{"id":214,"date":"2010-02-04T15:35:20","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T20:35:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/?p=214"},"modified":"2016-06-09T08:25:53","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T13:25:53","slug":"what-could-be-more-strategic-than-process-or-decision-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/2010\/02\/04\/what-could-be-more-strategic-than-process-or-decision-management\/","title":{"rendered":"What could be more strategic than process or decision management?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The folks from Knowledge Partners have a post <\/a>that I found thanks to Sandy Kemsley, whose blog <\/a>often provides good pointers.\u00a0 This article talks about the decision perspective on business rules.\u00a0 It makes some good points, on which I would like to elaborate albeit at a more semantic or knowledge-level.<\/p>\n

Every language has three kinds of statements: questions, statements, and commands.\u00a0\u00a0 There are also some peripheral types, such as exclamations (Yikes!), but in business processes and decisions only declarative and imperative sentences matter.<\/p>\n

From a process- or decision-oriented perspective, decisions are always phrased as imperative sentences.\u00a0 Otherwise, the statements reflected in any business process, whether you are using BPMN or a BRMS, are declarative sentences.<\/p>\n

Decisions are imperative sentences because they state an action to be taken.\u00a0 For example, decline a loan or offer a discount.\u00a0 It’s really pretty simple.\u00a0 A decision is an action.\u00a0 Rules that don’t take actions are statements of truth.\u00a0 Such declarative statements of truth are perfect for formal logic, logic programming, and semantic technologies.\u00a0 It’s the action that requires the production rule technology that dominates the market for and applications of rules.<\/p>\n

The authors of the aforementioned article use the following diagram to explain the benefits of the decision-oriented approach in\u00a0simplifying business processes:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

The impact is very simple.\u00a0 If you eliminate how you reach decisions from the flow that you diagram in BPMN things get simpler.\u00a0 It’s really as simple as realizing that you have removed all the “if” parts (i.e., the antecedents) of the rule logic from the flow chart.<\/p>\n

So who in their right mind would use a business process tool to express any business logic?<\/strong><\/p>\n

For the astute reader, this glosses over the need for decisions to have fairly global access to the data underlying (i.e., required in order to make) decisions.\u00a0 The separation of models and data between BPMS and BRMS should be avoided to address this.\u00a0 SOA helps, but there are important details (e.g., stateless?)\u00a0 [We’ve also written elsewhere here (how’s that for an oxymoron?) about the need for decisions to understand context, both with regard to the state of the business process or events that trigger processes.]<\/p>\n

But wait, there’s more!\u00a0 Where did the business process we’re looking at on the right come from?\u00a0 Where is it documented (or enforced!) that a loan should not be approved without first checking credit?\u00a0 Is there any path to approving a loan for which checking credit is not a prerequisite?\u00a0 Who drew this graph?\u00a0 How do we know it’s right?\u00a0 [I’ve written elsewhere about the need for governance of business processes, of which this is the simplest form of example.]<\/p>\n

Are you getting the picture?\u00a0 Business process diagramming is still programming, visual as it may be.\u00a0 This pigeon-holing of rules technology is wrong.\u00a0 Raising the understanding of decisions as central is important, even critical.\u00a0 But thinking that knowledge must be expressed as rules that coallesce complexity into boxes tied with bows within in\u00a0pretty diagrams is naive.\u00a0 The right perspective is that both the flow chart and the logic are driven by the knowledge captured about the organization and its operational and governing policies.<\/p>\n

Most people would agree that if-then rules are technical tools.\u00a0 Many would agree that BPM tools are best left in the hands of IT.\u00a0 More are realizing that each should be driven more by knowledge about business and constrained less by the shallower by still steep waterfall relationship between the executive suite and technologists.<\/p>\n

Decision management is important but it is only a piece of the pie.\u00a0 Knowledge management – not the 90s notion of content management but knowledge\u00a0that is curated and understood rigorously enough to generate and govern process\u00a0and decision diagrams and logic, respectively – is where the strategic CIO needs to aim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The folks from Knowledge Partners have a post that I found thanks to Sandy Kemsley, whose blog often provides good pointers.\u00a0 This article talks about the decision perspective on business rules.\u00a0 It makes some good points, on which I would like to elaborate albeit at a more semantic or knowledge-level. Every language has three kinds … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “What could be more strategic than process or decision management?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,72,8,9],"tags":[60,61,62,65,880,894,413,882,883,150,184,885,415,416,419,418,417,408,269,414],"class_list":["post-214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-process-management","category-business-rules-management","category-compliant-governance","category-decision-management","tag-bpm","tag-bpmn","tag-bpms","tag-brms","tag-business-process-management","tag-business-rules-management","tag-cio","tag-decision-management","tag-formal-logic","tag-governance","tag-knowledge","tag-knowledge-management","tag-knowledge-partners","tag-kpi","tag-logic-programming","tag-production-rule","tag-sandy-kemsley","tag-semantic-technology","tag-semantics","tag-strategy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":861,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions\/861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}