System, to support their BPM work. Despite the importance of operational decisions, most do not yet similarly manage business decisions. This is changing as more organizations adopt Business Decision Management as well as Business Process Management so they can work at the intersection.

Simplifying Complex Processes

Contributed by:James Taylor, Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and CEO and Principal Consultant, Decision Management Solutions

There are lots of good reasons for adopting business process management as an approach, and a Business Process Management System as a technology. The benefits that can be gained are real but they can be undermined by over complex process designs. If the process you end up designing is the BPMN or BPEL equivalent of spaghetti code, then your process won’t be agile and it won’t be cost-effective. It’s also unlikely to deliver a positive customer experience or to be easy to continuously improve. The benefits of BPM are dependent on you developing processes that are reasonable, that are not over-complex.

Smarter Systems: Applying Decision Management

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

All systems are active participants in business decision making to some degree.

The logic coded into business systems allows a level of ‘smartness’, and this is then amplified by the decision logic used by users - resulting in smart business operations. So, if we want to make the entire business operations smarter, we need to focus on decision making across systems and their users. Business Decision Management seeks to explicitly define and improve operational decisions; and to automate them through targeted deployment of sophisticated decision management technologies like Business Rules Management, Advanced Analytics and Optimization.