James Taylor's Decision Management

I attended the Brainstorm BPM/SOA conference a couple of weeks ago and, as I was in the middle of my top 10 list, did not blog about it. Four presentations in particular struck me as interesting. The links below will only work for those of you registered at the BPM Institute but it has lots of good stuff so I recommend it.

The Role of Business Rules in Enterprise Architecture by Larry Goldberg
Larry did a nice job of articulating the value of managing business rules separate from data, function, process etc. Using the Zachman framework and mapping rules into the motivation column he also discusses how production-level business rules are distinct from analysis-level business rules, something that confuses a lot of people. His discussion of how and why to map the rules together and on the value of using a declarative approach to implementing business rules were also worth following.

Enabling Business Process Innovation by Tom Dwyer
Tom Dwyer of the Yankee Group had a nice presentation on enabling business process innovation. I am strongly of the opinion that automating processes without automating decisions properly is a great way to automate brain-dead processes. Any time a process includes complex pricing or eligibility or where the process is designed to support self-service, decision automation will be key to your success when automating the process. Equally you need a way to apply analytics to these processes and the most likely spot for customer or risk analytics, for instance, is going to be in the decision-making steps. In particular moving to the step Tom descries as "Drive Business Agility" will require the kind of change-tolerant components that decision automation technology such as business rules can deliver. Separating decision-making from process-control is also key as the rate of change can be quite different.

Introducing Business Rules into the Enterprise by Brian Stucky
Brian's presentation introduced the wonderful concept of Purple People - not business, not IT but a bit of both (the name comes from the red v blue of American political mapping). He talked at length of the need to use business rules, both at the analysis and technical levels, to bridge the IT/business divide and empower collaboration to deliver agility. This is where the purple people come in and a business rules management system can be a key element to empowering business/IT collaboration and agility. He also had some nice practical suggestions for stewardship and governance.

Moving Towards the Process-Centric World by Simon Hayward
Simon's discussion of the business process platform has an explicit role for managing business rules as services (decision services) that can be orchestrated by business process tools. He also talked about the move to more reactive agility (responding to unexpected threats and opportunities) and to event-based processing. I have previously talked about how such an approach, if it includes decision automation, can be a platform for bringing business intelligence into a business process also.

Lastly I really like the combination of topics at the Brainstorm shows - they bring together BPM, Business Rules, SOA and organizational performance. If this set of things interests you attend the shows and, perhaps, read this article I wrote on Shifting Your CPM Into Action.