I’m finishing up a European tour of three conferences with DecisionCAMP in Bolzano, which has a focus on business rules and decision management technology. This is really a technology conference, with sessions intended to be more discussions about what’s happening with new advances rather than the business or marketing side of products. Jacob Feldman of OpenRules was kind enough to invite me to attend when he heard that I was going to be with striking distance at CamundaCon last week in Berlin, and I’ll be moderating a panel tomorrow afternoon in return.
Feldman opened the conference with an overview of operational decision services for decision-making applications, such as smart processes, and the new requirements for decision services regarding performance, security and architectural models. He sees operational decision services as breaking down into three components: business knowledge (managed by business subject matter experts), business decision models (managed by business analysts) and deployed decision services (managed by developers/devops) — the last of these is what is triggered by decision-making applications when they pass data and request a decision. There are defined standards for the business decision models (e.g., DMN) and transferring those to execution engines for the deployed services, but issues arise in standardizing how SMEs capture business knowledge and pass it on the to BAs for the creation of the decision models; definitely an area requiring more work from both standards groups and vendors.
I’ll do some blog posts that combine multiple presentations; you can see copies of most of the presentations here.