Introduction to Decision Modeling

Now more than ever, in a world turned on its head by new and innovative business and technical ideas and disruptive ways of working, does an organization need to have a clear understanding of its choices and the decisions it makes. Unmanaged complexity is the enemy and its opposite - agility - the friend that heralds business success and enables an organization to respond quickly to changes in its business circumstances. Without a clear and communicable model it is almost impossible for an organization to embrace the changes that confront it daily in the digital world. The description and implementation of decisions, which has been inexplicably and somewhat invisibly part of almost all other disciplines has now been synthesized into a rigorous and formal discipline of its own, with a new way of modeling and describing decisions, Inputs, Outcomes, Rules, Business Knowledge, Authorities and more. Indeed, once you have seen the Decision Model and Notation in action and been introduced to the countless benefits it brings, you will not be able to go back to old and arcane ways of working.

Enterprise Architect has become the tool of choice for many Business and Technical leaders because of its flexible, extensible, standards-based and pragmatic approach to modeling complex systems. As a collaboration platform it is a tool for all disciplines, and allows Decision Models to be created, integrated, managed, documented, simulated and generated to programming code. The models can be visualized and integrated with a range of other models including Business Process Diagrams, Use Case Models, User Stories, Test Cases, Database Models, Implementation Artifacts and programming code to list just the main models.

How it will help you

Most readers will typically have some knowledge of decision-making in an organization, but each reader will most likely have different experiences and a different way of defining, managing and working with decisions. Decisions arise across the whole fabric of organizational descriptions and implementation. Distilling the decisions into a separate but articulated model will provide great clarity and value. The reader will benefit by understanding Enterprise Architect’s features and the tools that are available to develop and manage Decision Models, which in turn will enable them to be more productive as an individual and as a member of a team. The ultimate value, though, will be to the organizations they work for, which will acquire the ability to respond to change efficiently and with agility, allowing them to navigate through the complex and ever-changing business environment of the digital age.

Who will benefit

Anyone involved in the development, management or implementation of decisions, whether at a strategic level, a business value level or a technology level, will benefit from reading this guidebook. This encompasses a wide range of roles, whose work and decisions will ultimately be guided and facilitated by the models, but specifically there are four groups for whom using Decision Model and Notation holds great value:

• Strategic Thinkers, who are responsible for steering the enterprise through the turbulent waters of change, setting the goals and understanding the drivers, will benefit by being able to visualize the decisions they make and know that they are being implemented according to their intentions.
• Business and Process Analysts, who currently have business rules and decisions built into their Process diagrams in the form of complex and cascading sets of Gateways, will benefit because they will be able to extract these rules, placing them into an articulated Decision Model. The result will be a reduction of complexity, straight-through Process diagrams that are easier to understand and more resilient to change, and a simple model of their decisions that can be simulated, tested and implemented.

• Software Engineers, who know full well the benefit of isolating the business rules from the main body of the code and allowing them to be configured, will benefit because they not only will have a clear and tested model of the rules but they will also be able to automatically generate programming code that enshrines the rules, removing the possibility of errors of interpretation or translation.
• System Engineers, who are accustomed to complex and often seemingly intractable problems in a wide range of disciplines and contexts from space exploration to oceanography. Systems are designed to operate within a context that require decisions to be made, such as production line robots, planetary rovers, transport control systems, safety control systems in machinery plants and many more. These systems typically rely heavily on decisions to maintain operational efficiency, safety and to be able to respond to variables that change within the environments.

What you will learn

This topic will teach you how to use the many features of Enterprise Architect to develop and manage Decision Models using the new Decision Model and Notation (DMN), to connect the Decision Models to other types of enterprise model such as Business Process, StateMachine, Use Case and Parametric, to simulate them, to automatically generate programming code, to create documentation and to work collaboratively as a member of a team.

You will learn what tools are available, which tools should be used for a particular technique, and how to use them. For example, the topic will teach you how to decompose complex and seemingly intractable decision rules into a simple and understandable model, using diagrams and Decision Tables. These can be simulated and implemented manually or used to generate high-quality programming code in a wide range of languages, using the tools and facilities available within Enterprise Architect.

Overview of the Guide

This Guide is divided into a number of topics that will introduce you to Decision Modeling from a number of perspectives, ensuring that once you have worked through the document you will have a sound knowledge of the why, what and how of Decision Modeling. The Guide commences with a Getting Started topic that will introduce the concepts with broad brushstrokes, followed by an overview. Next is a list of benefits and a series of topics that develop the detail. The concepts, notation and tool usage are all introduced, giving you the theoretical and practical knowledge to get started with your own Decision Models and to derive the benefit of applying this approach to modeling decisions.