Foreword
I FIRST CAME ACROSS Alan's work in 2009 when he introduced me to the concepts at the heart of Decision Requirements Analysis. I was impressed by the approach he outlined and its potential for improving the analysis and design of decision management systems. I have been working in decision management for most of the last decade, spending much of that helping companies use business rules and predictive analytic technology to automate and improve business decisions. Alan's approach to gathering, modeling, and managing decision requirements immediately struck me as the right way to approach this problem. I have been using it with my clients ever since.
Decision management is a well established approach that focuses on automating and improving operational business decisions, including the many micro-decisions that impact a single customer or a single claim. In the years I have been working on decision management systems, the approach has become increasingly well known and adopted. Building decision management systems requires a solid platform for managing decision-making logic—a business rules management system—and the ability to integrate predictive analytic models with this logic. It also requires the ability to effectively identify, model, refine, and manage the requirements for such a system in a decision-centric way.
Take one company I was working with recently. They were struggling, trying to adopt a business rules management system into a process-centric culture. Using ...
