James Taylor's Decision Management

Jack van Hoof had another nice little post on EDA versus CEP (and SOA). I thought it was particularly worth noting that an architectural approach - Service-Oriented or Event-Driven - is not the same as the use of a particular technology - Enterprise Service Bus or Complex Event Processing. One of the things that decision management offers to those adopting a variety of approaches to solving their business problems - some event processing, some process management, service-oriented components etc - is that decision making, and components that make decisions, are useful throughout. Systems must make better decisions in response to events (complex or otherwise), process must have access to decisions so they can run straight through and services have questions they need answered about the business. I call these decision services but not because they require an SOA approach but because they service the need for decisions in a systems architecture.