IBM Operational Decision Manager

Introduction

• Operational Decision Manager (ODM) is a platform for capturing, automating and governing business decisions.

• Enables a business to respond to real-time data with intelligent, automated decisions.

• With ODM, IT and business users can manage the business decision logic that is used by operational systems within an organization.

Introduction

• In the form of business rules, the business logic can be packaged and called from the Application code/ESB as a decision service.

• Changes to the business policy do not require changes to the Application or Process code.

Operational Decision Manager components

Operational Decision Manager components

The Operational Decision Manager provides the below three components,

Decision Server: The Decision Server provides components for the Rule application development.

Decision Center: The Decision center is used for Rule management and Authoring.

Rules Execution Environment: The Rules Execution Environment provides an execution environment for the rules.

Decision Server

• The Decision Server provides an eclipse based tool, Rules Designer, for the development of the Rules.

Steps in Capturing the RuleThe process of capturing rules happens in two steps.

The first step consists in formalizing the vocabulary that is required to express the policy as a conceptual object model.

The second step consists in representing the logic of the business policy as if-then statements.

Decision Server

• A sample rule is shown below,

Decision Server

Execution object model (XOM)

• The execution object model (XOM) is the model against which you run the rules.

• XOM is the base implementation of the business object model (BOM).

Decision Server

Business object model (BOM)

• A BOM is implicitly mapped to a XOM of the same name.

• Every BOM element (business element) must have a corresponding XOM element (execution element).

Decision Center

• The Decision center provides separate consoles for the business users and the administrators,

Decision Center Business Console: The business console allow business users to Author, test, govern and deploy decision services to the Rules Execution environment.

Decision Center Enterprise Console: The Enterprise console allows administrators or release manager’s option for managing the decision services or the Rule projects.

Decision Center

• With Decision Center, business users can manage decisions that are directly based on the organizational knowledge, with limited dependence on the IT department.

• Business and IT functions can work in collaboration. The entire organization can align in the implementation of the automated decisions.

Rule Execution Server

• Rule Execution Server provides the environment for running and monitoring the rule applications.

• A rule application is deployed to the Rule Execution Server as a Rule App. Each Rule App contains one or more rule sets, each corresponding to a decision.

Change management

• The following steps are involved in the change management,

Initial release is created by the Developers.

New release and a new activity is created by the Business Users.

When all the change activities that are related to the release are complete, the decision service is published to the Rules Execution server.

Testing Rules

• The Rules can be tested in the Decision center Business console using test data files.

• The Rules can also be tested from the Rules Execution Environment as REST/SOAP services.

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