James Taylor's Decision Management

Jim Sinur posted BPM Needs to Add More Intelligence to Decisions Surrounding Processes and said:

Going forward, I see a need for more sophisticated decisions that will require a deeper integration of rules, analytics, and complex events.

If you read my blogs, you know I agree with this statement in broad terms. I think, however, that the integration of BPM and events may need to come through decisions. Business decisions, properly managed, built with business rules and analytics, and mapped to KPIs/business objectives make processes smarter, simpler and more agile. No question. These decisions can also make it easier to link events and processes. For instance, I correlate a set of events to determine that customer X is in trouble and I put a message on the bus saying so. Now, which process should run? Well that depends on how good a customer it is, and that's a business decision. The business decision, implemented as a decision service or decision agent, links the event to the most appropriate process.