James Taylor's Decision Management

I saw this paper by David Luckham a couple of days ago - SOA, EDA, BPM and CEP are all Complementary. He has a nice example process that he uses (which you should read before continuing). In this example he has two services, "risk assessment" and "funding" that are both decision services.

Interestingly, considering the risk assessment as a decision helps as it makes it clear that running the three sub-processes in parallel (income review, credit check and house appraisal) before doing risk assessment may be inefficient as the result of one or more of those sub-processes might not actually impact the decision at all. If we move to an event-based approach the power of this is even clearer. The risk assessment can be performed after the receipt of each event and can see if the information collected so far is enough to make a decision. If, say, a house appraisal, will make no difference then the decision service can issue the event that will trigger funding without waiting and issue a cancellation for the appraisal saving time and money. Clearly an SLA can be considered as part of this and the decision made without something if waiting is going to break the SLA (or worse yet regulations mandating processing time). It also shows how a custom decision service can make a fairly standard process (even an outsourced one) seem different as I discussed in this article. A different approach to risk assessment, and a different risk decision, will result in a different treatment for the customer even if all the process components are the same.

I have blogged before about this alphabet soup post and this one on decisioning in a loosely-coupled process and if this is a topic that interests you, would suggest this post on Business Rules, Business Decisions, Intelligent Processes, Enterprise Decision Management too.

Technorati Tags: BPM, business agility, business process, business rules, CEP, decision automation, decision service, EDA, EDM, enterprise decision management, event-driven architecture, service-oriented architecture, SOA, David Luckham