Business Process Management (BPM) and its life cycle activities – design, modeling, execution, monitoring and optimization of business processes – have become a crucial part in business management.
Most processes and business process models incorporate decisions of some kind. Decisions are typically based upon a number of business (decision) rules that describe the premises and possible outcomes of a specific situation. Typical decisions are: creditworthiness of the customer in a financial process, claim acceptance in an insurance process, eligibility decisions in social security, etc. Since these decisions guide the activities and workflows of all process stakeholders (participants, owners), they should be regarded as first-class citizens in Business Process Management. Sometimes, the entire decision can be included as a decision activity or as a service (a decision service). The process then handles a number of steps, shows the appropriate decision points and represents the path to follow for each of the alternatives.
Business decisions are important, but are often hidden in process flows, process activities or in the head of employees (tacit knowledge), so that they need to be discovered using state-of-art intelligent techniques. Decisions can be straightforward, based on a number of simple rules, or can be the result of complex analytics (decision mining). Moreover, in a large number of cases, a particular business process does not just contain decisions, but the entire process is about making a decision. The major purpose of a loan process e.g., or an insurance claim process, etc., is to prepare and make a final decision. The process shows different steps, models the communication between parties, records the decision and returns the result.
It is not considered good practice to model the detailed decision paths in the business process model. Separating rules and decisions from the process simplifies the process model (separation of concerns). Using this workshop we try to extend the reach of the BPM audience towards the decisions and rules community and increase the integration between different modeling perspectives. In this respect the approval of the new OMG DMN (Decision Model and Notation) standard enables this cooperation between process and decision modeling.
This is the fourth edition of the workshop. For the previous edition, see http://feb.kuleuven.be/demimop15
