Decision Management and Business Rules Management platforms cater to the needs of business oriented roles (business analysts, business owners, etc.) involved in operational decisions. But they also need to take into account the constraints of the enterprise and its technology environment.

Among those constraints are the ones that involve integrations. This is the first series of posts exploring the requirements, approaches and trade-offs for decision management platform integrations with the enterprise eco-system.

Why integrate?

Operational decisions do not exist in a vacuum. They

• are embedded in other systems, applications or business processes
• provide operational decisions that other systems carry out
• are core contributors to the business performance of automated systems
• are critical contributors to the business operations and must be under tight control
• must remain compliant, traced and observed
• yet must remain flexible for business-oriented roles to make frequent changes to them

Each and every one of these aspects involves more than just the decision management platform. Furthermore, more than one enterprise system provides across-application support for these. Enterprises want to use such systems because they reduce the cost and risk involved in managing applications.
For example, authentication across multiple applications is generally centralized to allow for a single point of control on who has access to them. Otherwise, each application implements its own and managing costs and risk skyrocket.

In particular, decision management platforms end up being a core part of the enterprise applications, frequently as core as databases. It may be easy and acceptable to use disconnected tools to generate reports, or write documents; but it rarely is acceptable to not manage part of core systems. In effect, there is little point in offering capabilities which cannot cleanly fit into the management processes for the enterprise; the gain made by giving business roles control of the logic is negated by the cost and risk in operating the platform.

In our customer base, most do pay attention to integrations. Which integrations are involved, and with which intensity, depends on the customer. However, it is important to realize that the success of a decision management platform for an enterprise also hinges on the quality of its integrations to its systems.

Which integrations matter?

We can group the usual integrations for decision management platforms in the following groups:

• Authentication and Access Control
• Implementation Support
• Management Audit
• Life-cycle management
• Execution
• Execution Audit
• Business Performance Tracking

Authentication and access control integrations are about managing which user has access to the platform, and, beyond that, to which functionality within the platform.
Implementation support integrations are those that facilitate the identification, implementation, testing and optimization of decisions within the platform: import/export, access to data, etc.
Management audit integrations enable enterprise systems to track who has carried out which operations and when within the platform.
Life-cycle management integrations are those that support the automated or manual transitioning of decisions through their cycles: from inception to implementation and up to production and retirement.

Similarly, execution integrations enable the deployment of executable decisions within the context of the enterprise operational systems: business process platforms, micro-services platforms, event systems, etc. Frequently, these integrations also involve logging or audit systems.
Finally, performance tracking integrations are about using the enterprise reporting environment to get a business-level view of how well the decisions perform.

Typically, different types of integrations interest different roles within the enterprise. The security and risk management groups will worry about authentication, access control and audit. The IT organization will pay attention to life-cycle management and execution. Business groups will mostly focus on implementation support and performance tracking.

The upcoming series of blog posts will focus on these various integrations: their requirements, their scope, their challenges and how to approach them.

In the meantime, you can read the relevant posts in the “Best Practices” series:

• Best Practices Series: Release Management
• Best Practices Series: Manage your decisions in Production

Learn more about Decision Management and Sparkling Logic’s SMARTS™ Data-Powered Decision Manager