Explainable Decisions

Posted on February 12, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Majority of decision modeling experts agree that decision models producing business decisions should be able to explain why these decisions were made. Silvie Spreeuwenberg even wrote that “Advice Without Explanation Is Not Very Intelligent“. Tomorrow FICO will run a special webinar “Unlocking the Full Potential of your Business Outcomes with Explainable Decisions“. They correctly say: “Only with explainable decisions will you be able to identify alternative approaches, project an accurate range of consequences, and deliver potentially game-changing results.” We would like to create a list of articles that deal with decision explanations. We ask our readers to post here their comments with the proper references. Vendors are welcome to describe how their BR&DM products produce explanations.

Posted in Decision Modeling, Explanations | 2 Comments

Sales Promotions – After Challenge Discussion

Posted on February 3, 2018 by mikeparishcorticon

In this post I’m arguing that the use of database tables to represent sales promotions is not a good idea to compare with the use of rules or decision tables. The promotion example in the Jan-2018 Challenge was a very simple one. Unfortunately, in the real world, business users are often not so accommodating. Towards the end of this document I’ve listed some examples of promotions that are in production at real customer sites. The main thing to notice is the wide variety of the various promotions.  Continue reading →

Posted in Challenges, Decision Modeling | 5 Comments

Challenge Feb-2018 “Tax Decision Table”

Posted on January 31, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

TaxTimeWith tax season upon us, our February Challenge deals with a quite simple decision table created by a business analyst from a tax agency. How would you represent this  table using your favorite business rules and decision management tool?

Posted in Challenges | 2 Comments

Andrew Ng launches $175M AI Fund

Posted on January 30, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Andrew Ng is known as the founder of the Google Brain, co-founder of Coursera,  and Baidu’s chief scientist (he also was a presenter in one of our early Decision Camps). Today Andrew Ng is one of the most recognizable names in the machine learning community. He left Baidu in 2017 and quickly launched a number of new AI projects, including the Deeplearning.ai course and Landing.ai, a project that aims to bring AI to manufacturing companies. It turns out that what he was really working on, though, was his AI Fund, for which he has raised more than $175M. This isn’t going to be a traditional venture fund. Instead, Ng and his team will use the money to initiate new AI businesses. Read more

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Trends | Leave a comment

No-code software democratises application development

Posted on January 25, 2018 by jacobfeldman

nocodelogiconlyAlan Trefler presented “The next AI frontier – software that writes software” at the World Economic Forum. In particular, he wrote: “The foundational knowledge to create self-writing, self-evolving software exists today… For businesses, this means that workers in different roles can collaborate to construct app functionalities in real time. Even complex analytical constructs can be visually modeled, simplifying the incorporation of semi-structured and unstructured data. Projects that once took dozens of programmers, months of time, and tens of thousands (if not millions) of dollars may now only take days, weeks, or months with internal staff.” Continue reading →

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Trends | Leave a comment

About Our Challenges

Posted on January 24, 2018 by jacobfeldman

Dr. Bob Moore submitted his Drools-based solution for our Jan-2018 Challenge. This is a third solution, and we still are looking for a pure DMN FEEL solution. Bob also wrote: “One of the fun aspects of the DMC challenges is seeing how many different takes people can have on the same ‘problem’. And usually the shorter and less specific a challenge statement is, the more it allows free-rein to one’s imagination.”  Continue reading →

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Decision Model for Order Promotions

Posted on January 20, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Our Jan-2018 Challenge deals with a popular business decision problem:  help merchants to define various promotions for their sales orders and to automatically decide which orders are eligible to which promotions. A simple example of promotion: reduce the total cost of the order by $3.50 if it contains at least 5 items 1108 and at least 4 items 2639. This challenge was generalized by M.Parish: Continue reading →

Posted in Case Studies, Challenges, Decision Modeling, Decision Models, DMN | Leave a comment

Core DMN Components

Posted on January 16, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

DMN-ExecuteAccording to James Taylor, “The vast majority of the business logic in a decisioning system can be defined using the two core DMN components:

  • Decision Requirements Diagrams structure decision problems, break them into coherent pieces. They show where data is used and what knowledge assets (policies, regulations, best practices) are involved.
  • Decision tables specify the logic for most of the decisions on the diagram using simple constructs.”

It certainly leaves the most complex DMN components such as “boxed expressions” out of the DMN core. James even adds: “frankly most decision tables look and work the same even if they don’t support DMN yet.”  Agree? Disagree? What does constitute the DMN Core in your opinion? Leave your comments here.

Posted in Decision Modeling, DMN | Leave a comment

BPM 2018 Predictions from Top Influencers

Posted on January 11, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Today the term “BPM” hardly represents a pure Business Process Management as along with process automation it is trying to cover decision management, case management, digital transformation, and even machine learning and blockchain. So, it is especially interesting to read “What’s Next” thoughts from the top BPM experts accumulated in this article. Here are a few teasers: Continue reading →

Posted in BPM, Decision Modeling, Machine Learning, Trends | Leave a comment

The Rules of Happiness

Posted on January 9, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Silvie Spreeuwenberg: “Most people are happy most of the time but do not think, write down or analyse all the good things that make them happy every day. Our tendency is to stress, analyse and act based on negative events. So use this tendency to the contrary with the rules of happiness“. You may find the rules here

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