At this point, you may think that ODM is a cool business solution, but you may wonder if it makes sense to introduce another piece of software into your organization because IT already has too much complexity. What we have found with our clients, however, is that ODM reduces complexity and makes it easier for organizations to adapt to change by providing a balance of freedom and governance.
- Reasons why organizations invest in ODM.
Management Capabilities
The key word here is management. ODM implementations can have anywhere from a few hundred rules to 100 000 rules or more. The management part of operational decision management enables you to organize, track, catalog, change, govern, simulate, test, audit, reuse, search for, collaborate on, and report on your business rules and operational decisions.
Essentially, it means that an organized system is in place to manage the entire life cycle of all the rules in your enterprise, whether on your first project or the twentieth. Notice no mentioning of rule authoring and execution here. Those functions, although necessary, are just the beginning. A decision engine is also an important part of the solution, but (to use a car analogy) most of us would not buy an engine that did not have a good vehicle around it. You might say that ODM attaches a transmission, odometer, brakes, headlights, seats, and seatbelts to your decision engine.
Less Reliance on IT
Business rules represent the business policies, regulations, and best practices related to your business. These rules have too great an effect on the business for you to keep them locked in systems that only IT personnel can access or read. It is not advocated that IT step out of the way and not be involved. Given resource constraints and the speed at which change needs to take place, however, a partnership between business and IT makes sense. Most IT departments would like to conserve resources by allowing business users to make routine changes to business rules, assuming that those changes are made in a safe environment with the right checks and balances.
By providing the necessary checks and balances, ODM enables business users to assume much of the responsibility for day-to-day rule changes. It’s a win-win situation, significantly reducing the IT’s workload while enabling business policy changes to be made much more quickly and accurately.
Intuitive Interface.
Business people today expect tools to be intuitive, partly because everyone is busy, but also because consumer electronics companies have trained us to expect intuitive interfaces. The need for intuitive interfaces extends to IT personnel, who like elegant, intuitive interfaces that do not force them to keep checking the user manual or online help.
Real-Time Actionable Insights.
Mobile, Cloud, Big Data, and the Internet of things are disrupting the way companies do business. You need new ways to integrate data into operations to deliver the personalized experiences customers expect. To gain competitive advantage and drive top-line growth, you must apply real-time, actionable insights to operational decisions and act as soon as risks and opportunities occur.
Key to decision making is the ability to uncover unique insights. Not only that, but also insights need to be something that can be immediately acted on. The event processing capabilities within an ODM platform help to capture data points and events of things happening both inside and outside your firewall. Supporting capabilities like context computing can then take those data and events and correlate them to past events, current state, and predictive analytics to help understand and evaluate how everything relates. Business rules then drive the actual decision.
Your decisions are made smarter as your business rules are enhanced with up-to-the-second analytics. Your business can create and shape customer-centric business moments, ensuring that you are making the right decision at the right time.
Built-in Governance and Change Management.
We know that governance is not the most exciting topic, but it is a crucial part of ODM. You will be using ODM to automate your corporate policies and regulations, so you need a clear, easy to use way to ensure that proper approvals have been granted for each new or updated rule. One key advantage of ODM is that it provides a structured governance model, because your rules are stored and managed in a dedicated system and are not intertwined into your applications and processes. Another important aspect of business rule governance is change management. The central repository in ODM can provide user-friendly change management and version control that differentiates among prior versions of a rule, the current version of the rule in production, and the proposed new version of the rule that is in the process of going through approval. The change management system can also store work-in-progress drafts of future proposed versions of the rule — for example, pricing and bundling rules for an upcoming holiday promotion.
Centralized, Searchable Rules Repository.
An ODM system should provide a repository that is centralized from the start and that’s easy to manage and search. Search capabilities should be on a par with the top search engines on the web. A good search function is the best way to promote reuse. An insurance company, for example, may want to see whether any existing rules apply to sports cars in California. Within seconds, an ODM search should be able to provide a list of rules that have the words sports car or California in the title, body, or metadata, even when the repository contains 30 000 rules. The search tool should be able to easily filter by parameters, such as business rules or decision tables. It also should be able to search by criteria such as rule status (in production or preproduction) or when the rule was last modified.
Integrated Simulation and Testing.
An important benefit of ODM is simulation capability. If you are trying to maximize profit, you want to answer questions about the effect of a price change before you implement the change, rather than later. ODM systems provide a user-friendly but powerful way to run simulations. You can simulate not only against sample data, but also last weeks or last month’s data to see what results you would have had in the real world with a different set of rules. Testing is also an important part of a successful ODM solution, and it should be as easy to accomplish as possible. An ODM system should be able to create a spreadsheet to facilitate testing and to display test results visually, for example.
Auditing and Reporting.
Imagine how nice it would be to be able to trace the life cycle of a decision quickly and easily. That is part of what ODM offers: a decision warehouse that provides easy access to all that information. If you need to look back ten years in time, the decision warehouse enables you to go to any information in your ODM deployment and generate the necessary reports. You have a history of who wrote and approved each rule, as well as a record of all the posted comments about that rule. Then, at runtime, you can easily trace any automated decision to see why it was made. The decision warehouse shows you the rules that were in place when the decision was executed and why the decision conformed to the business rules that were in effect at the time.
Reuse of Rules.
As you improve business rules over time, you create valuable enterprise assets because your rules represent how your business does business. As rules become optimized, their reuse becomes increasingly valuable. Reuse can take place not only across multiple applications and business processes but also across channels. The same rule can be called by web applications, mobile applications, and call-center applications, for example. Reuse across applications, processes, and channels can greatly increase your consistency in business operations and customer service; at the same time, it reduces the resources you need to develop applications, processes, and business rules.
Easy Integration with Other Solutions.
ODM complements virtually every type of business and technology solution, but a few solutions integrate especially well with ODM:
- Business Process Management (BPM) is the best solution for managing processes that take place over time. Processes managed by BPM may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few months (or longer in some cases). ODM, on the other hand, manages decisions that are made at a specific point in time. Although ODM technically has a concept of flow, that flow takes place in milliseconds, and the end-user is not aware of it. By contrast, BPM is best at managing flows that take anywhere from minutes to months. Working together, the two technologies are a natural pair, with BPM providing the long-running solution and ODM making the specific operational decisions.
- Business analytics is another key capability that works hand in hand with ODM, allowing you to base your decisions both on what you know (such as business practices, policies, and regulations) and on what you can predict. Typically, you have two ways to create joint operational and analytical solutions: one in which the analytics are used at design timeand one in which analytics are calculated at
In the design-time method, analytics are used to create business rules for use by ODM. At the time they are invoked, these rules may be anywhere from days to months old. The method is good for rules that do not rely on real-time information from other systems, such as a rule that predicts the occurrence of rare diseases when patients are admitted to a hospital. The rule might say, “If the patient has x symptom and y symptom, there is a xx% likelihood that he or she has z disease.” By contrast, a rule that requires near real-time inputs from other systems would be one that predicts the likelihood of default on a loan. The decision would depend on recent updates, such as adverse credit or risk information made available in the past few days or hours.
- Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an integration bus that serves as the core of most systems based on service-oriented This integration method provides message routing and transformation, among other services. This routing and transformation can be programmed into the ESB itself but is subject to the same limitations as business rules that are hidden in applications. It is much more effective to externalize these business rules in ODM to provide the same benefits that ODM provides to other applications.