Selecting a Decision Management System
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
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Features that apply to most implementations and most organizations’ needs
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Features that to enterprises that have larger teams, outsized execution requirements, or multiple teams that need to collaborate.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.