James Taylor's Decision Management

Jim Sinur, over on the Gartner blog, has a post this week on Rule Guided Processes are the Way of the Future in which he says

There are obvious benefits in making business policies/rules explicit and easily changed via accompanying quick-change processes.

Now I have blogged before about the power of business rules and decision management to make processes more agile and to allow analytics to be applied effectively but this is another area of potential value. The ability to have a single "process" that is dynamically guided and driven by a rules-based decisioning infrastructure could both increase your flexibility and drive down the number of processes involved. This has been the experience of a company I work with in Europe - Be Informed - who regularly find they can use this rules-based approach to processes to reduce a long list of processes to a single, dynamic one.

It strikes me that many companies who think they have either a unique process or a lot of process variations actually do not - they have a standard set of activities that must be assembled dynamically based on the circumstances, customer etc. This leads to a rules-first approach to defining the process and much simpler processes. This is particularly useful when you start considering case management processes where using the rules to determine what state the case has reached and what, therefore, is the right next step is a clearly better approach.

Not only can rules-based decision management help you simplify and agilify (!) your processes and help you apply analytics to your process, it can help drive your variable processes and case management.