Making Better Decisions Using IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management

ibm.com/redbooks Redpaper
IBM® WebSphere® Front cover
Making Better Decisions Using
IBM WebSphere Operational
Decision Management
Duncan Clark
Pierre Berlandier
Business rules and events in solution
applications and processes
Decision management lifecycle
and governance guidelines
Best practices for
automating decisions

International Technical Support Organization
Making Better Decisions Using IBM WebSphere
Operational Decision Management
April 2012
REDP-4836-00

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First Edition (April 2012)
This edition applies to Version 7.5 of IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management.
Note: Before using this information and the product it supports, read the information in “Notices” on page v.

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012. All rights reserved. iii
Contents
Notices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .v
Trademarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
The team who wrote this paper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
Now you can become a published author, too! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
Comments welcome. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
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Chapter 1. Decision management overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Decision management technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 WebSphere Operational Decision Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.3 Decision management solution development process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.4 Insurance demonstration scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.5 WODM Insurance solution overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.6 Website: Eligibility and pricing decisions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.7 Website: Situational decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.8 Call center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.9 Underwriting approval process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.10 Decision management and governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Chapter 2. Development process overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.1 Roles and responsibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.2 Decision development lifecycles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.2.1 Service lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.2.2 Decision lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.3 Process development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.4 Decision point development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.5 Situation identification and response development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.6 Decision information models and vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.6.1 Business object definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.6.2 Business object field primitives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.6.3 Domains and enumerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.6.4 Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Chapter 3. Decision design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.1 Identifying business decisions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
3.2 Defining the domain of discourse for the rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.2.1 Tailoring the model for the business users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.2.2 Sharing a common model across decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.3 Establishing the decision signature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.4 Decomposing the decision and orchestrating the subtasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.5 Authoring business rules. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.6 Decision integration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.7 Roles, responsibilities, and decision development lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Chapter 4. Situation identification and response development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4.1 Situations and events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
4.2 Defining situations of interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

iv Making Better Decisions Using IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management
4.3 Identifying business objects and the correlation context. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
4.4 Identifying touchpoint system events and actions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4.5 Mapping event data to business objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4.6 Using event rules to invoke actions in response to patterns of events . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
4.7 Mapping business objects to action data and executing the action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
4.8 Identifying situations using temporal event rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
4.9 Identifying situations using contextual event rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
4.10 Reacting to identified situations using event rule groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Chapter 5. Detect-Decide-Respond pattern design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
5.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
5.2 Using context variables to accumulate situation state . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
5.3 Using data stores to enrich a situation state . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
5.4 Making a decision in response to a situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
5.4.1 Creating events and actions from a decision service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
5.4.2 Triggering the decision from event rules. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
5.5 Responding to a decision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
5.6 Raising events using web services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
5.7 Raising events from within rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
5.7.1 Creating a JMS event publishing client. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
5.7.2 Exposing the JMS client in the rules business object model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
5.7.3 Verbalizing the means to publish an event . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Chapter 6. Business process design with rules and events. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
6.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
6.2 Identifying the underwriting approval process activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
6.3 Defining decision services in a BPM process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
6.4 Initiating a BPM process from an event . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
6.5 Triggering a BPM process from a WebSphere ODM action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
6.6 Providing the information for the manual review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
6.7 Raising an event from within a BPM process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Chapter 7. Managing decision changes across rules, events, and processes . . . . . 109
7.1 Support for managing and governing change in WebSphere ODM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
7.1.1 Access control and permission mechanisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
7.1.2 Rule and event status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
7.1.3 Decision test suites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
7.1.4 Decision simulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
7.1.5 Event testing and simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
7.1.6 Deployment baselines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
7.1.7 Branch management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
7.2 Rule lifecycle and governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
7.3 Decision lifecycle and governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
7.3.1 Define phase. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
7.3.2 Deploy phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
7.3.3 Monitor and Measure phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
7.3.4 Update phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Related publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Other publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Online resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Help from IBM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012. All rights reserved. v
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vi Making Better Decisions Using IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management
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© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012. All rights reserved. vii
Preface
Decision management is emerging as an important capability for delivering agile business
solutions. Decision management is not a solution in its own right, but must be integrated into
the solutions or business processes that it supports.
In this IBM® Redpapers™ publication, we describe the recommended best practices and
integration concepts that use the business events, business rules, and other capabilities of
IBM WebSphere® Operational Decision Management V7.5 (WebSphere ODM) to provide
better decision making in those solutions and business processes.
To illustrate these recommended best practices and integration concepts, we use an
insurance scenario that is implemented by a number of Web Applications and a business
process implemented with IBM Business Process Manager V7.5. The scenario provides the
opportunity to show:
How decisions can be used by Custom Applications.
How decisions can be used in business processes.
How to identify situations of interest based on events that occur across the applications
and process.
How to decide on the action to take when situations are identified.
How to manage and govern the design and change of these decisions to optimize
the business.
Chapter 1, “Decision management overview” on page 1 provides an introduction to decision
management and the WODM Insurance demonstration scenario and solution that is used as
an example.
This solution is also available in the IBM SOA Sandbox, allowing readers to explore aspects
of how the solution works in more detail. Although the scenario and concepts described here
are based on this exercise, there might be implementation differences in the recommended
best practices described in this document.
For this reason, it is not our intention to include detailed scenario screen capture or
implementation details in this document, but to concentrate on the best practices and patterns
for realizing the business values of decision management into service-oriented
solution scenarios.

viii Making Better Decisions Using IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management
The team who wrote this paper
This paper was produced by a team of specialists from around the world working with the
International Technical Support Organization.
Duncan Clark is a Product Manager for WebSphere Operational Decision Management with
responsibilities for integration between WebSphere ODM and other IBM Products. He is
based in IBM Hursley Labs. Over the last year, he has been responsible for demonstrations
and integrations of IBM products, including WebSphere ODM, BPM, and IBM Tivoli®
products. He managed the integration of the IBM ILOG® embedded rules into BPM V7.5 and
the development of support pack LA71, which provides integration tools and development
patterns for using WebSphere ODM with Business Process Manager. Before this
assignment, Duncan led the Governance and Policy architecture for IBM WebSphere Service
Registry and Repository.
Pierre Berlandier is a Senior Technical Staff Member with IBM Software Services for
WebSphere. As part of the ILOG service team for 15 years, Pierre has worked on the
different incarnations of rules programming paradigm, from expert systems to real-time
intelligent agents, and business rules management systems. As part the Service Engineering
group of IBM Software Services for WebSphere, he develops service delivery processes,
mentors practitioners, and captures and organizes best practices in the business process and
decision management space. Pierre has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from INRIA in France,
where he started working on the synergy between the rules and the constraint
programming paradigms.
We thank others who contributed to this paper, in the form of written content, advice, and
project support. The team acknowledges help from our sponsors and reviewers, including:
Margaret Thorpe, WebSphere ODM Product Management lead
Jerome Boyer, STSM - Software Services for WebSphere
Brett Stineman, WebSphere ODM Product Marketing
Stephen J. Lyons, STSM - Lead Architect WebSphere ODM Business Events
Jonathan Bond, Decision Server Requirements Manager (Events & Runtime)
Dave Wakeman, WebSphere POC Team
Mary Comianos, Publications Management
Stephen Smith, Technical Writer
International Technical Support Organization
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Preface ix
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x Making Better Decisions Using IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012. All rights reserved. 1
Chapter 1. Decision management overview
Decision management is a business discipline that empowers organizations to automate,
optimize, and govern repeatable business decisions. It is an extension of the decisions
business people would make if they had unlimited time to make those decisions.
Decision management technology provides the means for these decisions to be automated
and called in real time by processes, applications, and other business solutions.
To realize this automation, the technology must also make it possible to capture, change, and
govern the important decision logic in a controlled, scalable, and rapid manner. It is only by
effectively managing the decision logic that the wanted business agility can be delivered.
1

