Informatik: Business Decision Management

Business Decision Management (BDM) instead deals with transparent and human readable rules based decision logic as decision tables and expressions, used to manage and automate operational and repeating mass decisions in business processes. Different from today’s AI can this decision logic be understood and explained by business experts and maybe even clients and citizens.

BDM is about one of businesses most important assets – the operational business decisions. Many every day, routine and repeating decisions are made e.g. for:

• Loan application assessments
• Risk assessments for insurance policy applications
• Customer ratings on a web shop
• Taxation in an on-line eService for income tax return 
• Claim benefits
• Acceptance of orders and payment
• A diagnosis, such as vaccination status

Some of these decisions are made manually, but many more are automated in information and IT systems. We meet these decisions every day when we buy things on the web, book flights, make hotel reservations, hire a car and so on.

BDM is tightly connected to Business Processes Management. Business Process Management is about changing or designing business processes. Business Decision Management takes responsibility for the operational business decisions that a business process requires to function and deliver according to business goals. In the course, we work with two OMG standards: 1. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) for process modelling; 2. Decision Model and Notation (DMN) for decision modelling.

Automation of operational business decisions – decisioning – in BDM applies either Business Rules Management (BRM) and BRM systems (BRMS) for finding, authoring, managing and executing business rules (BR), or running the decision tables and FEEL (Friendly Enough Expression Language) expressions of DMN on a platform. We will touch on BR but will mainly work with decision logic as in DMN.

Many branches of society, especially banking, insurance and the public sector are rule heavy and already use rule-based decisioning. In Sweden, we can for instance fill in our tax return using digital services, which are based on rule-based decisioning. In the USA, an example of a major user of decisioning and support technology is IRS.

During this course, you will work both theoretically and practically with the concept of BDM. You will design decision requirement models and decision logic to automate decisions in processes using professional technologies: Signavio Process Manager. The course is at the edge of development and technology, and represents unique knowledge that only a very few institutions around the world can and do teach.

You will meet industry expert James Taylor live or on-line. You will also meet Lucas van Biert, a former INFN50 student and now BDM professional. They will provide expert insights and industry experience on BDM.

BDM is an approach drawing heavy industry interest. Through this course, you will have the possibility to acquire highly specialized and unique skills with high market value.