James Taylor's Decision Management

Jean-Jacques Dubray made an interesting comment on last week's post - What collection of approaches will transform YOUR business?. He suggested adding Master Data Management or MDM and he has a good point. Without MDM the reusability of decision services may be severely compromised - an MDM approach allows the services to have a single point of referential data access - while the quality and consistency of data increases the quality of rules.

I think there are some interesting analogies too in the way people think when adopting MDM and business rules. Both require a more declarative "enterprise" way of thinking about a problem rather than a procedural one. Both create enterprise metadata - that is information about the structure/behavior of the organization. Both require a change in programming paradigm with individual applications using existing, managed information rather than creating it.