Precise specification of business decisions and business rules
Decision Model and Notation (DMN) is a modeling language and notation for the precise specification of business decisions and business rules. DMN is easily readable by the different types of people involved in decision management. These include: business people who specify the rules and monitor their application; business analysts.
DMN is designed to work alongside BPMN and/or CMMN, providing a mechanism to model the decision-making associated with processes and cases. While BPMN, CMMN and DMN can be used independently, they were carefully designed to be complementary. Indeed, many organizations require a combination of process models for their prescriptive workflows, case models for their reactive activities, and decision models for their more complex, multi-criteria business rules. Those organizations will benefit from using the three standards in combination, selecting which one is most appropriate to each type of activity modeling. This is why BPMN, CMMN and DMN really constitute the “triple crown” of process improvement standards.
Using DMN to model your organizational decision-making will:
- help all stakeholders understand a complex domain of decision-making using easily readable diagrams
- provide a natural basis for discussion and agreement on the scope and nature of business decision-making
- reduce the effort and risk of decision automation projects through graphical decomposition of requirements
- allow business rules to be defined simply and reliably in unambiguous decision tables
- simplify development of decisioning systems using specifications that may be automatically validated and executed
- provide a structured context for the development and management of predictive analytic models
- enable the development of a library of reusable decision-making components.