James Taylor, one of the leading experts in decision management, is my guest tomorrow on the Business901 Podcast. Not sure, I could summarize the podcast any better than James did in this excerpt:
James Taylor: One of the things we’ve been excited about with decision modeling is the breadth of use cases for it. We started thinking this was a way as it is to design, do the requirements and design for automated decision-making systems. What we found on the journey was that there are lots of things we do as companies that are really about decision making. We build predictive analytics, data mining results, because we hope they will improve our decision making. We build dashboards to help people make decisions. We send you reports and visualizations because we hope that the content of that report will help you make a better decisions. And over and over again, we’ve had experiences where if you can focus on the decision you’re trying to improve first, you can dramatically improve how you attack many different kinds of problems, whether those are writing a procedure manual, building a dashboard, building a report, building a brick analytic model, or trying to document the business rules you need to automate a decision.
Decision modeling is a remarkably robust technique that we’ve used very successfully for everything from very high level models just to sketch out how a group of people make a decision, right down to enormously detailed fine grain models that will allow us to precisely implement what we needed to do.
The thing I will encourage people to say is that decision making matters to your business, repeatable decisions are everywhere in your business and you don’t really – probably today you have very good tools for finding them describing them or sharing that understanding amongst the people who work in the organization, decision modeling is a powerful context for getting that understanding.
James company, 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, DecisionsFirst Modeler, is a cornerstone for developing requirements for these next generation systems and processes.
His Latest Publications are Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to Using Business Rules and Predictive Analytics (IBM Press) and The MicroGuide to Process and Decision Modeling in BPMN/DMN: Building More Effective Processes by Integrating Process Modeling with Decision Modeling. If you would like to consider online training, James has a program coming up on January 6th that covers Decision modeling with the new Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard.