Zbigniew Misiak posted a great set of tips from practitioners BPM Skills in 2017 – Hot or Not – with my contribution here. This is a great way to get some quick advice from a wide range of practitioners and experts. As someone with a particular focus on decision management and decision modeling I was struck by the fact that there were 5 distinct recommendations for DMN and decision modeling/decision management (including, obviously, mine).
Some quick follow up points on my note:
- Hot
- Decision Modeling and the DMN standard
- There’s rapidly growing interest from companies in using decision modeling and the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard
- Lots of this interest is coming from business rules practitioners
- But process modelers using BPMN are keen to use it too as modeling decisions separately simplifies their process models dramatically
- And analytic/data science teams are seeing the potential for decision models in bringing clarity to their business problem
- Predictive analytics (not just process analytics)
- Data mining, data science, predictive analytics, machine learning etc are all hot technologies
- Practitioners need to move beyond dashboards and process analytics to include these more powerful analytic concepts
- A focus on decisions and decision modeling is central to finding the places where these analytics will make a difference
- Declarative modeling
- Business rules are declarative. So, at some level, are analytics. Process models are procedural
- Declarative models like DMN allow you to describe decision making without overlaying the procedures we happen to follow today
- Decision Modeling and the DMN standard
- Not
- Modeling business rules outside the context of decisions
- There’s no value to business rules that don’t describe how you make a decision
- You can, of course, describe your data and your process in a rules-centric way and that’s fine
- But don’t think there’s value in just having a big bucket of rules
- Embedding business rules directly into processes
- Decisions are where rules meet processes
- Embedded rules as gateways or conditions simply makes your process messy and complex
- Even embedding decision tables as separate tasks will only work for very simple scenarios
- You need to model the decision and create a decision-making component, a decision service, for the process to use
- Procedural documentation
- Works fine for proceses but a procedural approach for documenting analytics or rules simply documents how you do this today, not what you need it to do tomorrow
- Modeling business rules outside the context of decisions
Check out everyone else’s thoughts BPM Skills in 2017 – Hot or Not
Comments on this entry are closed.
Thanks for participation and writing about the post!