James Taylor's Decision Management

Tom Debevoise has a nice little video he has made with some introductory comments on business rules, business processes and decisions. You can check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qq07af6PY8.
Like Tom I think that you can dramatically simplify business processes if you find the decisions within them and externalize them so that they can be managed separately. If you embed decisions within your processes you not only complicate your process, you also force the decision and the process to be updated at the same time (something that reduces agility). Clear decision points also make it easier to identify where analytics can be applied to your process. There's a fair bit on this topic on the blog - check out these items:

• Achieving Agility - some notes after Gartner
• Introducing business decision management
• Business rules, routing rules, event rules
• Decision Services
• Decision technology as a platform for analytics in a process,
• Some thoughts on intelligent business processes
• How to combine BI and BPM
• Decision management and dynamic business applications
• Business rules and process coupling