2 Making Better Decisions Using IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management
1.1 Decision management technology
There are two interrelated forms of decision management technology (Figure 1-1).
Figure 1-1 What is decision management
In both cases, the business processes and Applications make calls to the Decision Services
that encapsulate the behavior of the decision being automated.
In analytical decision management, the history of decisions is analyzed to build a model that
can be used to predict the best decision response for the future.
In operational decision management, policy, best practices, and business experience is used
to write rules that describe how to make those decisions or identify situations that need to be
reacted to. In many cases, the models that result from analytical decision management can
also be used in the operational decision management automation.
There are situations where all the decision automation needed for a solution can initially be
provided by one of these forms of decision management. However, as decision making
become more complex, the need for synergistic use of both forms of technology becomes
greater. When starting from analytical decision management, the models that define best
practices or probability can be encapsulated and applied in a broader systems context
through operational decision management. When starting from operational decision
management, the decision logic that defines best practices can benefit from the data mining,
segmentation, and insight provided by analytical decision management
In both cases, there needs to be some measure of how good the decisions are. These key
performance indicators (KPIs) relate to the overall goals of the business and, when used with
Scenario Analysis and Simulation, allow for a real-world method of assessing how decision
changes affect the behavior of business systems.
Operational Decision Management Analytical Decision Management
Business Processes, Applications and Solutions
Decision
Services
Internal and External Data
 Policy
 Regulation
 Best Practices
 Know-how
 Risk
 Clustering
 Segmentation
 Propensity
Scenario Analysis
and Simulation
Decision
Services
Business
Rules and Events
Predictive Analytics
and Optimization

Chapter 1. Decision management overview 3
1.2 WebSphere Operational Decision Management
This paper focuses on WebSphere Operational Decision Management and its capabilities
(Figure 1-2).
Figure 1-2 WebSphere Operational Decision Management components
IBM WebSphere Decision Center provides a convenient working environment for business
people to collaborate, share, and manage their business policies in a secured environment.
Operational decision projects are then stored in a centralized repository where releases can
be saved as versions and accessed in a secure way. Decision Center also comes with
various user interfaces:
The web console providing a full set of management capabilities, including testing
and simulations
Plug-ins for maintaining rules using Microsoft Office documents
Through widgets deployed in IBM Business Space
IBM WebSphere Decision Server is the environment designed for IT users to design,
implement, integrate, prepare, and deploy operational business decision-based applications.
The Decision Server integrated rules and events designers, both being specific Eclipse
plug-ins, provide dedicated design perspectives for business rules and business events.
Decision Server is also the execution environment for the business rules and business
events policies.
This packaging means that WebSphere Decision Server provides a complete stand-alone
capability for developers to design, deploy, and execute both business rules and business
events in a SOA solution. WebSphere Decision Center provides capabilities to govern the
changes to the policies or rules that define how those services behave.
WebSphere Operational Decision Management
WebSphere Decision Center
Design
Management
Versioning
Decision Artifacts Access and Control
Repository
Rule
Execution
Event
Execution
Decision
Monitoring
Connectors
WebSphere Decision Server
Define
Deploy
Update
Measure
Visibility &
Governance
Rule Designer
Event Designer
Decision Center
for Business Space
Rule Solutions
for Office
Decision Center
Console

1.3 Decision management solution development process
The goal of this paper is to provide guidance and best practices for realizing effective decision
management solutions using WebSphere Operational Decision Management. Before going
into the details of the example scenario and solution, it is necessary to consider the important
steps that must be undertaken to define a solution.
The goal of decision management is to empower the business decision makers to rapidly
understand and manage the way automated decisions are made within the solution. Decision
management enhances their understanding, increases their throughput, and provides more
precise fine-grained decisions that are appropriate to the situation.
However, the integration of decision management into the solution requires a deep
understanding of the IT infrastructure and architecture. It is therefore important to understand
the roles and tasks that are typically undertaken when developing a decision management
solution. This topic is described in Chapter 2, “Development process overview” on page 9,
which sets the scene for the more detailed design practices chapters in the rest of the paper.
1.4 Insurance demonstration scenario
In this paper, we use a fictional automobile insurance organization to demonstrate how the
decision management capabilities of WebSphere ODM can be used in a realistic solution.
The automobile insurance organization (WODM Insurance) currently has two channels for
marketing:
A self-service website
A call center
Using either channel, customers can apply for insurance quotes by providing the driver
characteristics, vehicle characteristics, and type of coverage required.
Based on these characteristics, underwriting decisions are made as to the risk of providing
insurance and, if approved, a price is calculated and a quote offer made to the customer.
WODM Insurance wants to automate the underwriting decisions and pricing rules to reduce
risk, improve profitability, and ensure that they can react quickly to marketplace trends.
They are also concerned about the amount of market share they have and need to attract a
higher proportion of profitable customers. They intend to accomplish this task by identifying
situations where there is an opportunity to retain a desirable customer by offering
personalized promotions.
WODM Insurance identified a number of situations where it is not possible to safely automate
an underwriting decision. In this case, they require underwriter approval before offering a
quote. They intend to use a business process to automate the approvals, ensuring that the
underwriters can quickly decide which of these situations should be approved and which
should be rejected. Automation of the approval process should also improve the turnaround
time of the quote and improve customer satisfaction and retention.

1.5 WODM Insurance solution overview
The WODM Insurance solution illustrating the role of the WebSphere Operational Decision
Management components is shown in Figure 1-3.
Figure 1-3 WODM Insurance solution
Each of the main components of the solution is now described, relating the component to
later chapters in this paper where the design of that component is described in more detail.
1.6 Website: Eligibility and pricing decisions
The website is the main channel for customers to obtain quick quotations. On the website, the
customer is asked for details about the driver, the vehicle, and the type of insurance
coverage required.
The website application first validates the information provided and then starts WebSphere
Decision Server to check the underwriting rules and assess if this driver is eligible for
insurance. The Eligibility decision assesses the risk and identifies the quote as eligible,
ineligible, or requiring manual approval.
If the decision is ineligible or manual, the quote is rejected and a reason for rejection passed
to the customer. If the quote is eligible, the Pricing decision is made and a quote is offered to
the customer.
The design of these decisions is described in Chapter 3, “Decision design” on page 21.
Web Site Logic Flow
WebSphere Decision
Server
WebSphere Decision
Center
Accept Event
Decline Event
Reject
Event
Offer
Event
ReplyRequest
Eligibility
Rules
Data
Validation
Rules
Reminder,
Refer to
Call Center
Auto Insurance
Approval
process
Manual
Eligibility
Follow Up
Offer Promotion
Investigate Fraud
Decision Center Console
Decision Center
Repository
Deploy
Pricing
Rules
Call
Center
Event
Rules
Promotion
Rules
Get driver
information
Get vehicle
information
Select
coverage
options
Display
pricing
Accept or
decline
quote

