Sandy Kemsley posted about a presentation on this topic she saw at a recent conference by Michael zur Muehlen – his presentation is here (on slideshare) and is worth a visit. Sandy’s comments were, as usual, to the point and I only have one thing to add. Michael talks about using business rules to automate decisions but his formal models of rules and processes lack decision as an object. This is also a problem with the standards at the moment. I feel strongly that we must formally differentiate decisions and get both the BPM standards and the rules standards to agree on a definition of a decision so that we can better manage the intersection. Decisions are not like other tasks and should be modeled differently.
Michael also made a good point about how business users think and it reminded me of this post from Bruce Silver where he discussed the challenge BPMS vendors need to overcome in terms of exposing the process to business users in a way they can manage much as BRMS vendors expose just some aspects of the rules in a decision to their business users.
