James Taylor's Decision Management

Russell Keziere wrote an interesting little article this week - BPM Sherriff Rolls Into Town. He took aim both at old-style monolithic applications and at the potential "wild west" of uncontrolled components. I wanted to focus on a couple of key points. First he said

"Monolithic computer applications, which only a software programmer can change, promise to do everything but end up solidifying or creating silos within business departments"

and later he added that

"ERP applications will be with us for years to come"

His suggestion was to use a BPMS as part of the composite application development process and to help IT get control of its own governance processes. While this sounds like an excellent idea, I wanted to return to the idea of using a BPMS to do the composite application assembly needed to truly exploit SOA. If your BPM sheriff is not able to call on effective decision services then you won't really be able to generate true decision services - your process will be easier to change and your services more self-contained, but only a focus on decision making services as a distinct class of services is really going to get it done. Not only do decisions require a different approach, it is important not to over-synchronize them with your processes if you don't want to create a new monolithic process! Over on my other blog I talk about use of decision services for the last decomposition of the application. A focus on decision services also allows you to use decision management to complement ERP and use SOA, BPM with your Enterprise Applications.

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