The purpose of this IBM Redbooks publication is to help architects, project managers, developers, and business analysts apply Decision Management successfully. Decision Management is the combination of tools, processes, and people that enables enterprises to respond quickly and cost effectively to business policy change.

Let us first examine the title of the book, Governing Operational Decisions in an Enterprise Scalable Way. What do the words Governance, Operational Decisions, and Enterprise Scalable mean?

Figure 1-1 on page 2 shows the three levels of governance within the organization:

Figure 1-1 shows the governance hierarchy.

Operational Decisions are business policies controlling the enterprise. These policies are distilled into Business Rules, which are organized into decision services.

Enterprise Scalable requires being able to govern changes in parallel over thousands of rules by hundreds of people. To do this, an enterprise-scale Decision Management System is required, such as IBM Operational Decision Manager (IBM ODM).

This chapter covers the following topics:

The focus of this book is on the latest features of IBM ODM V8.9.0.1 or later, decision services, Decision Engine, and the decision governance framework. The decision governance framework is an optional prescriptive workflow that enforces a process for changing rules within IBM Decision Center. This book assumes decision governance framework as the default approach to implementing decision governance. However, decision governance framework is optional, and it is up to readers to decide which approach works
for them.

This book focuses on the key components of ODM Standard (Figure 1-2).

The following components are shown in Figure 1-2:

You can find more detailed information about IBM Operational Decision Manager at the IBM Operational Decision Manager home page: IBM Operational Decision Manager home page.

Decision governance defines the tools, processes, and people that facilitate business policy change.

Figure 1-3 shows business policy changes being deployed more frequently than traditional application development releases. The result is agility. Agility enables the enterprise to respond quickly to change and gain a competitive advantage.

Figure 1-4 on page 5 shows the evolution of decision governance within the enterprise. Stage one shows traditional application development where business policies are scattered through the organization in code and spreadsheets. Changes to business policies are managed by the IT Governance process.

Stage two is to adopt ODM to encapsulate business policies into business rules. Business rules are developed, maintained, and tested using ODM, but changes are still managed within the traditional Application Development IT Governance process.

In stage three, business rules are maintained outside traditional Application Development. This is where the full power of ODM comes into play. The business takes control of the day-to-day agile changes to business policy. Changes to business policy are made safe and secure by the decision governance features of ODM.

The shift from phase one to phase three requires first the adoption of Decision Server to encapsulate the business policy, and then the adoption of Decision Center to enforce decision governance. The benefit of this effort is enabling agile change to business policy.

This book uses the Loan Validation Service of a fictional banking organization to illustrate how IBM Operational Decision Manager can be used to govern decision making in an enterprise scalable way. This decision service is available within the sample server, so you can follow along and see in your own sample installation what is going on.

The goal is to show how the validation of eligibility for a loan can be acted upon in the following ways:

The Loan Validation service provides a simple service to handle requests for large loans, like home mortgages. A borrower goes to the bank and applies for a loan for a specific amount. For the loan application, the borrower needs to provide information such as income, age, previous bankruptcy information, and so forth. The information from the application is used as input to the business rules to establish if the loan can be granted and under what conditions.

The bank uses IBM Operational Decision Manager to automate the loan decisions and return a decision. It validates input data, computes an internal score, determines eligibility, and returns the decision with appropriate comments. This helps the bank make quick, effective, and repeatable decisions for borrowers through a variety of channels. The use of ODM helps ensure that their lending policies are enforced, and allows them to make quick changes to the policies when they need to change, whether in response to changes to their own criteria or in response to changes in the legal requirements.

The bank’s solution (Figure 1-5) consists of two components:

This chapter outlines the main concepts and structure that this book will cover.

Chapter 2, “Decision governance for project managers” on page 9 plans for Decision Governance and provides an example to help plan for your projects. It also describes how to create a Center of Excellence.

Chapter 3, “Roles and responsibilities in governing decisions” on page 21 explains roles and responsibilities for governing decisions.

Chapter 4, “Securing the Decision Center” on page 31 explains how to create roles and apply users and security to Decision Center.

Chapter 5, “Designing decision services” on page 61 explains how to organize your rule projects for scalability and maintainability.

Chapter 6, “Processes” on page 73 explains the processes involved in delivering decision services, both from an IT and Business perspective.

Chapter 7, “Decision governance framework” on page 85 takes a deep dive into the Decision Governance Framework and shows how to use it for both simple and complex projects.

Chapter 8, “Deployment” on page 119 covers deploying decision services to the execution environment.

Chapter 9, “ODM DevOps” on page 127 provides DevOps guidance on automating the build and deployment of decision services, both from IT and business centric environments.

Chapter 10, “ODM on Cloud” on page 135 provides details on how to govern decision services on the cloud.

Chapter 11, “Branching and merging” on page 143 provides details on how to use the advanced repository management features of Decision Center when the decision governance framework is not used.

Chapter 12, “Conclusion” on page 165 concludes and summarizes the book.