Well drafted guidelines help new users learn best practices, identify useful patterns and help enforce good governance. However, good guidelines are hard to develop and expensive as they involve significant investment from subject matter experts. Even good guidelines are of limited use for real-time decision-making - especially if the decisions are fluid, specialized and complex. Over time many guidelines atrophy because their maintenance proves too expensive or too demanding of scare subject matter experts. This rapidly turns guidelines into a liability rather than an asset! Kaiser Permanente has many best practice guidelines in all areas of its business - everything from clinical practices to deciding on the recipients of philanthropic awards.

In an effort to ensure decisions are based on current best practices and increasingly made in real time, Kaiser Permanente is adopting decision modeling with the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard. Guideline documents are being replaced with decision models linked to executable decision tables. These models are kept in living repositories so they stay up to date and can be encapsulated as decision services deployed in real time applications. This presentation will describe 2 scenarios that demonstrate this pioneering technique. The rapid iteration from decision discovery through decision modeling, business rules specification and deployment will be outlined and best practices for engaging business experts and analysts will be discussed.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Understand value of decision modeling
• See how to replace static documents with a living model
• Understand a decision-centric approach to business rules
• See how decision modeling engages business owners