James Taylor's Decision Management

I saw this post today - BPM as Topware - by George van Antwerp. While I like his attempt at a new way to classify BPM products, I think that both require a focus on decisioning and decision services in some kind of decision layer. Without decision services to automate critical decisions, it will not be possible to take a whole process (whether it involves people or systems or both) and get it to run straight through to completion - you will keep finding yourself putting something on a worklist and waiting. Not good. You need to focus on the diamonds in your process and take a more decision-centric view of improvement.

I blogged before about IDC's grouping into 3 types that also need decisioning and I find that it does not matter how your classify BPM, you cannot get away from the need to automate decisions to get the full value out of BPM.

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