James Taylor's Decision Management

I saw this post from Steve Jones on Change the business not the package and he made the very valid point that even if you are buying your packaged software in the form of services - a service-oriented package if you will, you should resist the temptation to customize it to death. Yes, perhaps SOA will make it easier, but not really. In this context, however, decision management can really be your friend.

One of the best ways to customize a package is to inject custom decision making into it. Most packages are pretty dumb (as noted in this post) and don't make many decisions being more focused on the create, read, update, delete logic necessary to manage your data. Adding decision services not only makes them smarter, it adds services designed to be easy to change and adapt. An SOA-based package makes this a lot easier. Building a composite application that combines the packaged services with easy to customize decision services might just give you the best of both worlds.

I have blogged about how enterprise applications can be enhanced in this way before and discussed how a process-oriented approach may not work for you here.

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