James Taylor's Decision Management

I am attending the Brainstorm BPM/SOA/Rules event in Washington DC this week and blogging as I go. I am not sure if the wireless network will allow me to blog "live"but I will at least post them every few hours.

First session was the Master Mind Session: Enabling the Agile Enterprise with a panel of the show speakers. This is always interesting as it brings together the folks who talk about business process, business rules, SOA, enterprise architecture and performance management. Although the topics seem highly related it often amazes me how little overlap there can be.

Anyway, Ken Vollmer starts off by trying to show how the various pieces fit together. The biggest problem with the view he presents is the failure to link SOA with business rules. Personally I think that SOA requires decision services in general, regardless of whether business process management is the objective or not. Brett Champlin went next and discussed how business process management discipline enabled by technology but process-oriented thinking is #1. Interestingly I think that this is true for adopting business rules also- think about the process, think about the decisions the process needs, decide if those decisions should be automated (in parallel with deciding if automating the process is useful or if my existing systems work just fine).

Bill Ulrich gave a nice overview of how rules and processes fit into a Business Architecture and should/do drive the adoption of an SOA IT infrastructure. The need to enable business/IT collaboration is key and a primary objective of business architecture. Tom Dwyer introduced SOA and emphasized its long conceptual history - the need to have more dynamic, more agile infrastructure to allow recombination of software assets.He also discussed the synergies between BPM/rules/process-thinking and so on with SOA and the fact that SOA sits between a bottom-up integration layer and a top-down process-centric decomposition. Tom talked about SOA as a long term objective for companies, not a simple technology adoption project.

Barb talked business rules and used an example of driving rules (as applied to Italian taxis) to illustrate how unwritten rules and local interpretation can make a big difference! She also asserted, and I agree, that the business rules within a process often change more often than anything else in the process. She also outlined KPI's maturity model from level 0 (no idea), through trying to find the rules, through managing and optimizing rules. Alan Ramais discussed organizational performance and the challenges of creating sustainable, high-performance. You must plan for the kind of performance you want, design it and manage it. This applies at the organizational, process, job role and technology levels. To some extent he is emphasizing the "design with the end in mind" approach - design for the performance you want. If you want process agility, design for it. If you want decision agility, design for it and so on.

They were asked where to start and several suggested that understanding your organization and what kind of performance you want is important. Tom tried to show how an overall blueprint for SOA is essential, even if BPM drives the original SOA adoption. Barb's point of view was to make sure someone is thinking about business rules no matter where you start. There was some useful discussion about pulling it all together and about not driving to a complete SOA (as distinct from using some SOA technology) until you have at least started to think about business processes. In general, however, they all said "start with me". Ho hum. These are interesting people as a group but the session seems to lack a scenario that ties them together.

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