Thursday at bbc2010 covered the flamboyantly named Decision Table World Congress. This kicked off with an intro into the field by Prof Jan van Thienen, and was followed by other sessions including one by Asst. Prof. Maria Baldassarre on decisions in processes, and in particular mentioned GQM theory.
I did try to attend Ron Ross’ presentation on his view on decision modeling. However he had been put in the same room as my earlier presentation, and with over 100 people crammed in there was simply no more room. Ron’s abstract mentioned:
Decision analysis involves identifying and analyzing key decisions in day-to-day business operations and capturing the decision logic used to support them. The end-product is decision logic in the form of decision structures, decision tables, and business rule statements.
This presentation explains Question Charts (Q-ChartsTM), a simple diagramming technique for capturing the structure of decisions. It illustrates how to analyze and define the key elements of each decision and related dependencies. Finally, it shows how to avoid common pitfalls in creating decision tables. These innovative techniques have proven highly successful in organizations of many different types and sizes.
Luckily he has put his ideas up on his website for download here.
Given the full room though I instead listened to Christian de Sainte Marie of IBM’s Ilog group describe the W3C RIF standard – to a smaller but still full room – and how it could help companies moving rules across rule engines, where otherwise they would end up rewriting the rules at a full 50% of the initial cost of writing them …
Later on in the day I shared a panel session on the “Past, Present and Future of Decision Tables” with Ron, Jan van Thienen and Silvie Spreeuwenberg (of Dutch rule analysis company LibRT). We used this panel to publicly announce the work on the OMG Decision Modelling Notation RFP, which both Jan and the aforementioned Christian are contributing to. One interesting response came from a Microsoft employee constructing decision tables for their SAP systems and who seemingly needed a common notation for representing these across the organisation – an ideal DMN / decision table standard use case it seems! Disappointingly Ron Ross himself seemed less enthused by the idea, as he considers the semantics of the terminology / vocabulary as being far more important than the decision metaphors using them – probably as he is more business analysis oriented than decision automation biased like myself. In contrast, the folks at KPI announced on BPMInstitute.org that they seemed to be quite interested in the idea of a decision model standard.
Hopefully the DTWC will be repeated in future conferences.
