At the OMG technical meeting this week we had a review of the draft DMN RFP by the Business Modelling and Integration group experts, and a thought-provoking presentation by Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg of KPI on their KPI Decision Model which is proving very attractive to business analysts.
From an event processing perspective, “decisioning” is part of “event processing” in that it is the consumer of complex events: when you detect an event pattern you decide what to do with it. Of course, it is also extremely relevant to day-to-day business processes and operations…
Some of the conclusions the DMN RFP team came to this week:
- Decision modelling is more than just a complement to BPMN, and indeed the RFP will not over-emphasise the relationship between the two. Indeed, in some respects, the “goal-driven network” idea for business models is as applicable to process models as it is to decision models. Decision modelling could become the dominant analysis aspect in future years: consider a business process like “loan approval” and you don’t need a degree in computer science to work out that the business process is there just to support the business decision on whether to approve a loan!
- Barbara and Larry emphasised the need for metrics and business motivation in decision modelling. Monitoring decision events is of course yet another event processing task.
- The “business model” – “IT model” dichotomy can take many forms in a decision model, with the classic being the business analysis model being the logical decision structure or goal-driven network, using business terminology, with the underlying decision metaphors (such as decision tables – the first and obvious choice for the DMN RFP) being IT models. Transformations from things like SBVR to UML Class, and decision table to PRR, will be out of scope for DMN itself though – such transformations will either be subject to other standards or be vendor-specific. But they and the Model Driven Engineering ideal become much clearer using a DMN.
- The logical decision model or goal-driven network has ramifications for the inference rule engine business. I’ll blog on that separately! 🙂
So in summary: DMN is looking like it could be very useful. And I expect attendees at the RulesFest and BAForum conferences next month will enjoy the KPI show as much as I did. For those interested in decision metaphors, BRForum (alongside BAForum) also has the Decision Table World Congress…
