Design of Clinical Trials for Treatment of Pain, Development of Clinical Trials, Selected Qualitative Methods, Within-Patient Studies: Cross-over Trials & n-of-1 Studies, Clinical Economics, etc.
Substitute a standard web services interface for a speaking tube, a business rules management system for his encyclopedic knowledge of policies and regulations, data mining or predictive analytics for his customer knowledge and adaptive control for his experimentation and you have Decision Management. The Answerer but on an industrial scale.
Let’s start by recapping decisions services. Decision services are services, generally stateless ones, that answer business questions for other services. Decision Services typically have no side effects so they can be called whenever they are needed without the caller worrying that something will change in the system. This means that database updates, event generation or other actions taken as a result of the decision are taken by the caller not by the Decision Service. This is not 100% true but works as a general rule. To work, Decision Services need to contain all the logic and algorithms necessary to make the decision correctly.
Rob sees three key areas where rules can help:
Tighter warranty controls
Claims processing is improved because financial limits, detailed coverage types, materials return and more can be automated and rapidly changed when necessary. The rules also allow “what-if” testing and impact analysis.
Better built vehicles
The decision making is tracked very closely thanks to rules so you can analyze specific repair types, specific VINs and so on. More effective parts return and generally better information also contribute.
Lower cost repairs
Rules allow goodwill repairs, labor-only repairs and specific kinds of repairs to be managed very precisely. Rules-driven decisioning can reduce the variation of costs between dealers and help intervene, rejecting or editing claims that seem overly expensive. The ability of rules to deploy data mining and predictive analytics can also really help here.
JT has posted his view on rules and decisions and how they relate. Given that James talks more about services than events, I thought it would be worth reviewing his post from both a Complex Event Processing and a TIBCO BusinessEvents event processing platform perspective.
”Decision Services:
Support business processes by making the business decisions that allow a process to continue.
Support event processing systems by adding business decisions to event correlation decisions (they are often called Decision Agents in this context).
Allow crucial and high-maintenance parts of legacy enterprise applications to be externalized for reuse and agility.
Can be plugged into a variety of systems using Enterprise Service Bus approaches.”
It strikes me that many companies who think they have either a unique process or a lot of process variations actually do not - they have a standard set of activities that must be assembled dynamically based on the circumstances, customer etc. This leads to a rules-first approach to defining the process and much simpler processes. This is particularly useful when you start considering case management processes where using the rules to determine what state the case has reached and what, therefore, is the right next step is a clearly better approach.
P. Eklund, X. Sun, D. Thomas, and D. Thomas. International Conference on Information Processing and the Management of Uncertainty (IPMU), page 345-350. (1994)
F. Badra, M. d'Aquin, J. Lieber, and T. Meilender. International Semantic Web Conference (Posters & Demos), volume 401 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, (2008)
W. Maass, and T. Kowatsch. 21st Bled eConference "eCollaboration: Overcoming Boundaries Through Multi-Channel Interaction" Proceedings, page 25-37. Bled, Slovenia, (2008)