Making Better Decisions Using Ibm Websphere Operational Decision Management

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® RedpapersTM 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.

IBM® Operational Decision Management (ODM) is a family of products used by IT and business users to create and manage business decision logic throughout their organization. This IBM RedpaperTM publication offers advice on all aspects of performance, including hardware, architecture, authoring, quality of service, monitoring, and tuning. The advice is based upon preferred practices and experience gained from real customer situations. This paper is aimed at a wide ODM audience, including IBM employees and customers, and provides useful information to both new and experienced users. Although the product family is known as IBM WebSphere® Operational Decision Management (WODM), at V8.0, with V8.0.1 the the name is now simply IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM). The performance information in this paper is based on V8.0 of this product family and differences introduced with V8.0.1 are pointed out.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication presents decision governance topics from a theoretical discussion perspective and then goes on to make links to the practical aspects of applying these concepts by using the IBM Operational Decision Manager platform. This book explores enterprise governance context to clarify the bigger picture for how governance is carried out across the enterprise. You will also find this book valuable if you are using or considering the usage of an operational decision management system (or business rules management system (BRMS)) in your organization. You might be following a standard such as the The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) Architecture Development Method (ADM) and decided to use a decision management system that lets the business people take control of the business decisions that are made by the technology systems in their organization. This book also describes Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT), which provides a comprehensive framework that assists enterprises in achieving their objectives for the governance and management of enterprise IT. Another topic of great importance that this book covers is the relationship to ITIL, a public framework that describes best practices in IT Service Management. Of the five stages of the ITIL lifecycle, this book focuses on the objectives and processes of the Service Transition stage.

Systems of record (SORs) are engines that generates value for your business. Systems of engagement (SOE) are always evolving and generating new customer-centric experiences and new opportunities to capitalize on the value in the systems of record. The highest value is gained when systems of record and systems of engagement are brought together to deliver insight. Systems of insight (SOI) monitor and analyze what is going on with various behaviors in the systems of engagement and information being stored or transacted in the systems of record. SOIs seek new opportunities, risks, and operational behavior that needs to be reported or have action taken to optimize business outcomes. Systems of insight are at the core of the Digital Experience, which tries to derive insights from the enormous amount of data generated by automated processes and customer interactions. Systems of Insight can also provide the ability to apply analytics and rules to real-time data as it flows within, throughout, and beyond the enterprise (applications, databases, mobile, social, Internet of Things) to gain the wanted insight. Deriving this insight is a key step toward being able to make the best decisions and take the most appropriate actions. Examples of such actions are to improve the number of satisfied clients, identify clients at risk of leaving and incentivize them to stay loyal, identify patterns of risk or fraudulent behavior and take action to minimize it as early as possible, and detect patterns of behavior in operational systems and transportation that lead to failures, delays, and maintenance and take early action to minimize risks and costs. IBM® Operational Decision Manager is a decision management platform that provides capabilities that support both event-driven insight patterns, and business-rule-driven scenarios. It also can easily be used in combination with other IBM Analytics solutions, as the detailed examples will show. IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced, along with complementary IBM software offerings that also provide capability for systems of insight, provides a way to deliver the greatest value to your customers and your business. IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced brings together data from different sources to recognize meaningful trends and patterns. It empowers business users to define, manage, and automate repeatable operational decisions. As a result, organizations can create and shape customer-centric business moments. This IBM Redbooks® publication explains the key concepts of systems of insight and how to implement a system of insight solution with examples. It is intended for IT architects and professionals who are responsible for implementing a systems of insights solution requiring event-based context pattern detection and deterministic decision services to enhance other analytics solution components with IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced.

The IBM® Operational Decision Manager product family provides value to organizations that want to improve the responsiveness and precision of automated decisions. This decision management platform on IBM z/OS® provides comprehensive automation and governance of operational decisions that are made within mainframe applications. These decisions can be shared with other cross-platform applications, providing true enterprise decision management. This IBM Redbooks® publication makes the case for using Operational Decision Manager for z/OS and provides an overview of its components. It is aimed at IT architects, enterprise architects, and development managers looking to build rule-based solutions. Step-by-step guidance is provided about getting started with business rules by using a scenario-based approach. This book provides detailed guidelines for testing and simulation and describes advanced options for decision authoring. Finally, it describes and documents multiple runtime configuration options. This third edition, SG24-8014-02, of this IBM Redbooks publication updated the information presented in this book to reflect function available in IBM Operational Decision Manager for z/OS Version 8.7.1.

Abstract This IBM® Redbooks® publication introduces operational decision governance and describes in detail how to implement it using the IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) platform. ODM allows businesses to automate and manage day-to-day operational decisions. It provides an integrated repository and management components for line-of-business, subject-matter experts to directly participate in the definition and governance of rules-based decision logic, organized in decision services. Governance of changes to decision services is of particular importance and value. This book describes how organizations can choose between the built-in ODM decision governance framework or a custom governance based on manually managed branches. Related topics, such as access control, permissions and user management, are covered and give a full view on decision service governance. You will find this book valuable if you are using or considering the usage of an operational decision management system in your organization, either with ODM on-premises or ODM on Cloud offerings. This book was written to help assist the following target audience in applying Decision Management technology successfully: IT Project Managers need to understand how decision governance differs from IT Governance, and how ODM straddles both worlds to facilitate agile change. IT Technical Architects need to understand how to architect ODM to sit inside both the IT and business worlds. Business Analysts need to understand the processes for changing business policies using ODM Decision Center. Business Rule Development Teams need to understand the best way to structure rule projects for scalability and maintainability.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication presents decision governance topics from a theoretical discussion perspective and then goes on to make links to the practical aspects of applying these concepts by using the IBM Operational Decision Manager platform. This book explores enterprise governance context to clarify the bigger picture for how governance is carried out across the enterprise. You will also find this book valuable if you are using or considering the usage of an operational decision management system (or business rules management system (BRMS)) in your organization. You might be following a standard such as the The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) Architecture Development Method (ADM) and decided to use a decision management system that lets the business people take control of the business decisions that are made by the technology systems in their organization. This book also describes Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT), which provides a comprehensive framework that assists enterprises in achieving their objectives for the governance and management of enterprise IT. Another topic of great importance that this book covers is the relationship to ITIL, a public framework that describes best practices in IT Service Management. Of the five stages of the ITIL lifecycle, this book focuses on the objectives and processes of the Service Transition stage.

In today's competitive, always-on global marketplace, businesses need to be able to make better decisions more quickly. And they need to be able to change those decisions immediately in order to adapt to this increasingly dynamic business environment. Whether it is a regulatory change in your industry, a new product introduction by a competitor that your organization needs to react to, or a new market opportunity that you want to quickly capture by changing your product pricing. Decisions like these lie at the heart of your organization's key business processes. In this IBM® RedpaperTM publication, we explore the benefits of identifying and documenting decisions within the context of your business processes. We describe a straightforward approach for doing this by using a business process and decision discovery tool called IBM Blueworks LiveTM, and we apply these techniques to a fictitious example from the auto insurance industry to help you better understand the concepts. This paper was written with a non-technical audience in mind. It is intended to help business users, subject matter experts, business analysts, and business managers get started discovering and documenting the decisions that are key to their company's business operations.