KNOWLEDGE AUTOMATION How to Implement Decision Management in Business Processes

Organizations are constantly searching for ways to make their business processes more effective, less costly, and more agile, with strategies increasingly involving three technologies: decision management; business process management systems (BPMS); and service-oriented architectures (SOA). Providing a methodology that allows companies to create a simple and clear approach for defining business decision needs, Knowledge Automation is your one-stop how-to guide to understanding the intersection of these technologies.

Sharing his twenty-five years of decision management experience, author and renowned industry expert Alan Fish presents a pragmatic and straightforward guide to help CFOs, CIOs, and technology managers use business rules and predictive analytics to optimize and automate small, high-volume business decisions. It describes Decision Requirements Analysis (DRA), a new, quick, and simple-to-use method for defining a set of business decisions and identifying all the information?business knowledge and data?required to make those decisions.

Examining the levels of a knowledge automation project, from the very top?the motivating business strategy?down to the techniques used to implement business knowledge in decision services, Knowledge Automation is your ultimate nontechnical guide to:

• How business processes can be redesigned to automate operational decision-making through the use of BPMS
• The most important technologies used for encapsulating business knowledge in decision services
• The principles of DRA and the Decision Requirements Diagram (DRD)?and how to run a structured workshop resulting in the creation of an automation-scoping document
• Using the DRD structure to scope, estimate, plan, and manage a project to implement a set of decision services

Exploring a simple method destined to become a standard technique in the business analysis and project management toolbox, Knowledge Automation explains how decisioning requirements can be represented in a single diagram and how the results of this analysis can be used to estimate delivery costs, manage projects efficiently, and facilitate system design.