What is Decision Management?
Modern-day business operations are centered around processes and data. However, when knowledge and expertise are forced into hard-coded, inflexible systems, bottlenecks occur. By adopting and scaling the capabilities of business rules, decision modeling, and machine learning, Digital Decisioning leverages data and expertise to create business value, improve results, and deliver a great user experience to effectively meet today’s operational requirements. For Digital Decisioning to deliver true value, it must initially focus on solving business problems that will, ultimately, contribute to positive and desirable business outcomes. Technology, automation, and methodologies are essential for Digital Decisioning, but they are always at the service of business decisions.
The foundation for successful Digital Decisioning projects is applying a Decision Management approach. Decision Management models business decisions first. These decisions, for the most part, have to do with customers and how you engage with them, deliver services to them, or handle their transactions.Once you have a good grasp of what decisions your business needs to make and how these decisions will advance your business, Decision Management shows which technology and analytics tools you need to invest in and how to integrate them. Finally, Decision Management focuses on the processes and infrastructure needed to ensure continuous improvement and business engagement. To maximize success, adopt a proven approach such as the DecisionsFirst™ approach from Decision Management Solutions.
November 15-17, 2021
Three 2-hour sessions with homework.
9:30-11:30am Pacific / 12:30 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern
This is live training. Recorded sessions are sent out on the day of each session if you miss a session or want to want to review the session. For those working in time zones where attending is outside of working hours, a separate work session to go over homework can be scheduled.
When representing and analyzing business decisions in real business situations and processes, decision tables have always proven a powerful approach. Decision table methodology, however, is more than putting some rules in a few tables. Learn about proper methodology, table types, notations, best practices and the Decision Model Notation (DMN) standard, based on years of experience in modeling decisions.
This 3-part online live training class taught by leading decision table expert Jan Vanthienen of the University of Leuven will prepare you to model decision logic, business rules, using decision tables.
You will learn the concepts, objectives and application areas of decision tables for business analysis and business process management. You will see how to model and normalize decision table models and how they can simplify business processes. Mainly you will get many lessons from a long experience on how to build, analyze, verify and optimize decision table models according to simple guidelines.
Prerequisite: Decision Modeling with DMN or experience with decision modeling.
“Good decision tables have good structure, completeness, exclusivity, readability and correctness. They are normalized (factored) and focused on a specific, defined decision-making problem. And they are, of course, written in a standard way using DMN.“
Course
Details
- Modeling Decisions with Tables
- The basic principles of decision tables
- Variations, types, layout
- Normalization, contraction, optimization
- The use of (S-)FEEL and glossary
- Decision Table Construction Methodology
- Consistency, Completeness, Correctness by design, not by verification after the facts
- A simple methodology to construct good decision tables
- The importance of non-redundancy
- Guidelines and typical patterns
- Applying Decision Modeling with Decision Tables
- Decisions, rules and processes
- Linking to Business Analytics
- Tools and documentation
- Experiences, pitfalls and recommendations:
- How to get started.
- How to recognize decision problems.
- How to avoid unmanageable tables.
- How to solve real business problems.
Registration
General Information for Attendees
- Format – This is a live training. Recordings will be sent out after each session in case you miss the session or want to want to review at a later time. For those who live in time zones where the session is scheduled outside working hours, a separate work session to go over homework can be scheduled.
- Recommended Software – It is recommended that participants use a decision modeling software for the exercises, such as DecisionsFirst Modeler. However, use of this software is optional, and other diagramming software, modeling tools, or paper and pencil can also be used. The techniques taught are equally applicable. Course examples will be in a class installation of DecisionsFirst Modeler. All participants will receive a free trial of the recommended software.
- Cancellation Policy – Registrations may be canceled up to 48 hours in advance of the first class. A 15% administrative fee will be retained if you choose to cancel. To cancel, please contact us.
- Technology Check – The class will be conducted in Zoom. You can test your connection, video and microphone at https://zoom.us/test. Although we will use chat and Q&A to communicate in the class, it is also helpful if we are able to have audio interactions. For audio interaction you need a microphone or headset connected to your computer. You can test that it is working using the Zoom test link above.
- Other Terms – If for any reason the class cannot take place as scheduled, you will be offered alternative training dates at the same price.
What are Decision Tables?
Decision tables are a well-established technique but experience, user interface and other technical improvements have made them increasingly mainstream. The basic premise is that a tabular layout of the logic in a decision (or in part of a decision) is far easier to understand, verify and execute than any textual description of the decision.
Who Should Attend
- Process Analysts and Business Analysts looking to expand their knowledge of decision modeling.
- Business Rules Analysts using decision tables to manage business logic.
- Enterprise and Technical Architects developing business architecture models.
- Project and Technology Managers running rules analysis programs.
- Subject Matter Experts responsible for documenting business rules.
About the Instructor
Jan Vanthienen is professor of information management at the Business Information Systems Group of KU Leuven (Belgium), where he is teaching and researching on business rules, processes and decisions. The area of business rules modeling, validation and verification, and decision modeling in the context of business process modeling has been his major area of research and expertise for many years. He is a regular speaker at BBC, where his nickname seems to be: not (just) the decision table guy.
Jan is also a recipient of an IBM Faculty Award, the Belgian Francqui Chair at FUNDP, a Best Paper award at The International RuleML Symposium and a Best Paper Nomination at the Fourth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems.