Business Concept Mapping Using Techniques such as Fact Concept is Essential in Building Knowledge for Decisioning.
Understanding of the business concept is important to successfully develop a solution to an identified problem. This understanding should be there across all the stakeholders of different teams in a project such as SMEs (Subject Matter Experts), project managers, and developers. It requires a way to express the ideas, relationships, and structure of the project. That is why business concept mapping techniques such as Fact Concept is useful as it makes it easier to grasp the knowledge by all the parties.
Mainly, there are four main types of concept mapping.
There are both advantages and disadvantages of each mapping type. For instance, the first three types; spider, hierarchy, and flowchart mappings are easy to read. But we cannot see the input/ output attributes and how each sub-entity is related to each other, making them incomplete. It is also hard to map a complex system in this way. The system mapping may not be easy to read, but it contains inputs, outputs, and you can map a complete structure of a complex system including the relationships with each entity. Therefore, a solution that allows users to easily create a system mapping can be very useful.
Let us see how Fact Concepts support system mapping in a more user-friendly way.
Fact Concept for System Mapping
Fact Concept is a model that maps the fundamental business context visually.
When a Fact Concept is modeled, it defines:
- The context of a business domain
- Bases of the business glossary (terms) and associated expressions
- Constraints about Facts, structurally and semantically
- Relationships of the Facts within a business context
The following figure is an example of a Fact Concept created in FlexRule® Advanced Decision Management Suite. It maps a sample contract management system. You can understand the structure of contract management along with the facts, input, and output attributes. For example, the agreements and contacts are connected to each contract, the attributes of contacts are name, family, address, and email and there are several types of addresses. You can also see the data type of each attribute.
The data types of attributes can be defined as follows.
The validation rules can also be defined for each attribute as follows (e.g. Contract number is required. It cannot be null or empty)
The Fact Concepts model can be used across the project for defining and modeling business rules because it will be the base of business logic.
Conclusion
When the initial business concept is given, the SMEs can dig more into the concept and understanding the complete concept. The business knowledge they gain through this process needs to be transferred into a solution with the help of a development team. This understanding determines whether the developed solution delivers the expected outcome. Especially, in a complex system with multiple stakeholders and constant business rule changes, it requires a mapping to clearly interpret this knowledge. That is why a user-friendly technique like Fact Concept, that allows change management, validation, and defining data type is helpful for building complex solutions.
Last updated March 9th, 2023 at 09:41 am, Published September 24th, 2020 at 09:41 am
Product Engineer at FlexRule – She focuses on analyzing and understanding customer requirements and identifying process. She also works in the emerging areas of technology such as Decision Robotics, testing and ensuring that the product functionalities align with the customer requirements.
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