Nowadays, it becomes obvious to every organization that they need a way to model and execute operational decisions outside of processes and applications. By extracting the decision logic out of applications and processes and separating the life cycle of these decisions from consumers, the organization will be more flexible to change these critical pieces.

Here when we talk about decisions, we mean operational decisions that happen every day, hundreds, and thousands of times across many different products and services offering. For example, these are some decisions that can be automated with the use of decision management suite:

  • How much premium should a customer pay to insure a car?
  • What are the services a citizen is entitled to?
  • What products should we recommend to a customer?
  • What questions should a nurse answer in a situation about a patient?

The challenges of adopting a decision management suite are the fact that how easy is to model a decision and make it available as a service for consumers i.e. applications and processes. And then hope they will start using the decision services and every time business needs a change in a decision, they have the control and power to change it at their own pace, no need to wait for IT to cut codes. Right? Well… this is a little too much wishful thinking.

Decision management suites provide the technological capability to model and execute decisions – the 3rd stage (decide) of the decision cycle. However, there are 4 big assumptions around a successful adoption of decision management suites:

  1. The decisions will be integrated into processes and applications by the consumers.
  2. Context of the decisions will be built, validated and will be provided to decision models (i.e. data, information, systems, etc.)
  3. All the required data and information are available at the point of decision making.
  4. Results of decisions will be integrated back into systems and actions will be carried out by applications and processes i.e. the consumers.

The assumption that neither of the above requirements is the responsibility of the decision model is true. However, the challenge of decision automation is more than just modeling and automating a set of operational decisions. In a real-world scenario when it comes to decision automation, all the above requirements should be addressed to enable organizations to utilize the decision model in operation.

Otherwise, it’s all for nothing! a disconnected decisioning experience that is adopting the decision management either will build a set of decision models, isolated, with minimum impact in business operations. Or, the left-out requirements for automating decisions should be addressed by infrastructure, building applications, and writing codes.

I believe, everyone agrees on the first issue of disconnected decisioning, minimal impact of decision modeling is not acceptable neither from business nor from practitioners. Therefore, we don’t explain this more. However, the second issue of disconnected decisioning although it looks logical, in fact, it is the real problem. Why?

Challenges of Adopting Decision Management Suite

How can These Challenges of Adopting Decision Management Suite Be Resolved?

Do you remember why did organizations want to adopt a decision management suite? One of the main reasons was to enable the business operation team (BizOps, DigiOps…) to change decisions at their own pace. Because decision management suites do not cover the full requirements of decision automation and there are lots of assumptions around it, therefore it still has a heavy reliance on building code for the rest of the requirements, and consequently modeling and deploying executable operation decision at the business pace has a very big road blocker again.

This is where, the Decision-Centric Approach® allows organizations not to only look at the requirements for decision modeling and execution of them but understands and implements all the pieces of decision automation, the end-to-end decision automation scenario. To enable the business to run at its own pace, the decision automation technology should cover all the requirements of decision automation, not just the decision modeling and execution part.

Last updated February 10th, 2023 at 08:55 am, Published August 13th, 2020 at 08:55 am