1.7 Website: Situational decisions
When a quote is offered to the customer, they have the option of either accepting or declining
the quote. As with any web application, they can also close the browser and leave the site.
The website application also integrates with the WebSphere Decision Server Event run time.
Events are generated whenever a quote is offered or rejected by Decision Server and also
when a customer accepts or declines a quote.
These events are used in the Customer Acquisition Situations project (shown as Event Rules
in Figure 1-3 on page 5) to determine customer behavior and determine what actions to take
to close a sale. Two actions that influence the customer are possible through the website:
Reminder Messages can be sent to the customer about quote offers, encouraging them to
accept the quote.
The customer can also be referred to the call center where they can obtain quotes that
cannot be provided through the website.
In the situation when a manual eligibility approval is required, an action is raised to start the
Approval process and the customer is referred to the call center to obtain the quote.
The design of stand-alone situational decisions is described in Chapter 4, “Situation
identification and response development” on page 37. This design includes how to use Event
rules to correlate and detect the responses from an individual customer across the website
and call center.
If a promotional situation is identified, the Customer Acquisition Promotions (shown as
Promotion rules in Figure 1-3 on page 5) decision is made to determine the most effective
promotion. This decision uses business rules associated with events in a Detect - Decide -
Respond pattern; it is described in Chapter 5, “Detect-Decide-Respond pattern design” on
page 59.
1.8 Call center
The call center has an interface that is similar to the website, but it is used by a call center
operator, who enters the customer details based on information received on the phone. After
the details are provided, the Eligibility decision is made, and if the customer is eligible, the
Pricing decision is made and a quote is obtained. The call center operator can also see the
result of any promotion decisions and accept the quote on behalf of the customer or reject the
quote. This situation illustrates the consistent reuse of the Eligibility and Pricing decisions
described in Chapter 3, “Decision design” on page 21.
In addition, the call center maintains a list of referrals from the website with guidance about
how to respond to those particular customers. These referrals include:
Following up a customer that is unable to obtain a quote through the website.
Providing a promotion to a desirable customer to close a sale.
Alerting about potentially fraudulent quote applications where, for example, several quotes
are requested for the same vehicle by different drivers in different states.
This capability uses the situation design principles described in Chapter 4, “Situation
identification and response development” on page 37and the Detect - Decide - Respond
patterns described in Chapter 5, “Detect-Decide-Respond pattern design” on page 59.

1.9 Underwriting approval process
The underwriting approval process is implemented using IBM Business Process Manager
(Figure 1-4).
Figure 1-4 Underwriting approval process
The approval process can be initiated in two ways:
The driver, vehicle, and coverage requirements can be implemented using a coach. This
situation occurs when WODM Insurance receives an email or paper application form
where the quote details must be manually entered into the system. This path through the
process shows how WebSphere ODM business decisions can be used within a process to
automate and improve consistency in the decision making.
Alternatively, if a quote from the website needs manual approval, the quote characteristics
already obtained from the website or call center can be retrieved and passed into
the process.
As with the website and call center, the process first starts the Decision Server Eligibility
decision. In the case of a manual Eligibility quote, the Eligibility decision is repeated to
provide the rationale to the Underwriter, even though it is already made by the website.
The process flow gateway (called “Risk?” in Figure 1-4) uses the Eligibility decision response
to route the process as follows:
An eligible response routes the process to perform the Pricing decision and notification to
the customer of a quote offer.
An ineligible response routes the process to notify the customer of an
unsuccessful application.
A manual response routes the process to Manual Application Approval.

The Manual Application Approval provides a coach that displays the characteristics of the
driver, vehicle, and cover to the underwriter together with the reason for the manual review.
Based on this information, the underwriter can approve or reject the quote application
together with a rationale for rejection.
If the underwriter tasked with the review does not respond quickly enough, the approval is
escalated to the underwriter’s manager, ensuring a fast turnaround in quote approvals. Based
on the underwriter's response, the customer is notified of their unsuccessful application or the
quote is priced and an offer is made to them.
The key design concepts of a business process and its integration with decision management
are described in Chapter 6, “Business process design with rules and events” on page 85.
1.10 Decision management and governance
The final part of the WODM Insurance solution is to use Decision Center to provide the
business with the capability to quickly change, simulate, validate, and deploy changes to the
decisions and situations of interest.
This capability is achieved by making and managing the following decisions and
situation projects:
The Data Validation rules used by the website and call center to check the fields entered
by the user.
The Eligibility decision defining the acceptable underwriting conditions and those
conditions that need manual approval.
The Pricing decision defining the pricing rules for the different insurance cover, driver, and
vehicle characteristics. This decision also shows how these pricing decisions might be
managed at a regional level, allowing different regional managers to define the pricing
rules needed for their regions while still complying with a global pricing policy.
The Customer Acquisition Situations project that detects situations where customers
might need promotions or other actions to obtain their business.
The Customer Acquisition Promotions decision that determines a personalized promotion
offer matched to each customer quote request.
The Decision lifecycle of authoring, simulating, validating, and deploying, together with the
roles and governance features to support versioning and change management, are described
in Chapter 7, “Managing decision changes across rules, events, and processes” on page 109.

Chapter 2. Development process overview
This chapter presents the high-level steps needed to develop a solution involving a collection
of business processes, with decision points implemented by business rules, and where
situations are detected and acted upon through business events.
2

2.1 Roles and responsibilities
Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and Business Agility promise organizations the ability
to quickly adapt and optimize the way their IT solutions behave in response to changing
market conditions and thus remain competitive in the marketplace. However, the
responsibilities for defining and developing these solutions are spread across
the organization.
The responsibility for specifying and managing the business must be considered from the
point of view of different roles:
Business Analysts are responsible for specifying how the business should behave,
identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect how well the business is doing,
and defining the processes and decision points needed to manage the business.
Line of Business Users are responsible for the day to day management of the business
using the solutions. They are responsible for monitoring the KPIs and modifying the way
decisions are made to optimize the business. In a decision management solution, these
roles have responsibility for optimizing decisions to meet the business need.
End Users, such as call center operators (and to some extent, customers) are responsible
for using the solution and need to be considered from a consumability and process
efficiency perspective. In many cases, the End User role might be the subject of KPIs that
the solution is designed to support, for example, customer satisfaction or call center
response times.
The responsibility for the delivery and maintenance of these systems is usually an IT
department. These IT solutions must be developed and tested in a rigorous manner to ensure
that they are reliable, available, and meet the requirements of the business. Within this IT
department, a number of key roles can be identified:
Operational Roles have responsibility for maintaining the solutions and ensuring the
availability and performance.
Architectural Roles have responsibility for the design of the solution and ensuring that it
meets the business requirements. This responsibility includes the requirements to be able
to respond rapidly to certain changing market or business conditions.
Development and Integration Roles have responsibility for configuring the products and
building deployable solutions for operations to manage according to the
architectural designs.
2.2 Decision development lifecycles
The service development lifecycle is often used by IT departments to undertake the delivery
and maintenance of service-oriented solutions. While the details and products used to
support this lifecycle vary considerably across organizations, the key activities undertaken by
the IT roles are similar. The introduction of decision or policy management into these
solutions allows an alternative lifecycle that interacts with the service development lifecycle.
This alternative lifecycle provides the business roles with a faster means of changing the way
decisions are made and thus react quickly to the emerging market changes.

Chapter 2. Development process overview 11
These intersecting lifecycles are shown in Figure 2-1.
Figure 2-1 Intersecting lifecycles for service development and business decision management
When considering the design and development of solutions that use decision management
capabilities, such as those provided in WebSphere ODM, consider both of these intersecting
development lifecycles and the conditions under which changes in one lifecycle imply
changes to artifacts managed in the other lifecycle.
The service lifecycle defines how decisions are exposed as decision services and integrated
into the solution environment. This decision service definition then provides an initial
definition of the decisions that can be managed by the business. Often, this initial design is
undertaken by both Business and IT resulting in a set of deployed decision services and an
initial set of rules that implement the decisions to be managed.
This initial service lifecycle is undertaken mostly by IT and is usually a relatively slow lifecycle
to ensure that all the software quality testing is undertaken. Providing changes to or new
decisions for the solution usually implies that the decision rules and vocabulary that realize
that decision need to be revised.
The decision lifecycle defines how the business defines and manages the decisions that
implement those decision services. After the decision service and associated vocabulary is
defined, changes to the way the decision is made can be made faster (and ideally) by Line of
Business Users. In this lifecycle, the Business Users can rapidly change the rules, simulate
them, deploy them and thus deliver the business agility needed.
However, there are some cases when the changes to the decisions cannot be
accommodated simply by changing the rules. A new decision might be needed or the
vocabulary might need to be extended. In this case, a new decision service must be
undertaken, resulting in a new version of the decision services being deployed and a new set
of decisions available for the Line of Business Users to manage. This situation implies that
the longer IT driven service lifecycle must be undertaken before those decision changes can
be deployed.
Having summarized the interactions between these lifecycles, the phases and main activities
in the lifecycles are described in the following sections.
Service
Lifecycle
Decision
Lifecycle
Define
Update
Measure
Deploy
Model
Manage
Deploy
Assemble
New decision point / situation defined
Decision signature or information model changed
Dependent decision provider rework
Exposed interface to the decision modified.
Dependent decision consumer rework

