James Taylor's Decision Management

Joe McK (SOA in Action) posted about a Nick Malik (Inside Architecture) post on BPM and SOA today and caught my eye. Nick used the analogy of twin siblings to discuss how SOA and BPM share many characteristics yet don't always get along. Nick also talked about data and events as the parents of both and that data and events need time to settle down before they should have SOA or BPM children!

Stretching this analogy to its breaking point, it seemed to me that many companies have trouble getting their data, event, processes and services to be a happy family. Perhaps, then, some family therapy is called for. It seems to me that what this family needs is a way to have services that support business processes effectively but also help process events and allow data to be brought to bear effectively. I call these decision services. Decision services make recommendations for action based on the data available (and insight derived from that data) such that those recommended actions can be taken in response to events or as part of completely a business process. In other words they bring the whole family together to create business value.

I am going to stop with the family analogy before I get too silly so here are some links including this article on how decision technologies can be a platform for analytics in BPM and this post on how decisions fit with BI and BPM. I have written before on why decision management is critical to event-driven architecture and on how being event-driven means being decision-centric. For the event-centric among you, Jack van Hoof had a great article on how to implement a loosely coupled process flow and I wrote about BPM-enabled SOA needing decision services.

Technorati Tags: BI, BPM, business intelligence, business process, decision automation, decision management, decision service, EDA, event, event-driven architecture, service-oriented architecture, SOA, architecture