BPM Skills in 2017: Hot or Not?

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
• 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

Check out everyone else’s thoughts BPM Skills in 2017 – Hot or Not