2.2.1 Service lifecycle
The service lifecycle describes how the interfaces to the decisions are designed and exposed
to the solution applications and processes. The emphasis is on how these decisions are
exposed as services whose signatures are governed and managed as part of the software
development lifecycle.
These interfaces represent the decision services and thus the identification of decisions, the
input and output parameters, and the associated vocabulary. Relating these items to a
centralized SOA Governance capability ensures that control over the purpose of these
decisions and their role in the overall business solution is maintained. It also provides a
common mechanism for discovering and sharing these decision services across
the organization.
The versioning strategy for decisions in regard to the decision interface and endpoints
available externally must be considered and aligned with any solution BPM governance and
snapshot strategy. This situation ensures that the decision service definitions are used
consistently in the business processes and solutions.
The phases and activities undertaken by the various roles are summarized here:
Model
The Business Analyst and Architect work together to identify the processes and their
activities, the decision points, and their role in the solution and the situations of interest to
the business. This phase is then further decomposed to identify the business information
needed to make any decisions together with how that decision is used in the solution.
The situation characteristics and initial responses are elaborated and the KPIs used to
assess how well the decisions are performing. Simulation scenarios are defined based on
the expected business requirements and the KPIs evaluated. These simulations can be
used to optimize the information needed and the basic rules needed to meet the
initial requirements.
Assemble
The Architect works with Rule and Integration developers to develop the decision service
implementations and integrate them into the solutions. This situation includes elaborating
the vocabularies and business objects used in the rules and providing an initial set of rules
to realize the decisions. The decisions and situations are integrated into the solution
according to the decision service signatures agreed and the events and actions available
in the solution.
This phase might be iterative until a satisfactory solution is achieved. Test cases are
developed to ensure that the decisions and situation rules can be modified safely without
breaking the integration and thus their role in the solution.
Deploy
In this phase, the IT development organization hands over to the operational department
and the processes, decisions, and situations are deployed as part of the solution.
Although the development organization deployed the services to development
environments, this deployment phase deploys to environments such as QA and Staging
before deploying to the final production environment.

Manage
In this phase, the processes, services, decisions, and situations are all operating as part
of the solution and the KPIs agreed are being monitored by the LOB Users in dashboards.
The LOB roles with responsibility for decision management examine the KPIs and the
ways the decisions are performing to ensure that the wanted business goals are being
met. If the business is not operating optimally, they use the Decision lifecycle to simply
modify the way the decision is made. It is only when significant changes are required that
they need to instruct IT to modify the decisions and perform another iteration of the
decision service lifecycle. This iteration should be undertaken using the existing SOA
Governance practices.
2.2.2 Decision lifecycle
The decision lifecycle describes how the business can change the way decisions are made,
the way situations are identified, or the actions that are taken in response to situations being
identified. The decision services and vocabulary is fixed within this lifecycle, as is the way
each decision is used in the solution.
The business can extend the rules within the boundaries of the existing vocabulary and
change the way the information and patterns are interpreted and responded to. As with the
Decision Service lifecycle, a number of phases are described. These phases are summarized
in the following list, and the activities are described in more detail in Chapter 7, “Managing
decision changes across rules, events, and processes” on page 109:
Define
This phase is undertaken between the Business Analyst and the Architect when the
decision definition overlaps with the decision service lifecycle. In the case of a policy
change or decision lifecycle iteration, the extent of the changes required need to be
evaluated to determine whether the change can be accommodated simply by changing
the decision.
This phase also includes simulation to ensure that the changes deliver the improvement in
KPIs that are required. If the decision interface and vocabulary need to be modified, this
action has an impact on the solution and another cycle of the service lifecycle is required.
Deploy
This phase is undertaken by the Operational department and should include checking the
validity of rules changed in the decisions and running the test suites to make sure that the
new rules do not introduce any unpredicted behavior. After this validation is performed,
the decision implementations are deployed through the various environments (for
example, QA and Staging) to ensure validity before deploying to the
Production environment.
It is important to point out that this deployment is for changes to the rules in response to
the business and does not need to involve development. The initial version of the rules is
deployed by development with the decision services and part of the decision
service lifecycle.
Measure
This phase is undertaken by the LOB Users observing the decisions made and the KPIs
through dashboards and ensuring that the business is running optimally. Usage of the
decision warehouse can help you understand what is actually happening in the business
and identify those decisions that are working well and those decisions that need to
be improved.

Update
This phase is undertaken by the Business Analyst or LOB User who needs to have
sufficient understanding of the way the decisions are made to be able to modify them to
improve the performance. The output of this phase is a set of current KPI measurements
and target KPI goals for the next iteration, version, or baseline of the decision lifecycle.
Further details of the decision lifecycle are described in Chapter 7, “Managing decision
changes across rules, events, and processes” on page 109.
The remainder of this chapter describes key aspects of the decision service lifecycle that
need to be considered to realize decisions.
2.3 Process development
In many cases, the solution design can be obtained by an analysis of the current activities
and processes being undertaken by the business. This analysis leads to identification of
decision points, situations of interest (exceptions and escalations), and other important
pieces of information. Process analysis is not the subject of this paper, but considerations for
integrating decision management into business processes are described in Chapter 6,
“Business process design with rules and events” on page 85, including:
Making decisions from within processes
Initiating a process as a result of an action or in response to a situation
Raising an event to be used in the assessment of a situation across processes or systems
2.4 Decision point development
Identification of key decision points across the solution is crucial to the whole decision
development. This topic is described in Chapter 3, “Decision design” on page 21and is
applicable to decision use across solutions, processes, or situations (events). A key part of
this development is the identification of the information used in the decisions. This analysis is
similar but different for processes, decisions, and situations, so a comparison of the
information modeling is described in 2.6, “Decision information models and vocabulary” on
page 15.
2.5 Situation identification and response development
The activities are still emerging for the identification of situations and how to respond to them.
There are many similarities with identification of decisions, so we do not define the situation
development activities in detail. Instead, we identify some of the key integration patterns for
situation identification and response in Chapter 4, “Situation identification and response
development” on page 37and then describe how to combine situations and decisions into a
Detect - Decide - Respond paradigm in Chapter 5, “Detect-Decide-Respond pattern design”
on page 59.

