How Difficult is Decision Modeling?

An Excerpt from the podcast, Decision Modeling with James Taylor (Podcast and Transcription):

Joe: How difficult is it to get started? Do you need someone trained to use the process and do you need software?

James: So the first thing is, how difficult is it? Well, just like any modeling technique, the approach we use and the one, we recommend to people, is based on a new standard that has been published by the Object Management Group. The Object Management Group (OMG), is the people who own the Business Process Model and Notation standard (BPMN), and they’ve just published this new decision model and notation standard. So it’s a standard representation for decision models, in the same way, that BPMN is a standard representation for process models. Decision Management Solutions is one of the submitters backed by our big companies in the space, and it’s a very simple notation because it’s a very recursive approach. You break the problem down into pieces, so it has a very small path.

In a technical sense, it’s not that hard to learn how to read the diagrams or what the pieces are but like any modeling technique, practice, training and all of these things help you build better models. The difference between being able to build a model which you could probably do to be honest in about 10 minutes and the kind of working through an exercise, learning some of the tips and tracks and so on and when we do that as a training class, it’s like a day’s training in decision modeling and that’s enough to get most people up the learning curve and able to build reasonably good models reasonably quickly. But as always with a modeling technique, there’s no real substitute for experience and the more models you build, the better you get.

And about that software, now a lot of decision models are quite straightforward and early versions of the model can be done on a whiteboard or a flip chart and you can sort of have a discussion around it like you can with any modeling technique. But just like process models or data models, really at the end of the day, you’re better off with a repository based software tool that will let you capture that information so that it persists; so the next time you build a decision model and you want to reuse your definition of how do we decide how valuable a customer or somebody is, that definition is available to you. You don’t have to create it again from scratch. But yes, there is a key value proposition for software infrastructure that will help you manage these models as well as obviously for the kind of training and mentoring that any modeling technique tends to benefit from.

Decision Management Solutions specializes in helping organizations build decision-centric, action-oriented systems and processes using an approach of decision management, business rules and advanced analytic technologies. Their collaborative decision modeling software, Decisions First Modeler, is a cornerstone for developing requirements for these next generation systems and processes.