BMM12 — Should BMM include business rules, decisions, both, or neither

At the BMI meeting on 10Dec07/Burlingame, there was a discussion on decision modeling and its relationship to existing modeling needs and standards. An action from the meeting was to raise the question of whether business decisions per se should be defined in BMM alongside, or instead of, business rules, or whether business motivation per se should be independent of business decisions (and/or business rules).

[From my understanding of BMM v1.2, processes are defined outside of BMM, and probably decisions are related more to processes and are guided by business rules / driven by policies.]

Caveat: this is going to be difficult to answer without a formal definition of a decision model. And I am not going to define one at this stage of discussions! J

However, it is probably safe to assume that a Decision Table (which I define as a table of conditional elements with some action as a conclusion, rather than the fact definition type of “Decision Table” that Donald was telling me is defined as a part of SBVR) is an instance of a Decision Model. And that you invoke decision tables (and services) in process activities in order to direct processes (and services). But decisions may be defined separately from process, of course, although their “execution” (manual or automated) context is probably always going to be in a process of some kind.

Disclaimer: this issue may be subject to revision as the terminology is refined.

2 cents of Comment: I think the answer is “yes, decisions are related to motivation but are not part of motivation”. I will leave to others the discussion on whether (SBVR type) business rules are part of motivation or a simply related to motivation.

Disposition: See issue 14188 for disposition