In anticipation of his presentations and tutorial at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Nov. 2 – 6, 2015, we asked James Taylor, CEO at Decision Management Solutions, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out his interview in relation to his BBC 2015 presentations.

Q: How is your organization advancing the pursuit of business excellence?

A: Our focus is on helping companies understand how they make decisions. Decision-making is often a black box in an organization with little or no visibility into how people or systems currently make decisions and no real framework for asking how they want to make those decisions in the future. Organizations need better tools for understanding decision-making, particularly for the day to day decisions at the heart of business operations. By helping organizations understand and model their operational decision-making we help them see how they might automate those decisions using business rules, how they can simplify their business process models by externalizing decisions and how they can apply big data analytics to improve decision-making and business results.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in 2015 thus far? What trend do you see that people should keep in mind?

A: We are big supporters of the new Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard – we are one of the original submitters and worked with IIBA on making sure decision modeling was in the new BABOK. We have found that DMN-based decision requirements models have tremendous value in a really wide range of projects. We have seen huge value in decision requirements modeling in managing business rules projects, in framing predictive analytic requirements, in designing dashboards, improving manual decision-making, fitting new analytics into existing decision-making approaches and much more. We have taught hundreds of people decision modeling and the range of projects where decision requirements models help has been stunning.

The power of decision requirements modeling is just beginning to make itself felt and I think the trend of separating decisions from processes, linking those decisions to business rules and analytics, and putting decisions at the center of a business architecture is a real opportunity for a wide range of folks – business analysts can use it to better specify decision-making requirements, business architects can use it to raise the visibility of decisions in architecture, business process managers can simplify their process models and business rules managers can it to structure and drive rule harvesting and management.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you have implemented to help your organization or business run more efficiently and effectively?

A: We have been using our modeling software, DecisionsFirst Modeler, to manage decision requirements models for business rules projects being implemented in a commercial (or open source) Business Rules Management System. The way it structures business rules thinking makes rule harvesting easier and makes it realistic to validate that all the rules have been captured for a given piece of decision-making. But the model is not throw-away, it can be linked to the business rules being implemented to improve ongoing management, impact analysis and more.

Q: If you could give your five-years-ago self insight and advice about this industry, what would you say?

A: Even 5 years ago it was clear that success with business rules or analytics required a “decisions first, rules second” mindset. I wish we had pushed for a decision-centric standard and for more formal modeling of decisions sooner. We have been using decision requirements models since 2011 and the DMN notation since it stabilized but it would have been great to have the approach and a standard notation even earlier.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at Building Business Capability.

A I’m giving three sessions at BBC:

• I am giving a workshop on “Business Analysis and Architecture with Decision Modeling” that will take you through the construction of decision requirements model using DMN and show how these models are used for requirements and as a key component in a business architecture.
• I am presenting a set of lessons learned from our work with real-life deployment of Decision Management at scale in large organizations.  Having trained hundreds of analysts in decision modeling and used it on dozens of projects we have lots to share.
• And I am presenting on how decision modeling and Decision Management were applied to the old business rules product derby problem (UServ) in solutions submitted to the DM Community to show how the business rules community is moving to a focus on decisions.

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Don’t miss James’ tutorial called Business Analysis and Architecture with Decision Modeling, his co-presentation entitled Good Old UServ Product Derby in the Brave New World of Decision Management, and his session Lessons Learned from the Real-Life Deployment of Decision Management at Scale at Building Business Capability on Wednesday, November 4, 2015 from 4:50 to 5:50 pm. Click here to register for attendance.