James Taylor's Decision Management

I saw this article - Decisioning - A New Approach to Systems Development (Parts 1 and 2), by Mark Norton this week. I was fascinated as Mark is the almost the first (other) person I have seen using "decisioning" the way I do. The first article is great - a really nice overview of decisioning as a way to think of building systems with some great ideas and some strong rationales for doing systems development this way. The second article was a real disappointment by comparison - much weaker, more hurried. Anyway, you should read the first one on BRCommunity. To help, here are some comments of mine and links:

• A very small percentage of the functionality of system really differentiates you and you should build this while buying the rest.
• You must focus on decisions if you are going to improve them.
• Insurance is, indeed, a hot-bed of decision-centric thinking
• If a decision is "the result of applying structured business knowledge to relevant facts to definitively determine an optimal course of action" then business knowledge must mean rules and analytic insight
• Using the insight you need to drive the data you capture is very effective
• I think it is helpful to call automated decisions "decision services" given the rapid adoption of a service-oriented approach
• There's a nice list of problems with traditional approaches that explain why rules are better for decision automation
• De-constructing an application into its components, one of which is the decisions within it, makes perfect sense and a colleague of mine presented on this at Gartner ITxpo in Cannes last year
• The value of "Purple People" who can cut across IT and the business should not be underestimated. Decisions are where these two areas meet and their different perspectives must be resolved

Enjoy.

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