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| <mainDescription><p>
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| Decision points are point of variability in the business process which makes decision on information data given as
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| input. A decision is a choice or a selection, is made after considerations, and results in action. When implementing
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| decision with software we are looking at operational decisions related to operations like eligibility, validation,
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| calculation, risk assessment, opportunity, etc... Those decisions involve worker's or subject matter experts'
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| knowledge. The logic for making a decision should not be locked and therefore can be externalized to a business rule
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| management system. The analysis of decision points start by the process analyst / business analyst working with Subject
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| Matter Experts to understand how decision are done on a piece of information.&nbsp;This analysis activity is done by
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| doing the process modeling, or the business use case modeling. The search for mental thinking verbs like analyze,
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| check, validate, evaluate, verify in the description of an activity can help identifying decision point, as well as
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| looking and understand how data&nbsp;are built. Looking at a business entity life cycle helps also identifying the
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| decisions applied to change its state.<br />
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| </p>
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| <p>
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| The type of decision will most likely be a reject or accept of the business event or flag it for future processing
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| downstream in the business process. The decision may also include some computational expressions to assign value to
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| attribute of the business transaction.
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| </p>
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| <p>
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| When there is a human task and conditional node you can expect to find decision point there. A human task can also
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| being sub decomposed in an automatic task which performs the main stream of decisioning and an exception task&nbsp;done
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| by a human expert. In most business process there is the existence of validation step to ensure data quality: those
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| steps are source for business rules.
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| </p>
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| <p>
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| <br />
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| It is recommended to define the interface of each decision point and then consider the implementation choice later.
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| Using rule engine technology is the best choice when business users want to change the business logic over time, to
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| enforce auditability, to trace the decisions done on a given business event. During the inception phase the project
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| team is doing business modeling activities which aim at describing the business process and decisions applied to any
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| business events supported by the application. Decision points are extracted at that moment and logged in the decision
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| point table
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| </p>
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| <p>
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| When designing by services, a decision service is business service making decisions, so linked to decision points. A
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| decision service can serve multiple decision points in a process, if they are sequentially related. Most likely a
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| decision point will be mapped to one decision service. The implementation can use a BRMS rule engine, to support ease
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| of change and adaptability. Decision service can be implemented in traditional software language, but will most likely
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| be more efficient in rule engine language, because over time new decision criteria will be done.<br />
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| <br />
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| The process of designing, implementing decision service should not be thought as a one shot deal. This is a process
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| which has to be managed over time, and well supported by a BRMS with the governance processes.
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| </p><br />
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