guest post by Jacob Feldman
First of all, congratulations on your new Primers that provide very detailed convention sets for the decision management domain. I quote from your documents:
* DecisionSpeak™, a set of conventions for expressing the meaning of operational business decisions.
* TableSpeak™ is a set of conventions for business-friendly representation of decision tables and their meaning (semantics) in declarative fashion.
Naturally, my first thought is: can we make these conventions EXECUTABLE? More precisely:
Can we help subject matter experts (not programmers) to:
– create documents that follow these conventions?
– automatically validate (enforce) compliance to these conventions?
– execute the compliant documents?
After a quick walking through the documents, I think the answers are YES. We, at OpenRules, should be able to build OpenRules templates (in Excel) that supports these conventions and to direct users how to apply these templates to create, validate, and execute concrete decisions, decision tables, and other types of rules. There are certainly many details how better to address certain constructions described in TableSpeak™, but they all look solvable to me.
Previously, we provided a similar implementation as soon as another decision modeling methodology (TDM) was published. Now we are working with James Taylor making business requirements created by his newest DecisionFirst Modeler executable. As you know, OpenRules is also working on a reference implementation for the DMN as this standard comes to the age. It would be only natural to provide support for the IPSpeak™ methodology. Based on our previous positive experience working with you, Gladys, and other experts from BRS, I am looking forward to making IPSpeak™ executable.
http://openrules.com
Comment by DMN proponent: In common business use the term “decision” is often overloaded to mean “decision output”. So I “make a decision to do X” is the act, whereas I “use the decision as input to another decision” is referring to the decision output. I’m not sure there are any semantic issues with (i.e. possible problems caused by) this overloading?
My response: Since DMN is a standard (and in particular claims to be a business standard), then it must stick with its own definition of terms in all cases. Otherwise, in what sense is it a standard (especially a business standard)?
In defining “decision” DMN had two fundamental choices (from Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary):
1. a : the act of deciding; specifically : the act of settling or terminating (as a contest or controversy) by giving judgment
1. b : a determination arrived at after consideration : SETTLEMENT, CONCLUSION
DMN explicitly chose the first meaning. I strongly prefer the second, but then I’m a big fan of all things declarative. So in BRS TableSpeak[1] an outcome by definition is a decision.
Since DMN explicitly chose the first meaning, however, an outcome (conclusion) is by definition *not* a decision. A decision is an act, never the result of the act.
Hey, I’m just reading what is written in the standard. If DMN somehow allows ‘overloading’ of the term “decision” — the central term in the standard — all bets are off. A term that you can use any way you want when it happens to suit you is a term that has not been standardized at all. The result is semantic muddle. Pretty big deal. Sorry!
www.BRSolutions.com
