Introduction

DMN is a modelling language and notation for the precise specification of business decisions (and rules) that is easily readable by the different stakeholders involved in decision management, including business subject matter experts. As a result, DMN can reduce the risk and effort of automation projects.

The DMN On-Ramp aims to help businesses benefit from automating their business decisions with the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) by providing a route to adoption and a conformance system.

Find out more about decision modeling.

Why Do We Need a DMN On-RAMP?

The current marketplace can be confusing for businesses wishing to benefit from the transparency, agility and powerful AI integration capabilities of digital decisions. As discussed elsewhere on this blog, Decision Model and Notation (DMN) is a standard published by the Object Management Group to describe and model repeatable decisions within an organization to ensure interchange. But how should businesses get started with this standard?

The DMN standard documentation is technical and not aimed at end-users. Although it describes the details of the standard exhaustively, it does not (by design) include any business case for using DMN or any means of assessing what tools are necessary to support it. Furthermore, the standard presents vendors with an all-or-nothing approach to conformance, leading to large-scale inconsistency in the tools market.

Businesses need to understand the scenarios in which DMN is effective and, for each scenario, what functionality tools must provide to be helpful. Vendors need a pragmatic, standardized and staged approach to conformance.

DMNOR aims to supply a vendor-independent, validated, staged route for DMN adoption and tool conformance. We aim to clarify the different ways businesses can engage with DMN and provide a compliance road map to ensure they know which tools can support them. At every stage of the DMN journey, we want to give business users confidence about assessing the tools they need and vendors clarity on what their tools must provide.

Who is on the Committee?

The team is a consortium of practitioners, vendors and academics, all of whom have many years experience of in using decision modelling in projects. The current composition of the committee is:

• Representatives from vendors such as IBM (Lenny Bromberg, Pierre Berlandier), Sparkling Logic (Marc Lerman, Carlos Serrano) and InRule (Chris Berg)
• Professor of information systems at KU Leuven and research leader in business rules processes and decisions, Professor Jan Vanthienen
• Entrepreneur, author and thought leader on digital decisions, James Taylor

What Are the Initial Deliverables?

Our team aims to provide:

• A comprehensive definition of how and why businesses can use DMN, the decision modelling scenarios (e.g., mining a decision inventory, eliciting decision definitions from subject matter experts, embedding machine learning into decisions)
• A set of business-centric compliance levels for vendors
• Provide consolidated advice on best practices for decision discovery and organization

What’s Next?

Watch this space for more news about On-Ramp developments or post questions in the comment section below.

See our presentation about the DMN On-Ramp at DecisionCAMP 2021!