2.6 Decision information models and vocabulary
Before any form of decision making can be undertaken, the information about which the
decision is to be based must be identified. This identification is an iterative process and
involves a good understanding of the solution and the information being processed by
that solution.
A starting point is to identify the concepts or types of object that are processed by the
solution. In the WODM Insurance solution, the concepts of Driver, Vehicle, and Coverage
Request can immediately be seen as useful concepts. Each of these object types has a set of
characteristics that is used by the solution or decision making, although different parts of the
solution might have different perspectives of these concepts and require different
characteristics to be defined, such as:
The solution needs a driver’s address to send out quote policies
The decision making component is interested in a driver’s age
The event processing component is interested in other quotes that the driver requested
The approval process needs to know a driver’s identifier to ensure that approvals are
applied to the correct quotes.
It is therefore important to identify a common business terminology that can be used across
the solution, Rules, Events, and Process tools. This terminology includes the naming,
verbalization, and characterization of decisions, situations, and actions, and aligning business
object types across rules events and processes. This situation does not imply that a single
representation must be used for these information models. However, you have better
interoperability and achieve a common understanding between business and IT (and the
different tools that support them) if you follow the recommended practices described in this
section.
2.6.1 Business object definitions
This section describes the characteristics of business objects and how they are represented
across the Rules, Events, and Processes. When identifying the information needed for these
decisions, it is the business objects and the fields that describe them that are important. This
capability is available across the different tools, but the manner in which it is implemented
is different.
Table 2-1 shows the different characteristics of the information model and how it may be
represented in the different tools.
Table 2-1 Information model characteristics
Characteristic Rules Events PD IBM Integration
Designer / Schema
Class representing
a type of object
Business Class
with natural
language
verbalizations
and
descriptions
Only
available as
shared
objects
currently
Data ->
Business
Object
representing a
type of
business object
xsd:ComplexType

Although it might be convenient to have a single representation, it is important to recognize
that the different types of processing actually require different sorts of information models.
Decisions usually use rich information models based on deep hierarchies of classes or types
of objects meant to provide a detailed factual context for the decision. The more refined the
decision is, the more information it requires to be established. Decisions are provided with the
full context that they need to render the decision and do not retrieve additional information
after they are started (for a more detailed explanation, see 3.6, “Decision integration” on
page 33). The decision response can also require a complex model. For example, a complex
eligibility decision might return a list of alternative coverage quotes, potentially upselling the
prospect with additional coverage, or other types of insurance, such as home, life, and so on.
Object or instance
of a class
representing a
named concept of
relevance to the
business
Variable or
Decision
parameter of
type Business
Class
A Business
Object
Variable xsd:Element
Fields Attributes
referencing
simple types or
Business
Classes
Field
available in
Business
Objects. Can
reference
only simple
types
Parameters
referencing
simple types or
Business
Objects
xsd:Element
Scope allowing the
same names to be
resolved within a
single solution
Package Package None namespace/prefix
Name (nls) -
allowing the
business to refer to
the characteristic in
a business like form
Verbalization of
classes,
variables, and
attributes
Verbalization
of business
objects and
their fields
No
Description -
allowing the
semantic meaning
of the characteristic
to be understood
Available for
Classes and
attributes and
can be defined
for multiple
languages
Available for
objects and
fields in a
single
language
Available for
business
objects, and
parameters in
the language of
definition
Available through the
use of annotations
Field cardinality
defining how
collections of
objects or primitives
can be handled
Field cardinality
constraints and
verbalization for
handling
collections of
field values
Single
cardinality at
a field level
although
objects can
be collections
Field cardinality
supported
Complex type
cardinality constraints
on field elements
Characteristic Rules Events PD IBM Integration
Designer / Schema

Events consider patterns of objects and usually need an array of objects of the same
structure. The fields are a subset that is used to determine the pattern, which means that they
should not be complex types (classes) or collections of values. Key fields should be added
that either:
Allow the objects to be correlated (for example, a Vehicle Identification Number allowing
different quotes for the same vehicle to be associated)
Allow other processing to augment the concept fields with information not provided in the
event (for example, having a quote ID that can retrieve information from a database).
Often, the keys from different objects need to be brought together to identify the patterns, so
a quote might include a driver’s full name, a Vehicle Identification Number, and quote ID fields
which allows identification to be based on different contexts. The nature of event processing
is that many objects must be held in memory at the same time, so wherever possible, the size
of the objects (number of fields) should be minimized.
Processes tend to have little emphasis on information, but focus on the sequence of activities
to be performed. Information that is added by those activities may be stored in databases or
in some cases stored in process state variables. Similarly, information presented to users
participating in activities are retrieved from databases or other services based on some key
process state variables.
For example, when processing a quote approval, it might be adequate to simply maintain the
quote ID of the quote. When an activity is undertaken, the subset of fields appropriate to that
activity can be obtained from the database, the activity undertaken, and the results stored
back to the database.
When integrating systems using this approach, the requirement is then about mapping or
augmenting the fields that are required from the fields that are provided. This capability can
easily be provided by ESB mediations or is often provided as a core capability of individual
products. In WebSphere ODM event processing, event object fields can be mapped to
business object fields directly or by using JavaScript functions. Process Designer web service
integrations have mapping tables that allow the web service parameters to be mapped into
process variables for the duration of an activity.
These different perspectives mean that attempts to unify the information model often result in
failure. The approaches often used within SOA start with a data dictionary that defines the
concepts and ways that they are expressed. They also describe the fields or characteristics to
be associated with each concept. This situation does not mandate that every representation
uses every field, but it does provide a basis for using common terminology when creating the
system-specific concepts.
2.6.2 Business object field primitives
Software technologies often provide an extensive number of ways of representing
information, especially the simple fields. In practice, there are a few primitive types that can
support most of the business requirements.

Table 2-2 describes the preferred primitive types in use and the recommended subset to
avoid the extensive mapping required for the individual fields.
Table 2-2 Information model field primitives
By using these field primitives, mapping of field values can often be undertaken automatically
by the products. This situation means that the mapping can concentrate on selecting the
fields that need to be included in the particular representation.
2.6.3 Domains and enumerations
Many information models can be built on the class and field constructs described earlier.
However, many information models require that only a limited range of values be used in a
field. This set of values is often termed an enumeration or domain. In the WODM Insurance
scenario, domains are used to represent many different fields, including the type of vehicle
(Sedan, Coupe, Pickup, and so on) or the type of coverage (comprehensive, liability, and so
on). Although the values in these domains might be fairly static, other domains might be much
more likely to change. Examples of this change could include vehicle makes and models or
even product classification systems.
These domain values usually have representations used in the solution and definitions for
what the value actually means. This meaning is important when making decisions, so
individual values often have a verbalization, allowing rules to compare the field value to
detect the condition intended by the rule author.
Domains normally reflect a range of possible values that may be used in the solution, which
usually has checks to ensure that only the values in the domain are handled correctly. As new
domains values are added, the solution provides the means to make sure that the solution
can handle those values.
Decisions that are made based on those values now need to be modified to reflect the
responses for the new values. This management of domain updates in decision management
is an important feature that needs to be considered in the information model. WebSphere
ODM does support various techniques for updating domain values, but it is often difficult to
maintain domain values across different system boundaries.
2.6.4 Variables
In the previous sections, we described the general structure of an information model and how
the characteristics of its concepts can be described. This description does not provide
information about the context or role of the concept in the solution or decision being made.
Type Rules Events PD IBM Integration
Designer /
Schema
String String String String xsd:string
Integer Integer Integer Integer xsd:int
Real Double Double Decimal xsd:double
Boolean Boolean Boolean Boolean xsd:boolean
Date Date DateTime Date xsd:date
Time Time DateTime Time xsd:dateTime

This context is defined by giving a concept a name or by defining a variable that describes
that particular concept.
In the WODM Insurance solution, a quote could refer to multiple drivers. The context must
distinguish between:
The driver applying for the quote
The main driver for a vehicle
The set of drivers for a vehicle
Providing named variables similar to these items makes the context far clearer when writing
rules for decisions.
Variables are used in a similar manner for correlating the patterns of events. In this case, a
variable holds a sequence of objects (of the same type, such as Quote) associated with
Events from the same context (for example, the main Driver full name).
When considering the analysis of decisions and the solution business performance, it is
important to define KPIs. These KPIs must have a context that defines what they are a
measure of, so they are examples of the use of variables in the information model.
Putting these recommendations together:
Variables should be used to identify concepts of interest in the solution or decision
making, such as the main driver.
The variables should represent a certain type of object, such as a driver.
The fields associated with the type of object should be defined in a data dictionary to
ensure consistent interpretation.
Each system representation of a variable should use the fields needed.
System variable fields should avoid complex types and arrays where possible.
Care should be taken when considering the use of domains for field values to ensure that
the values are interpreted correctly across the systems and can be extended when the
domains are updated.

