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Don’t jail your logic in code Our friends at Data Decisioning forwarded an article from The Register recently – Inflexible prison software says inmates due for release should be kept locked up behind bars. The basic building blocks of this story is that there is a module calculating release dates for prisoners that was clearly [...]

The Decision Management team at Gartner (Rob Dunie , Roy Schulte, Derek Miers , Pieter den Hamer , Paul Vincent , Marc Kerremans and Erick Brethenoux ) have recently published a new paper entitled “Should Your Project Use a Decision Management Suite?” [Gartner subscription required]. It’s a great paper and I strongly recommend it if you have access. The quotes below [...]

We are relaunching our newsletter, in a GDPR-compliant way, with a focus on DecisionsFirst Digital Transformation. We were probably GDPR-compliant before but better safe than sorry. We send emails about every 3 or 4 weeks with information about resources, events and articles on Decision Management topics. For example, case studies in digital transformation; decision modeling as a [...]

All industry standards offer interchange. Successful standards offer skills interchange not just a technical interchange format. The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) decision modeling standard has a published XML interchange format, of course, and several of the committee’s members are working really hard to iron out the remaining issues and make the XML interchange more [...]

I am speaking at an event in Switzerland, September 21 at 4pm CET at the Swiss Exchange in Zurich. I am talking about Successful digitalization and automation in the financial and insurance industry: State-of-the-art methodical approaches help companies succeed at digital transformation. Besides efficient IT architecture concepts, the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard plays an increasing [...]

After yesterday’s pre-conference day on DMN, the main program started today. All the slide decks are all available on the DecisionCAMP site. Edson Tirelli started things off with a session to demystify the DMN specification. DMN does not invent anything, he says, but takes some of these concepts and defines a common language to express [...]

  The Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies Report began in early 2012 as a way to share our research and experience in building Decision Management Systems. Since then we have extended, updated and revised the report many times. This week we released the latest version – Version 8 – with a new, easier to use format. There [...]

Paul Harmon over on BPTrends interviewed Jan Purchase and I about our new book, Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN. The interview covers a pretty wide range of topics – a definition of Decision Modeling, the bottom line value of modeling a decision, the difference between decisions and rules and how decision modeling helps projects. We talk about some of [...]

I am delighted to announce that Jan Purchase, founder of Lux Magi, and I have finished what we believe is the definitive guide to decision modeling with the Object Management Group’s Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard, Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN. The book is now on general release and available for purchase from Amazon and Barnes [...]

Continuing with blogs from Building Business Capability I am self-blogging the session I co-presented with David Herring, who leads the Process Transformation and Decision Management Program at a leading Northern California Healthcare organization, on “Pioneering Decision Services with Decision Modeling”. David works at a large not-for-profit health plan that does everything from inpatient, to home [...]

Jerome Boyer of IBM presented a methodology – Best Practices for Managing a Cognitive Business Operations (CBO) Journey Proven Method. Cognitive, in this context, is about extracting intent from unstructured text using natural language and thus improve process execution. By adding Watson services to a BPM/ODM installation, organizations can improve interactions, improve assignments, improve advice and deliver faster reactions. For [...]

I am giving a presentation on Pioneering Decision Services with Decision Modeling at Kaiser Permanente with David Herring at this year’s Building Business Capability conference. Well drafted guidelines help new users learn best practices, identify useful patterns and help enforce good governance. However, good guidelines are hard to develop and expensive as they involve significant investment from [...]

I am pleased to be the instructor for the upcoming BPMInstitute.org Decision Modeling with DMN course. This course is schedule is take place at the Hilton Arlington on Tuesday, September 27 and is part of a 4-day training event hosted by BPMInsittute.org. In this course I will discuss the primary goal of DMN, which is [...]

Join me for a free webinar on 3 Reasons to Adopt Decision Modeling in your BRMS Program Thursday, September 29, 2016 11:00 AM PDT Decision modeling address 3 key challenges of a existing BRMS program, improving traceability, sustaining business engagement and maximizing re-use while minimizing duplication. A decisions-first, decision modeling approach using the Decision Model Notation [...]

Join me for a free webinar 4 Reasons to Start with Decision Modeling on Your First BRMS Project on Thursday, September 15, 2016 11:00 AM PDT If you are kicking off your first BRMS project, don’t start by gathering the rules! Often teams will be advised to begin their project by gathering all the relevant rules, in a [...]

One of the most persistent problems with decision modeling in my experience is the tendency of people to think of decision modeling as a one-time requirements effort. Many teams are convinced that building a decision model using the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard (white paper here) is going to help them with their business rules [...]

We are running our new, highly reviewed Decision Table Modeling with DMN training featuring leading decision table expert Jan Vanthienen July 26-28 9:30am-11:30am Pacific each time. When representing and analyzing business decisions in real business situations and processes, decision tables have always proven a powerful approach. Decision table methodology, however, is more than putting some rules in a few [...]

One of the interesting and useful things about the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard for decision models is how it handles the data required by a decision. Simply put, a Decision in DMN may have any number of Information Requirements and these define its data dependencies – the Decision requires this information to be available if the [...]

The Call for Speakers is open for DecisionCAMP 2016 until April 1st. This year DecisionCAMP will be hosted by the International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML) on July 7, 2016 at Stony Brook University, New York, USA. This event will aim to summarize the current state in Decision Management with a particular focus on the use of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) [...]

Jan Purchase of LuxMagi and I are working away on our new book, Available now! Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN and I wanted to take a moment to talk about why Jan and I are the right people to be writing this. Our aim is to provide a comprehensive book that explains decision modeling as well as the DMN standard and [...]