IDIOM Decision Suite
IDIOM - Automating decisions so that you can automate more of your business processing
The IDIOM Decision Suite is a new class of tool designed to capture and test the specification of business decisions that support core business processes, and to then deploy those decisions to any required system, including third-party systems.
The IDIOM Decision Suite is focused on managing and deploying business decisions for which the logic is known to the business, not on processing large numbers of assertions into inferred results.
So is IDIOM a rules engine?
The IDIOM Decision Suite could be considered to be part of the 'Business Rules' family of tools. However we like to emphasise the differences rather than the similarities.
- IDIOM recognizes a decision as being a special kind of rule that is directly associated with a business outcome such as an approval, an action, or a price.
- It is the recognition of the importance of the ‘decision’ concept to business systems that is key - by explicitly recognising the role of decisions within computer systems, we can extract and manage them on a different life cycle to that of the mass of computer code, effectively breaking many of the constraints inherent to traditional systems approaches.
This decision ‘life-cycle’ is shorter, faster, and much more cost effective when managed by IDIOM, unleashing huge improvements in flexibility for the business.
For a more technical discussion, see the IDIOM Technology page.
Figure 1: The IDIOM Decision Suite
The IDIOM Decision Suite consists of the IDIOM Decision Manager (the desktop application visible to decision designers) and the IDIOM Decision Engine (an independent runtime component that implements the code generated by the Decision Manager).
The IDIOM Decision Manager has two major inputs:
- The specification of an interface between the IDIOM generated rules and the host system(s). This interface is described in the form of 'business objects' that will be supplied by the host system. Each 'business object' is described by an XML Schema.
- The knowledge of the business domain expert, as captured by the IDIOM Decision Manager.
The IDIOM Decision Manager will generate two major outputs:
- Logical English documentation of the Decisions and their Formulas for approval by the domain expert. This documentation forms a clear and explicit inventory of business decision making logic.
- Computer program source for any environment.