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] Building the decision’s context is procedural and messy, complex and time-consuming, and probably requires data and programming skills with regular tooling in hand.
[B] Context building sitting in consumer enforces change to the consumer as decisions evolve.
One of the big reasons to manage and automate decisions separate from processes and applications is reusability. Leaving the context building for decision execution becomes a barrier to adopting the decision model and decision services across organizations’ broader processes and applications.
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.
LiveContext™ is to rescue!
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 September 2nd, 2022 at 03:52 pm, Published September 1st, 2022 at 03:52 pm
CEO and the founder of FlexRule – He is an expert in architecture, design, and implementation of operational decisions, business rules, and process automation. Created Decision-Centric Approach, a methodology that brings People, Data, Rules, and Processes together to automate operational business decisions.
This approach is recognized by Gartner as the missing link to provide business value to organizations.
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