Articles for 'Barbara von Halle'

There are capabilities necessary to implement Smart Systems, where business people manage business logic in a business-like and agile fashion, with highest integrity, and deployable to any and many targets. These are the requirements satisfied by a BDMS, not by a BRMS 

This month’s column is not a debate about decision table theory versus decision model theory. Instead, it focuses on current practices for decision tables and those of The Decision Model. It covers (1) Four Benefits of Decision Tables (2) Decision Tables in Practice (3) The Decision Model in Practice (4) The Science Behind the Transformation Steps and (5) Wrap Up: A Leap in Maturity.

Today many business analysts are creating business-oriented decision models. These decision models contain business logic for operational decisions that operate within business processes. And, it is no surprise that data quality is critical to business-oriented decision models. After all, good decision models operating with bad data are no better than bad decision models operating with good data. The surprise is: not only are decision models a preferred way for managing true business logic but they are remarkably suitable for managing data quality logic!

With the rapid adoption of The Decision Model, the most frequently asked question is: “How do I convince my organization to try it and eventually adopt it as a standard?” Two related questions from two different perspectives are:  Do I have to find a way to introduce The Decision Model from the top down? Can I introduce The Decision Model from the ground up?
 

There is an exciting paradigm shift happening within the information systems (IS) field. This means a new breed of information systems is emerging as are new approaches for developing them. The good news is that business analysts may be more critical to the new paradigm than to past ones. 

While many organizations have already adopted The Decision Model, others are actively exploring how it may improve or totally replace their current business rules approaches. The latter are asking the critical question:  How is The Decision Model different from what we are doing and why are these differences important?
 

The project involved updating a quote process and the technologies underpinning that process, this included dealing with an underwriting calculation, which was embedded partly in the legacy systems and, partly, in heavily manual processes. The project team could not determine how to unpick this calculation and provide a detailed specification to a 3rd party software house.

Agile development is an approach that evolves requirements and software through iterative deliverables. One of its principles is to deliver working software frequently, often through a series of two to three week iterations.  The Decision Model (TDM) is a model for the full and rigorous specification of logic.

In this article we focus, not so much on the similarities among decision models, but on their differences. More than that, we explore the idea of classifying decision model structures based on differences in their logic. The decision model diagram is the first place to look for visible differences among decision models.
 

Like most business analysts, Charles captured business rules as part of requirements gathering. Also like most business analysts, he followed traditional business rules approaches. These included writing individual business rule expressions, storing them outside the confines of process models and use cases, and providing pointers to them. However, he changed his approach after experimenting with The Decision Model.

The Decision Model in practice has delivered many unanticipated, but positive surprises. The most obvious and powerful surprise is how it drastically simplifies process models. In fact, we regularly receive unsolicited messages from people who experience this effect. For example, one practitioner condensed a 45-page process model to one with eight task boxes.
 

The number of successes with The Decision Model is escalating. Organizations are using The Decision Model to solve a range of business challenges and opportunities including some we did not expect. Therefore, this month we summarize three real world projects to illustrate how organizations are using decision models and how quickly project teams are delivering them.

This month’s column explores the biological basis of human decision-making based on Lehrer’s book. However, it also suggests that lessons from the human brain can sharpen our decision models2 and enhance the process by which we create and manage them.
 

In this article, I explain a project completed in the financial services industry. A client asked me to lead a project to redesign a failed sub-process that had resulted in billions of dollars of backed up financial transactions. This particular financial process had a history of failed and abandoned process improvement projects. The pressure was on and, I must confess, I was not entirely sure that The Decision Model would be a good fit.

You are experiencing success with decision models even without the assistance of decision modeling software. Imagine the possibilities with proper software support!