Good Old UServ Product Derby in the Brave New World of Decision Management

Jacob Feldman of OpenRules and I presented on Good Old UServ Product Derby in the Brave New World of Decision Management at the Building Business Capability Conference. We began by introducing DMN a little (check out this white paper for more details on decision modeling with DMN). He and I see a lot of interest in DMN with 11 vendors already announcing their support for DMN (all listed in the DMN Tools Catalog). We expect there to be others but we note that Decision Requirements Diagrams support is much less widespread than Decision Table support and that few, if any, implementations are “conformant” with the standard.

To illustrate this we discussed the old UServ Derby that was recently revived as the Decision Management Challenge. From the various submissions we could observe several things:

1. Specification was in text rather than models where today it would be a DMN model
2. Many different decision table formats which while similar still have differences of meaning and appearance
3. Decision flows were used in several rather than decision requirement models
4. Interoperability is not happening yet – neither in terms of visual interoperability nor XML interchange.

We wrapped up by talking about our joint submission described here and demonstrated here.