DRA in Design

Design tends to be the prerogative of techies – and is therefore elegant from the bottom up:  it uses the computational resources very efficiently.  Good design should also be elegant from the top down:  the structure of the solution should be parsimonious and reflect the structure of the decisioning.  Bottom-up design is very specific to the platform, so it is not possible to discuss it in this platform-neutral forum anyway.  Top-down design, however, can be purely functional.  This posting suggests how the decisioning structure exposed in the DRD can be used as the basis for designing a decision flow and an object model.

Rules Discovery

The key to successful rules discovery is that all rules must be contextualized in specific business decisions.  This statement may be seen as heretical by those who have signed up to the Business Rules Manifesto, but my concern here is with the practicalities of delivering decision services to a tight budget and timescale, not with the quixotic task of modelling the behaviour of an entire organization.  So my advice is this:  do not try to define universal rules which apply across all business processes and activities; establish only the specific rules required to make each decision which is in scope.

DRA in Project Management

In the good old, bad old days of Knowledge Engineering, the “iterative approach" often meant in practice "keep adding rules until the client runs out of money".  This mindset persisted as our field came to be called Business Rules, when there was a common assumption that one could simply gather whatever rules the "experts" considered pertinent, arrange them into groups, and deploy them as rule services.  Now Decision Management (DM) has turned this deeply misguided idea on its head by stressing that one must first define the business decisions to be automated, before harvesting the specific rules to implement them (see for example James Taylor on "Using Decision Management to improve Requirements”).

Decision Requirements Analysis (DRA) formalises this top-down process, allowing a rigorous specification of the decisioning requirements at the outset of a rules project.  The main benefit is improved project management:  DRA results in better plans, less risk, and tighter control on scope.