Decision Management, Business Decision Management as we call it here at the BPMInstitute.org, is both an approach and a technology stack for automating and improving business decisions.
Business Decision Management has proven itself as a way to implement business rules and as a way to tie business rules and machine learning together to manage risk, reduce fraud and improve customer engagement. While there are other use cases for business rules and for machine learning, using them to automate, manage and improve decisions is by far the most powerful. Applying the approach generally involves three steps:
While the second and third steps involve applying known techniques and approaches to a new problem, specifying decision requirements requires a new approach and new techniques. There is an emerging consensus that decision modeling is the best way to specify requirements for business decision management projects. Decision modeling enables organizations to:
The best practice for decision modeling is to use the Object Management Group’s standard, Decision Model and Notation (DMN). This standard, like the Business Process Model and Notation, does not focus on methodology but on standardizing the way decision models should be represented. This approach gives users access to a broad community and a vehicle for sharing expertise more widely and embodies the most successful top-down modeling approaches.
At the core of a DMN decision modelare a few key concepts:
Decision modeling applies these basic concepts to produce decision models or decision requirement models. These models are a network of decisions, input data and knowledge sources. As a process model is to workflow or a data model is to information, a decision model is to decision-making: A clear and unambiguous way to describe decision-making by breaking down that decision-making into a set of simple concepts.
Source: DecisionsFirst™ Modeler
The example shows a decision requirements model that uses the DMN notation. The Select Marketing Offer decision (decisions are shown as rectangles) has two types of input data – Marketing Offers and Customer data (input data is shown as an oval). The solid arrows show that these two types of input data are information that is required by the decision. The decision itself has been decomposed into three sub-decisions and the use of the solid arrows here also shows that the information produced by these three decisions is also required to make the Select Marketing Offer decision. This decomposition is repeated for an extra level of detail for two of the three. Finally, two knowledge sources, Marketing Know-how and Customer Loyalty, are linked with a dashed line that shows they are authorities for specific decisions.
Decision Modeling is an increasingly important element of Business Decision Management and a critical first step in successful business rules projects.
Editors Note: This article has been updated from it's original content. The original article can be found here:
https://www.bpminstitute.org/resources/articles/role-decision-modeling-business-decision-management
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