A Decision Model and Notation update – it’s submitted!

Well all our hard work has paid off and we submitted a proposed standard to the Object Management Group on Decision Model and Notation. This standard is intended to provide a standard business-friendly notation that can be used for initial decision requirements, for detailed decision models, and even to manage technical implementation of decisions in technology such as business rules management systems. Personally I hope it will do for decision modeling what BPMN did for process modeling. While it grew out of a desire to model decisions for automation it is going to be a powerful tool whether you are working on modeling manual decisions, planning to implement a business rules management system or trying to build business understanding for an analytics project. We have already had success using it with business rules, predictive analytics and BI projects for instance. Lots of folks put a lot of effort into the standard and kudos to all of them. For the record, the submitters were Decision Management Solutions, Escape Velocity, FICO, IBM and Oracle along with co-authors KU Leuven, Knowledge Partners International, Model Systems and TIBCO.

Personally I am excited about this standard as I think it will help folks focus on decisions and decision-making first rather than beginning with the business rules or analytics that implement that decision-making. A graphical notation for modeling decisions and broad agreement on what it takes to model decisions will also make these important techniques more widely adopted. We have been using the approach in our consulting projects and have customers using our recently released DecisionsFirst Modeler product, a collaborative cloud-based platform for managing these decision models. If you are interested in the approach, why not check out these white papers on Decision Modeling for Business Rules Projects and Decision Modeling for Predictive Analytics Projects  or check out DecisionsFirst Modeler itself. We also have some great starter services around decision modeling to get you up and running quickly.

Once the proposal is accepted by OMG it will be available as a beta spec and I will blog about it again so you can all download it. Meanwhile OMG members can get access to it on the members-only section of the OMG site and it should be finalized next year some time.