James Taylor's Decision Management

The new book from Barb von Halle and Larry Goldberg, The Decision Model: A Business Logic Framework Linking Business and Technology, is now available. This book outlines an approach for capturing and managing the business rules you need to understand in order to implement a Decision Service. It complements the use of a business rules management system as it is a modeling approach for rule analysis and design. It has some nice features, not least a set of rules for checking your decision model for completeness and validity.

I wrote a chapter for the book on how the Decision Model complements a more general Decision Management approach. While not every decision for which the Decision Model is relevant is also relevant to Decision Management, many will be. The use of the Decision Model with Decision Management is very similar to use of Entity Modeling with Information Management - the Decision Model will help ensure you write the correct rules as you implement your decisions. The power of the Decision Model to help business users understand how decisions are made, what rules are required and to check those rules for completeness and consistency adds tremendous value. Modeling rules during the requirements gathering approach, as I have noted before, requires that they be considered separately from the rest of your requirements and the Decision Model provides a way to do that. Decision Management also provides a well defined approach for taking the Decision Model and putting it into production using production business rules management systems and sophisticated analytics in combination, something essential for risk-based and opportunity-based decisions like fraud detection, credit, marketing, retention and more.

The Decision Model page on KPI's website has some nice resources including a primer on the approach. I highly recommend both the book and the approach.

I am at the Business Rules Forum this week. I will be acting as co-chair so there won't be live blog posts from sessions but I will write a wrap up for each day.