Chapter 3. Decision design
This chapter describes how to use the business rule modeling and execution capabilities of
WebSphere ODM to build complex decision services. These decision services look at the
context of information submitted by an application and determine what should be the
response to that context according to an established business policy.
The approach is to create a model of the business context that gathers all of the necessary
pieces of information that are needed to:
Make the decision.
Decompose the overall decision process into a set or organized substeps.
Define each substep as a set of business rules that, when applicable in the context of
information, enriches that context with new information that contributes to the
final decision.
In WebSphere ODM, decisions are implemented by rule sets that are deployed to the Rule
Execution Server. Decision services can then be constructed that request the execution of the
decision on the Rule Execution Server.
3

3.1 Identifying business decisions
Decisions that can be implemented through business rules emerge from the application
requirements or the business process maps at the time labels or high-level descriptions are
applied to the different activities of the solution. Descriptions that use an action verb, such as
determine, check, calculate, evaluate, decide, and so on, that are applied to business objects
typically indicate the potential for a decision point.
Examples from the WODM Insurance scenario are the Validate quote request data,
Determine driver eligibility, and Compute quote pricing descriptions that appear in the
high-level design of either the Insurance website or the call center application.
Rule-based decisions are made using a stateless context of information. This context of
information should be complete before the decision is made and represents a snapshot of a
business situation at a certain time. This decision contrasts with event-based decisions that
yield their outcome from observing the evolution of context-based information over time.
Decisions interface with the outside world through a set of input and output parameters.
Decisions are invoked synchronously, with the caller waiting for the decision outcome before
proceeding (for more information, see 3.6, “Decision integration” on page 33). You are free to
process requests asynchronously (for example, using a message driven bean) to efficiently
perform tasks such as batch processing.

Chapter 3. Decision design 23
The outcome of a decision is a combination of flags and computed values, which result in a
set of actions taken on the side of the decision maker:
A flag returned by a decision influences the flow of the application code or the business
process. In the latter case, the activity that makes the decision is directly followed by a
gateway in the process map. The Data Validation and Eligibility determination fall in this
category (see the Check Eligibility activity in Figure 3-1).
A value computed by a decision is assigned to an attribute of one of the application or
process business objects. In the context of a business process, a decision that computes
a value may not be followed by a gateway, but the returned value directly participates in
the result of the business transaction. The Pricing determination of the WODM Insurance
scenario falls in this category (see the Calculate Pricing activity in Figure 3-1).
Figure 3-1 Decision points in the business process
Decisions commonly involve knowledge that belongs to business subject matter experts
(SMEs). Looking for human tasks that are followed by a gateway in a business process is a
good way to identify decision points. These decisions can be split into a straight-through
processing component that defers to business rules, and an exception component that
handles complex cases involving human expertise. As the decision point is better understood
and the set of rules is extended, the proportion of cases addressed by the rules versus the
one that should be addressed manually is growing.
Decisions are characterized by:
Their complexity: A valuable business decision represents a complex business operation.
This operation commonly involving hundreds of rules organized in a number of functional
subtasks that might involve the participation of several business departments and cover
multiple business dimensions, such as geographies, channels, products, and so on.

The large amount of context data they need to execute:
– As a corollary of the decision complexity and because it needs to make fine-grained
inferences based on many business dimensions (the channels, geography, and so on),
the decision rules need extensive information about the business situation it is
examining. The more context information about the borrower’s credit history or the line
items of the insurance claim is provided to the decision maker, the more accurate and
powerful the decision can be.
– Reference data: Decisions involving the validation of a business artifact often need a
catalog of prototypes and constraints to perform the validation process (for example,
the list of phones or calling plan available for a zip code).
The volatility of their definition: The definition of business policies changes often,
motivated by competitive or regulatory factors coming from outside the enterprise, or by
the needs to address new business situations (extend the decision footprint) or existing
situations (improve the decision quality).
Based on the first two characteristics, the business rules components embedded in BPM
platforms are not suited to define and manage complex business decisions. The data that is
passed through the activities of a business process is not detailed enough to make
complex decisions.
Also, externalizing decisions to a decision management system allows users to:
Agree on common terminology and vocabularies that can be used for decision making
across applications and business processes. This situation makes the decision rules
understandable and accessible across the organization.
Make the decisions reusable across applications and business processes. As more
business processes are automated and applications are modernized, common decision
services are identified and can be shared through a decision management system. This
situation is the case in the Web Quote application, where the Eligibility and Pricing
operations are shared by the website and the call center. Decisions are commonly
encapsulated and exposed as web services, which allows easy reusability and integration.
Clearly decouple the lifecycle and the governance of the decisions from the lifecycle of the
application or business process. Indeed, the motivations and the stakeholders that drive
changes in the decisions are different from the aims of processes. Also, decision changes
(business policy, market shifts, new regulatory requirements, and so on) tend to be more
frequent than application or process changes.
During the decision point identification process, although the details of the data that are
needed as input to the decision are often unclear and incomplete, the outcome of the decision
should be well-defined, as it directly influences the continuation of the application or business
process execution. The precise input needed by the decision is determined while harvesting
the business rules and building the business object model, as described in 3.2, “Defining the
domain of discourse for the rules” on page 24.
3.2 Defining the domain of discourse for the rules
After the set of decision points needed by the solution is decided, the Rule Projects that
provide the implementation of the different decisions can be created. The starting point for the
development of a Rule Project is to identify the conceptual object model that supports the
representation of the context data for the decision and also captures the decision response.

The discovery and organization of the conceptual object model is an activity that is
concomitant with the harvesting of some initial business rules that apply to it. Harvesting rules
prompts the definition of the business terms and facts that are needed to structure the object
model. Conversely, structuring the terms and facts in an object model has an impact on how
the rules are eventually written.
It is a best practice to define the conceptual object model as a UML class model. This action
facilitates the iterative design that is bound to occur during the early phases of the model
construction, and also makes the design task more approachable and manageable by a
business analyst.
In the WODM Insurance application, the three decisions rely on a common object model
because all the business rules revolve around the context of an AutoQuoteRequest. The
model is organized hierarchically, based on the concepts illustrated in Figure 3-2.
Figure 3-2 AutoQuoteRequest model
The conceptual object model should be designed to accommodate two (often conflicting)
characteristics: Cover all the details needed to make the decision while staying
understandable to the business users. Therefore, the model can end up being large and
complex, and it must be instrumented and adapted for the business users.
In most cases, the object model acted upon by a rule-based decision is much larger and
demands more details than the business objects that are managed by the business process
or the events.

Conversely, the object model is much less complex than industry standard models such as
ACORD and MISMO, which tend to be all encompassing and are better suited to exchange
information across systems or enterprise boundaries.
3.2.1 Tailoring the model for the business users
After a first workable version of the conceptual model is available, it can be transformed into
an eXecution Object Model (XOM), which is a set of Java classes or an XML Schema. If a
UML tool is used to design the conceptual object model, this transformation is
straightforward. The XOM represents the model of the data that is passed to the decision
when it is executed. The rules are applied to this model.
To make the rule writing activity intuitive for the Business Users, a Business Object Model
(BOM) is built on top of the XOM. The BOM allows you to associate verbalizations with
classes, attributes, and methods from the XOM. It also allows you to mask elements from the
XOM that are technical and are not directly relevant to rule authoring, and it allows you to add
some business terms to the BOM that are derived from the combination of attributes and
operations from the XOM.
Using in Rule Designer, A BOM in a Rule Project is defined by someone in an IT role or a
business analyst with enough technical background and experience in
object-oriented modeling.
In the AutoQuoteResponse BOM class example shown in Figure 3-3, the
GlobalAdjustmentsList and the MessagesList attributes come from the associated
AutoQuoteResponse XSD complex type, which carries back the outcome of the response to
the decision.
Figure 3-3 AutoQuoteResponse BOM class structure
However, these attributes are not directly relevant to the business person who writes the
pricing rule. The business person wants to be able to “add a dollar adjustment” or “add a
percent adjustment” to the quote while adding a justification for doing so.

