Selecting a Decision Management System

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  • Features that apply to most implementations and most organizations’ needs

  • Features that to enterprises that have larger teams, outsized execution requirements, or multiple teams that need to collaborate.

  • Features that would support special requirements or advanced use cases where an organization has some capability in decision automation but wants to expand it’s competitive automation advantage

 
 

Base Features

  • Authoring

    Support for DMN standards including import/export. - Allows for skills interchange as well as maintaining central decision assets in a standard format.

    Non-programmer decision authoring – allows for faster change and upskilling

    Decision table support – This is the most central artifact in business rules authoring, robust support for tables is foundational

  • Governance & Change Management

    Decision Lifecycle management – Ability to version, branch and manage decisions for releases

    Deployment pipeline management – Functionality that facilitates and automates deployments of decisions to be consumed as a service or api

  • Testing and Validation

    Scenario-based testing against defined expected results – this is similar to unit testing for code but tests logic in decisions against a set of expected results.

    Tracing of execution – giving the ability to inspect after execution what decisions were made

Enterprise Features

  • Authoring

    Visual version comparison tools – Tools that allow for rapid change management of decision artifacts from the requirement to implementation components

    Low Code object models – Easily update data models used by decisions without major code updates & deployments

    Advanced/Large Decision table support – Ability to edit large and complex decision tables

    Decision Catalog – Ability to manage shared decision assets across the enterprise

    Full DMN model – Able to represent decisions in a model with shared decisions across multiple decision services

  • Governance & Change Management

    Allow traceability to original source – support for hierarchical knowledge sources that map decisions to original sources of logic e.g. regulations, machine learning models, etc. This enables fast impact analysis.

    Requirements lifecycle management – ability to manage requirements lifecycle separately to the implementation components lifecycle, this facilitates collaboration across stakeholders.

  • Support for Modern Architectures

    Containerized API-based deployment model – allow for the deployment of individual decision APIs

    Hybrid cloud-ready – Support for deployment on all major cloud and virtualization platforms and ease of relocation from one platform to another

  • Testing and Validation

    Simulation – Able to run champion challenger simulations by varying the deployed decisions and running representative data sets against the decisions at scale.

    Analyst-driven testing – Ease of use for business-driven testing rather than programmatic test cases

Advanced Features

  • Machine Learning

    Explainer XAI Support – ability to receive explainable artificial intelligence data and incorporate that into the decision-making explanations

    Connect to models – ability to easily connect to versions of model APIs that have been deployed to a serving environment

  • Bid Data

    Access feature farms – ability to access streaming grid data that allows for up to data variables to be used with decisions

    Grid ready - Ability to deploy natively to grid compute like spark and have a licensing model that supports bringing the execution to the data.