Business Decision Management (BDM) is a nascent discipline that is gaining momentum in the industry. One of the drivers behind it is the increased digitization of customer interactions, leading to more personalized and more automated decision making. The increase in compliance requirements that have to be met also encourages the adoption of BDM.
Decision modeling is a key ingredient to decision management. Therefore, the Object Management Group (OMG) has approved the DMN as an open standard as of December 2014. On a high level, DMN describes decision requirements and dependencies. Below that, DMN allows definition of decision logic, which can be exchanged between stakeholders and executed by a rules engine.
The newly created project OneDecision.io provides an Open Source, Java-based reference implementation for DMN execution. It supports basic decision tables, JSON data types, as well as the standardized DMN XML interchange format. The project is published under an Apache license, so everyone is able to use the source code for commercial and non-commercial purposes.
Tim Stephenson, co-Founder of Omny Link, who provided the initial implementation, says “DMN is a very promising standard. This open source project allows people to familiarize themselves with the standard and consider native DMN support within their software applications.”
Tom Debevoise, Chief Evangelist at Signavio, adds “The initiative is about strengthening the ecosystem around DMN. The more people get involved, the better - that is why we launched this as an initiative open to everyone.”
Paul Holmes-Higgin, general manager for Alfresco’s Business Process Management platform, Activiti, says “DMN has an important role to play in interoperability for business decision management and this project ensures real-world validation and enhancement of the standard.”
The open source project, including source code download, can be found at .
About the founding members of the OneDecision.io:
Signavio is a provider of Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Decision Management (BDM) software, headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Alfresco is a leading provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and BPM software, with offices in San Mateo, Calif. OmnyLink is a provider of Marketing and Business Automation solutions, based near London, U.K. Bruce Silver Associates is an independent industry analyst firm, contributor to OMG standards and thought leader for process and decision modeling, based in Los Angeles, Calif.