The BOM editor of Rule Designer empowers you to:
Make placeholders that are not directly relevant to the business (for example,
GlobalAdjustmentList and MessageList) invisible by not verbalizing them (Figure 3-4).
Attributes that do not need to be used in rule project artifacts should not be part of the
BOM. Attributes that are in the BOM, but not verbalized, can be used in technical artifacts,
such as functions or technical rules, which are written against the structure of the
BOM classes.
Create business level actions (addDollarAdjustment and addPercentAdjustment) that use
underlying XOM class placeholders (Figure 3-5).
Figure 3-4 Not verbalizing attributes that are not needed by the business rule authors
Figure 3-5 Creating business level operations in the BOM
Deep hierarchies of classes in the XOM may lead to complex expressions being needed in
business rules. One role of the BOM is to simplify terminology. For example, a driver could
have an Address type field with a State field. This situation means that rules that make
decisions based on the state of residence would need to be expressed as:
If the state of the address of the driver is “CA” then…
This situation can be confusing, so in the BOM representation of the driver, you could include
a state of residence virtual field that leads to more understandable rules, such as:
If the driver resides in “CA” then…

3.2.2 Sharing a common model across decisions
Because all the decisions in the WODM Insurance application are using the same BOM, a
common rule project named AutoInsuranceQuotingBOM is dedicated to the BOM definition,
and does not contain any rules. See Figure 3-6.
Figure 3-6 Common insurance BOM isolated in a rule project
The three rule projects that correspond to our three decisions reference this BOM project so
that they can use it in the definition of the rule artifacts. Figure 3-7 shows the reference from
the Eligibility rule project to the AutoInsuranceQuotingBOM project.
Figure 3-7 Sharing the common BOM through a project reference

The project organization is shown in Figure 3-8.
Figure 3-8 Shared BOM
In the WODM Insurance application, the common BOM includes the model for the outcome of
the three decisions. The class ValidationResponse is associated with the DataValidation
decision, the class EligibilityResponse with Eligibility, and the class AutoQuoteResponse with
Pricing.
The BOM can be composed of multiple BOM entries, and you could have:
Excluded the classes ValidationResponse, EligibilityResponse, and AutoQuoteResponse
from the BOM defined by the AutoInsuranceQuotingBOM project.
Defined a BOM entry in each of the decision project, containing only the response class
relevant to that decision.
The goal of this practice is obviously to place exactly the set of concept and operations where
they belong and the benefit is to not bother the business user with concepts and operations
that are irrelevant to a specific decision.
AutoInsuranceQuotingBOM
DataValidation Eligibility Pricing

The resulting design is shown in Figure 3-9.
Figure 3-9 Shared BOM with local BOM entries extensions
3.3 Establishing the decision signature
After the Business Object Model is defined, the decision signature is established by defining
the interface of the decision to the outside world. That is, what data does the decision need as
input and what data it returns as the output of the decision. This interface is defined by the
ruleset parameters associated with the rule project (Figure 3-10).
The type of the ruleset parameters is drawn from the set of classes defined in the BOM.
Therefore, part of the XOM and BOM design activities is to plan for classes that are used as
input and output parameters.
Figure 3-10 Pricing project ruleset parameters
AutoInsuranceQuotingBOM
DataValidation Eligibility Pricing

As described in 3.1, “Identifying business decisions” on page 22, the outcome of a decision is
usually a collection of flags or computed values, often completed by a collection of messages
that gives insight into the reasons for the decision. It is then the responsibility of the invoker to
process the flags and use the computed values as needed.
For example, the DataValidation and Eligibility decisions focus is on determining a flag value,
which is reflected in their output parameters, the Validated and the Eligible flags. See
Figure 3-11and Figure 3-12.
Figure 3-11 DataValidation output parameter
Figure 3-12 Eligibility output parameter
3.4 Decomposing the decision and orchestrating the subtasks
A complex decision is composed of multiple substeps. So, before you create individual rules,
you need to model the decomposition of the decision into substeps and organize the
sequencing of the substeps through a flow.
Each substep is usually a group of rules that revolve around a common business criterion.
For example, the Eligibility decision performs a group of validations based on the driver’s age,
one based on the driver’s perceived risk, and one based on the concept of profile, which is
the aggregation of multiple characteristics of the driver. The resulting groups are defined as
rule packages (Figure 3-13).
Figure 3-13 Rule packages decomposition
The next step is to place the functional groups of rules into a sequence using a rule flow.

For decisions that perform a validation such as Eligibility, the common rule flow pattern
(Figure 3-14) is a cascade of rule tasks associated with a rule package, in which, after each
task, the value of the output flag is tested. If the task detects an invalid state, the execution
terminates; otherwise, it continues to the next group of validations.
Figure 3-14 Eligibility rule flow
For decisions that perform a computation, such as Pricing, the rule flow is decomposed into a
set of tasks that represent the different steps of the computation (Base Premium, Local
Adjustments, and Global Adjustments for Pricing). There is also some branching that
determines which of the steps are needed for the request context.
3.5 Authoring business rules
With the decomposition and orchestration of the different steps of the decision in place, the
individual business rules can now be specified in the rule package they belong to. Rule
authoring is performed by the Business users using the Decision Center.
The business rules are written to recognize a pattern in the context of information provided to
the decision. When the pattern is recognized by the rule conditions, a set of actions is applied
by the rule.
Although the actions can correspond to an arbitrary snippet of code, they usually assign or
update the value of an attribute that contributes to the decision response. The goal of the
Eligibility decision, for example, decides whether the insurance application should be
accepted or rejected. By default, the application’s eligibility flag is set to “Eligible” and the goal
of the rules is to recognize the conditions under which the application is “Ineligible” (or should
go through a manual review process) and mark it as such.

The simplest metaphor to express a rule is an Action Rule, which is a simple if-then entity.
Figure 3-15 shows an example of such as rule in the context of the Eligibility decision, which
rejects the application for a driver who is too young. This rule belongs to the Age Check rule
task defined in the rule flow.
Figure 3-15 Action rule definition
The rule action is designed to set the eligibility flag of the application to Ineligible and record
an explanation message. Its verbalization, defined through the Business Object Model,
makes its intent clear to the Business user.
When multiple rules share a template of conditions and actions, they can be grouped in a
more concise metaphor, which is the decision table, such as the one shown in Figure 3-16.
This decision table belongs to the Profile rule task defined in the rule flow.
Figure 3-16 Decision table definition
3.6 Decision integration
A ruleset encapsulates the rule artifacts that compose a decision. A ruleset is extracted from
a rule project and its dependencies, and is associated with a RuleApp, which can group
multiple rulesets. In the WODM Insurance example, a single RuleApp groups all the decisions
used in the solution, that is, the decisions used for underwriting (Data Validation, Eligibility,
and Pricing) and decisions made in reaction to identified situations
(CustomerAcqusitionPromotions). After the RuleApp entity is deployed to the Rule Execution
Server, the decisions are available for invocation.

