Decision Model and Notation Overview

The fast pace with which our world is changing, the higher expectations of customers,  their impatience and intolerance of poor services and the myriad of choices they have in a competitive digital world has led to organizations needing to be able to change quickly and efficiently and to understand the decisions that underpin their business models and the implementation of these models.

Decision Modeling has not been well recognized as a discrete discipline or science and business rules and decisions have been modeled in a heterogeneous way with little consistency within organizations or between them. Decisions have ‘peppered’ Business Process Diagrams in the form of cascading gateways making them complex and intractable to change and moving them further from the ‘holy grail’ of straight through processing.  This situation has made collaboration and team work almost impossible and has resulted in poorly defined specifications, countless programming faults, frustration and ultimately unhappy customers.

This section addresses the questions of what Decision Model and Notation (DMN) is, where it fits in the context of other disciplines such as Business Process Modeling and Software Engineering, and what the characteristics of a good model are. The section also discusses the levels of usage and why and when to use DMN and gives a first example that will help a newcomer to appreciate the benefits of the standard.

Enterprise Architect's pragmatic approach to modeling and the extensive set of facilities available to the Business Analyst and Software Engineer and others makes it a helpful tool as a repository for decisions and a platform for creating, managing, simulating, implementing and disseminating decision models and collaborating as a team to bring true and repeatable value to an organization.