LiveContext is a critical component in making Decision Automation flexible and scalable. Decision Automation is a critical part of any organization in all industries when it comes to increasing operational capacity and ensuring the quality of outcomes. Therefore, many different technologies should work together (in a unified and integrated manner) to make sure the decision automation project can deliver business values successfully.
Decision automation is about capturing, managing, and automating business knowledge around business decisions in different shapes and forms using hybrid technologies: rule-based decisions, decision-making processes, and data-driven decisions. Regardless of the form of a decision, the very critical part of it is about how the data flows through the decision model for execution. Decision automation requires a context for the decision is being called for execution.
Many solutions, such as business rules management systems (BRMS) or even many vendors in the decision management (DMS) category, leave the context building responsibility on the consumer side. Their view is that often, the decision is part of a process or an application. Therefore, the process or application will create the context and send that to a decision model for execution.
This assumption and expectation that the consumers are responsible for creating the context for decision execution is risky!
[A] Procedural, messy, and high-effort
Building a decision’s context is procedural and messy. It is complex, time-consuming, and often demands both data and programming skills. Most teams rely on general-purpose tools that are not purpose-built for decisions, which adds to the overhead.
[B] Ad hoc, repetitive, and hard to maintain
Context building usually means repeating the same ad hoc data prep. It becomes a mini ETL process done in-memory for every decision model. The work is scattered across systems and scripts, with no reusability. As a result, updating or maintaining data logic driving those decisions becomes difficult and error-prone.
[C] Service Contract Violation
Many push the context building to the consumer. The problem is consumer may not have access to some internal insights, but also, when context building is embedded inside the consumer, any evolution in the decision model forces updates to the consumer too. This breaks the decision-service contract and violates clean separation between logic and usage.
[D] Not Reusable
Because each decision requires its own custom data prep, the work to build context is highly specialized and siloed. This makes it difficult to step back and see the broader picture. Insights remain locked within individual models, instead of being structured, shared, and reused across multiple decision scenarios.
Failing the Marks
Because of all the challenges above, decision automation cannot scale across the organization. One of the main reasons to manage and automate decisions separately from processes and applications is to support the growth and reuse of decision logic across the organization. But when context building is embedded in execution, it becomes a barrier. It makes it harder to scale decision projects from a single use case to broader adoption across teams, systems, and business units.
LiveContext™ is to rescue!
The context creation is not just a flow of data for the decision execution. It has at least 3 steps in which LiveContext plays a big role:
The first step is to connect to the multiple required data sources. They might be flat files, databases, files such as CSV, XML, JSON, or even some applications and online services. Then there is a transformation step that will transform the data to the structure and format that the decision needs. This transformation may also require looking up other values and data sources to complete the step. And once it is complete, it should create the Decision Ready Data that is going to pass to the decision model for execution.
The LiveContext™ solves the challenge of building the context. It also sits as part of the decision module, so the client or consumer does not need to create the context.
The client or consumer only passes parameters that are required for context creation to LiveContext™.
The LiveContext™ does more than just transform the data on behalf of the consumer of the decision. It also understands what part of the data is needed for the decision execution based on the decision stage. Therefore the decision may not need to have all the data upfront.
Also, it can cache the already loaded data for the life-cycle of the decision or the execution so it helps to avoid loading the same data multiple times.
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And last but not least, LiveContext will separate the data requirement of the decision from the physical data layer e.g. the database, files and other sources of data. This means you can switch between different sources of data whenever you need. For instance, model development may not need an actual production database, and you can get away by using a local JSON file. But at the QA stage, you may need to connect it to the production data for the sanity check. So you simply can switch in and out of the data sources based on your requirements.
Last updated February 17th, 2026 at 11:32 am Published September 1st, 2022 at 02:34 pm