A common way to expose a decision to potential clients is through a decision web service. A
complex business decision usually requires a significant amount of context information to be
properly executed and automated. There is often a relationship between the amount of
information that is made available to the decision rules and the accuracy of the decision, and
the extent of the business situations it can address.
For example, in a first approach to the decision implementation, you can decide that having
only the number of accidents and tickets of a driver available for the rules is enough to decide
the driver’s eligibility for a quote.
This situation is the case of the rules for the Eligibility decision of the WODM Insurance
application when assessing whether a driver presents high risks. However, you might realize
that this approach yields a crude decision that ends up routing many quote requests to the
manual review process.
You can later decide to refine the decision and use a more precise snapshot of the driver risk,
such as a Motor Vehicle Report (MVR), which provides a detailed history of the driver’s
tickets, with dates and severity. This refinement empowers you to write more discriminating
business rules. These actions are a part of the iterative and incremental approach to the
development of a business decision, which starts with a simplified version and incrementally
adds the handling of more cases.
One direct consequence of this incremental approach is from the decision web service design
point of view. Although the definition of the interface is stable over time, the definitions of the
ruleset parameters evolve as the footprint and the complexity of the decision increases. We
must enrich the data that is received by the decision web service to execute the rules.
This enrichment cannot be performed from within the ruleset execution, as best practices of
rule execution dictate that the rule engine should not perform any outside system call during
its execution. Using this best practice avoids having a rule engine instance idling while
waiting for the external system call to complete.
Enrichment should thus be performed before the invocation of the ruleset execution, through
for example, call to data services within the implementation of a custom web-service. As a
result, the WSDL of the custom web service that provides the decision operations is stable,
referencing mostly business object keys and light context information, while the data needed
for the ruleset parameters is gathered by the service operation.
We can initially use the Hosted Transparent Decision Service (HTDS) deployment facility of
the Rule Execution Server to quickly make the decision services available to their consumers.
The HTDS can then be replaced by a custom web service that is enriching the data provided
by the service input before performing the ruleset invocation.
3.7 Roles, responsibilities, and decision development lifecycle
The initial development of a business rules based decision is the shared responsibility of
three main roles:
The Business Policy Manager is the source for the business rules and the business terms.
This person is responsible for describing the intent of the business policy, the different
business dimensions involved, the KPIs against which the decision can be measured, and
how the policy is decomposed down to the rules level. This person is also responsible for
providing concrete scenarios that can be run through the rules.

The Business Policy Analyst is responsible for establishing and organizing the business
terms into a usable business object model, and harvesting, analyzing, and classifying the
rules. This person plays the central role in defining the BOM, capturing the rule flow and a
characteristic sample of rules that goes in each task of the flow.
The IT Developer is responsible for establishing the infrastructure of the rule project and
enriching the XOM or BOM with utility functions to support business operation. This
person is also in charge of preparing the decision for integration, implementing, for
example, the decision services that are exposed.
The Business Policy Analyst has a pivotal role in the development of the decision. This
person works with the Business Process Analyst for the identification of the decision point.
After the decision points and their interfaces are agreed upon, the Business Policy Analyst
can work with minimal need for synchronization with the business process development
cycle.
The Business Policy Analysts provide the IT Developer with the requirements for the rule
project instrumentation (for example, changes to the rule model, dynamic domains,
vocabulary extensions, and so on) to best support rule authoring from a business point
of view.
The overall development of the decision follows an agile and iterative approach. The best
such approach is captured by the Agile Business Rules Development process described in
detail in Agile Business Rule Development: Process, Architecture, and JRules Examples by
Boyer, et al.

A high-level view of this process is presented in Figure 3-17.
Figure 3-17 Agile Business Rules Development (ABRD) process
This process is characterized by a decomposition in a sequence of phases (Harvesting and
Prototyping typically lasts for one week each, Building for two weeks, and Enhancing long
enough to arrive to a complete version of the decision). Each phase includes iterations for a
set of activities, with a goal to deliver a workable set of rules (on paper for the Harvesting
phase, then in Rule Designer for Prototyping and Building, and eventually in Decision Center
for Enhancing).
Rule
Discovery
Rule
Analysis
Rule
Discovery
Rule
Analysis
Rule
Authoring
Rule
Discovery
Rule
Analysis
Rule
Authoring
Rule
Validation
Rule
Deployment
Rule
Deployment
Rule
Authoring
Rule
Validation
Harvesting
Partial Rule Set
PrototypingBuildingIntegratingEnhancing

Chapter 4. Situation identification and
response development
This chapter describes how to use the event processing capabilities of WebSphere ODM to
identify specific situations of interest based on events from a broad range of applications and
sources. It also describes how to create actions that make the solution respond to those
situations in the wanted manner.
This decision logic is defined in Event Projects, which are initially created by IT Architects and
developers. After the events, actions, data connector, and business objects are defined and
verbalized, Business Users can write event rules and event rule groups that define the
situations of interest and the appropriate actions to take in those situations.
4

4.1 Situations and events
Before describing the design approach, it is worth describing the relationship between a
situation and an event. An event is usually a measurable physical occurrence that can be
represented as a message in the solution. In the WODM Insurance solution, we use events to
define discrete system or customer occurrences, such as offering, accepting, or rejecting
a quote.
Conversely, a situation is not directly measurable. It defines a set of circumstances that might
arise in the solution. It is this defined pattern that makes it useful to the business, as the
business can use rules to define both:
When that situation is deemed to occur
The appropriate action to take when it does occur
The approach taken in WebSphere ODM is to correlate related events to build up a stateful
context over time and then use event rules to make a decision based on that stateful context
to determine the course of action to take. This Detect - Respond paradigm is the basis for
defining event rules described in this section.
In some cases, it is useful to split this paradigm into two parts. The first part correlates related
events to build up a stateful context over time and then uses event rules to simply identify a
situation. The situation is represented as a special action that is immediately injected back
into the event processing as a synthetic event. Whenever a situation is identified, there is an
event that occurs that can be used to trigger the response that is required. After the situation
is identified in this way, another set of event rules may determine the course of action to take
whenever the situation occurs.
This chapter describes a recommended set of steps to design an event project that delivers
this situational decision making behavior.
4.2 Defining situations of interest
A recommended starting point for an Event Project is for the business users to identify the
initial business situations that are of interest in the solutions. This action determines the
events that need to be considered and the actions that are required to respond to those
situations. The definition and integration of the situations as synthetic events is undertaken by
an IT Architect or Developer role working in Event Designer to meet the specifications
provided by the Business User.
In the WODM Insurance scenario, there are two major situations of interest to the business:
Multichannel customers represents those customers that seem keen to buy insurance and
have looked for the best price on both the website and call center. If these customers can
be encouraged to use a new multichannel insurance policy, support costs would be lower
and a discount can be offered to encourage them to buy.
Customer acquisition represents those situations where a good customer prospect (low
risk with a potential revenue stream) seems to be leaving or rejecting the quotes. In these
situations, WODM Insurance can offer a personalized promotion that is tailored to the
customer quote request to encourage the customer to close the deal.

Chapter 4. Situation identification and response development 39
Each situation of interest can be captured as a synthetic event in Event Designer, if an action
that can be invoked to identify that the situation occurred and an event can be used to trigger
the response to the situation. Figure 4-1 shows the initial representation of these situations in
Event Designer.
Figure 4-1 Situation definition in Event Designer as synthetic events
To allow the situation to be used easily by a Business User in their event rules, a natural
language verbalization is provided (Figure 4-2).
Figure 4-2 Situation verbalization
At this stage, the situations are conceptual and the design needs to concentrate on the
information needed to represent and identify the situation. This process is undertaken
through business objects.
4.3 Identifying business objects and the correlation context
The basis for identifying situations is to correlate related but different events and recognize
the patterns that are appearing over time. Correlation must be based on a particular piece of
information provided in an event. To hide the details of the event implementations from the
business user, Information is mapped out of the events into business objects whose fields can
be used to define the basis for event correlation and filtering when identifying the situations.
When identifying business objects, it is likely that these same objects appear in the events
that are used to populate them and the actions that are populated in response to a situation.
Therefore, there are three sorts of objects:
Business objects are verbalized and available to the business user. They can hold the
correlated state over multiple events and represent the context in which the interaction
takes place.

Making Better Decisions Using IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management

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Making Better Decisions Using IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management