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:

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.