BBC 2017 Speaker Series – Consultant:  James Taylor, CEO at Decision Management Solutions

In anticipation of his presentation at Building Business Capability in Orlando, Nov. 6-10, 2017, we asked James Taylor, CEO at Decision Management Solutions, a few questions about transforming the business. Check out this interview in relation to his BBC presentation entitled, Maximizing the Value of a BRMS with Decision Modeling.

Q: In what ways do you help your client organizations handle business transformation?

A: We help them identify critical operational decisions, model these decisions, and apply business rules and advanced analytics to automate or improve them. They are looking for radical improvements in business agility, transparency and accuracy as well as speed and cost – and Decision Management helps them achieve this.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing more robust business transformation capabilities for your clients?

A: The biggest challenge we help clients overcome when applying these powerful technologies is rapidly developing a clear understanding of the business decision at issue – and doing this in a way that business, operations, IT and analytics teams all understand. Decision modeling with the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard has really transformed how we do this – dramatically speeding it up and producing excellent results.

Q: What are your top suggestions for companies looking to become more agile?

A: Focus on getting decision-making out of code and into decision-centric business rules management systems. This is critical – how your systems behave is what your customers see so you have to be able to change it quickly and safely if you are to be agile from their perspective. And we’d add that if you are moving into advanced analytics (which you should be), then you’ll need a platform to do that in an agile way too.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in the past year?

A: Just how fast you can build a decision model if you start by building one rather than by analyzing data or business rules. Beginning with the decision in mind and that building a DMN model interactively with subject matter experts gets you really deep insight into the decision-making you are working on literally in hours.

Q: What do you see as the most important goal or trend for business analysts and other professionals to keep in mind?

A: Advanced analytics that turn data into insight (machine learning, predictive analytics, AI) are going to be essential for organizations moving forward. Business analysts and architects must understand the potential of these technologies and must integrate them into their requirements and design work.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you’ve implemented to help your client’s business’s operate more effectively? Have you seen any results yet?

A: Decision modeling with DMN. We have been astonished at how effective this is in eliciting requirements for business rules-based systems, how well it identifies the requirements for advanced analytics and how well it engages all the participants.

Q: If you could go back 5 years in time and give some professional insight or advice to yourself, what would it be?

A: Prototype more – you can’t tell people things, you can only show them.

Q: What’s one question you wished you were asked in this interview but were not? And how would you answer?

A: What’s the future of AI? It’s to be integrated into the set of decision-making technologies we have where it can add real value to the business rules, predictive analytics and optimization technology we are already using.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference this year?

A: I’ll be sharing lessons learned applying decision modeling. One of the key takeaways is that once you have modeled your decision, you know exactly what kind of dashboard you need to monitor and improve it. You did all the hard work when you designed the model!

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Don’t miss James’s presentation, Maximizing the Value of a BRMS with Decision Modeling, at Building Business Capability on Wednesday, November 8, 2017 from 4:50 to 5:50 pm. Click here to register for attendance.