Tag Archives: BPM

Taming our Sentient Systems with Decision Management

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Our systems are getting better at ‘sense and respond’, as they discover patterns in real-time data feeds. This big data gets generated by the social, mobile people;  and increasingly by ‘things’ like sensors and appliances – leading to the Internet of Things.

One of the core technologies that enable pattern-discovery is Complex Event Processing (CEP). The goal is to identify significant events in the environment and to respond to them appropriately. Chris Taylor on BPM for Real positions CEP as

The central nervous system that’s doing the heavy lifting for all of this change is a combination of technologies built on a platform of speed and fast cycles of change.

event-processing-in-a-nutshell

The interesting element in this conceptual model is the box in the middle labeled, ‘Decisions’ (highlighted in red by me). Even in Chris’ model, once the patterns have been detected, we need to decide what actions to take in order to exploit the opportunity or to counter the threat.

Opher Etzion tries to get a little bit deeper into this black box called, ‘Decisions’ and says

illustration follows the 4D: detect (channel), derive (pattern detection), decide (decision), do (actions).  The “decide” part is not necessarily “IF—THEN” rules, but can also be optimization or another event driven pattern.

While CEP is indeed a critical element for our new generation of sentient systems, the Decisions embedded within these systems need to be managed explicitly and aligned with organizational goals. We need to consider Decisions first.

Decision Management is an approach for automating and improving high-volume operational decisions. Focusing on operational decisions, it develops decision services using business rules to automate those decisions, adds analytic insight to these services using predictive analytics and allows for the ongoing improvement of decision-making through adaptive control and optimization.

A Decision Management Platform will bring together all the components of a sentient system as shown in the following excerpt from Decision Management Systems Technology Report.

context

Managing our sentient systems means managing the Decisions they can or they should make.

 

 

 

Rethinking Business Processes

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Process Mapping is generally seen as a laborious exercise in workflow mapping that is supposed to add value by helping improve business processes. Once the As-Is model has been mapped with sufficient and just enough detail, the analysts are supposed to find ‘obvious’ areas for improvement and can then triumphantly arrive at an obviously improved To-Be process model.

This approach may be adequate for incremental workflow improvement but does not address good design for a business process.

The reason a process exists is because it adds value to the customer. Otherwise the process shouldn’t exist. This is the golden rule for good Business Process Design.

James Martin and Michael Porter have been expounding on the central principle of value creation for the past few years with the Value Steam approaches.  Recently Ralph Whittle reviewed the background and presented Enterprise Business Architecture as the overarching concept to capture the value-driven approach.

Given that (value-driven) process design is the core of any successful organization, I am a little concerned to find Graham Hill bidding good-bye to Process Thinking and welcoming Design Thinking as a replacement.

It may be that his use of the word ‘design’ in this fashion is too generic. A good DESIGN will bring user-centric interface design, user-friendly information architecture and customer-value-driven business processes together into a rewarding experience for the customer – and a profitable transaction for the business. Process thinking (from a customer’s  viewpoint) is key.

Incremental workflow improvements in the guise of process management are ineffective unless they rest on solid business processes built after asking, “Does this add value to the customer?”