James Taylor's Decision Management

I was recently sent this paper on Information Model - SOA in a Business Perspective (the main site is www.TDAN.com) by some folks at IRM. This was an interesting model and I was pleased to see someone include business rules in an SOA meta model. I do agree with them that an entity-driven service approach will result in fewer, less process-specific services than most other approaches. Indeed this was what I suggested in the article I wrote on SOA and business rules after talking with Thomas Erl on this topic. There are a subset of these entity-centric services that are decision services, services that execute rules (and perhaps analytics) to make decisions but that don't represent part of the system of record.

I think the model needs decisions, or decision services, as first class objects. Business rules are by and large too granular for effective use in a model like this. Business rules are implemented in decisions, and these decisions support the various processes and composite applications being developed.

Business rules can be managed very effectively alongside use cases and requirements (helping to dig you out of the requirements tar pit) but when designing architectures, especially service-oriented ones, I think decisions and decision services are more effective.