Checking out some articles on the Business Rules Community I saw a great illustration of making processes simpler and more agile with decision management. In How Business Rules Define Business Processes (free registration required), Jan Vanthienen and Stijn Goedertier give some nice examples of how standard business process notation, with its abject failure to model decisions properly, can get you in trouble.
I have blogged about this before when I discussed focusing on the diamonds in your process, but Jan and Stijn have a nice worked example. Take a look at this:
In the left hand example the designers are trying to use the usual BPM branching constructs to pick a path through the process. It ALMOST looks like it would work but all it would take is a few more options and it would melt down into the kind of spaghetti BPM definitions that are becoming the next generation of legacy applications. On the right, the decision is made more clear and a decision service is defined to capture the rules, and perhaps the analytics, to be used in the decision making.
Smarter, simpler and more agile – the title of my upcoming presentation at IBM’s IMPACT show for those of you attending.
Ref: Jan Vanthienen and Stijn Goedertier, “How Business Rules Define Business Processes,” Business Rules Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3 (March 2007), URL: http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2007/b336.html
