Decision management is emerging as an important capability for delivering agile business solutions. Decision management is not a solution in its own right, but must be integrated into the solutions or business processes that it supports. In this IBM® RedpapersTM publication, we describe the recommended best practices and integration concepts that use the business events, business rules, and other capabilities of IBM WebSphere® Operational Decision Management V7.5 (WebSphere ODM) to provide better decision making in those solutions and business processes.
IBM® Operational Decision Management (ODM) is a family of products used by IT and business users to create and manage business decision logic throughout their organization. This IBM RedpaperTM publication offers advice on all aspects of performance, including hardware, architecture, authoring, quality of service, monitoring, and tuning. The advice is based upon preferred practices and experience gained from real customer situations. This paper is aimed at a wide ODM audience, including IBM employees and customers, and provides useful information to both new and experienced users. Although the product family is known as IBM WebSphere® Operational Decision Management (WODM), at V8.0, with V8.0.1 the the name is now simply IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM). The performance information in this paper is based on V8.0 of this product family and differences introduced with V8.0.1 are pointed out.
The IBM® Operational Decision Manager product family provides value to organizations that want to improve the responsiveness and precision of automated decisions. This decision management platform on IBM z/OS® provides comprehensive automation and governance of operational decisions that are made within mainframe applications. These decisions can be shared with other cross-platform applications, providing true enterprise decision management. This IBM Redbooks® publication makes the case for using Operational Decision Manager for z/OS and provides an overview of its components. It is aimed at IT architects, enterprise architects, and development managers looking to build rule-based solutions. Step-by-step guidance is provided about getting started with business rules by using a scenario-based approach. This book provides detailed guidelines for testing and simulation and describes advanced options for decision authoring. Finally, it describes and documents multiple runtime configuration options. This third edition, SG24-8014-02, of this IBM Redbooks publication updated the information presented in this book to reflect function available in IBM Operational Decision Manager for z/OS Version 8.7.1.
In today's competitive, always-on global marketplace, businesses need to be able to make better decisions more quickly. And they need to be able to change those decisions immediately in order to adapt to this increasingly dynamic business environment. Whether it is a regulatory change in your industry, a new product introduction by a competitor that your organization needs to react to, or a new market opportunity that you want to quickly capture by changing your product pricing. Decisions like these lie at the heart of your organization's key business processes. In this IBM® RedpaperTM publication, we explore the benefits of identifying and documenting decisions within the context of your business processes. We describe a straightforward approach for doing this by using a business process and decision discovery tool called IBM Blueworks LiveTM, and we apply these techniques to a fictitious example from the auto insurance industry to help you better understand the concepts. This paper was written with a non-technical audience in mind. It is intended to help business users, subject matter experts, business analysts, and business managers get started discovering and documenting the decisions that are key to their company's business operations.
This IBM® Redbooks® publication introduces operational decision governance and describes in detail how to implement it using the IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) platform. ODM allows businesses to automate and manage day-to-day operational decisions. It provides an integrated repository and management components for line-of-business, subject-matter experts to directly participate in the definition and governance of rules-based decision logic, organized in decision services. Governance of changes to decision services is of particular importance and value. This book describes how organizations can choose between the built-in ODM decision governance framework or a custom governance based on manually managed branches. Related topics, such as access control, permissions and user management, are covered and give a full view on decision service governance. You will find this book valuable if you are using or considering the usage of an operational decision management system in your organization, either with ODM on-premises or ODM on Cloud offerings. This book was written to help assist the following target audience in applying Decision Management technology successfully: IT Project Managers need to understand how decision governance differs from IT Governance, and how ODM straddles both worlds to facilitate agile change. IT Technical Architects need to understand how to architect ODM to sit inside both the IT and business worlds. Business Analysts need to understand the processes for changing business policies using ODM Decision Center. Business Rule Development Teams need to understand the best way to structure rule projects for scalability and maintainability.
Systems of record (SORs) are engines that generates value for your business. Systems of engagement (SOE) are always evolving and generating new customer-centric experiences and new opportunities to capitalize on the value in the systems of record. The highest value is gained when systems of record and systems of engagement are brought together to deliver insight. Systems of insight (SOI) monitor and analyze what is going on with various behaviors in the systems of engagement and information being stored or transacted in the systems of record. SOIs seek new opportunities, risks, and operational behavior that needs to be reported or have action taken to optimize business outcomes. Systems of insight are at the core of the Digital Experience, which tries to derive insights from the enormous amount of data generated by automated processes and customer interactions. Systems of Insight can also provide the ability to apply analytics and rules to real-time data as it flows within, throughout, and beyond the enterprise (applications, databases, mobile, social, Internet of Things) to gain the wanted insight. Deriving this insight is a key step toward being able to make the best decisions and take the most appropriate actions. Examples of such actions are to improve the number of satisfied clients, identify clients at risk of leaving and incentivize them to stay loyal, identify patterns of risk or fraudulent behavior and take action to minimize it as early as possible, and detect patterns of behavior in operational systems and transportation that lead to failures, delays, and maintenance and take early action to minimize risks and costs. IBM® Operational Decision Manager is a decision management platform that provides capabilities that support both event-driven insight patterns, and business-rule-driven scenarios. It also can easily be used in combination with other IBM Analytics solutions, as the detailed examples will show. IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced, along with complementary IBM software offerings that also provide capability for systems of insight, provides a way to deliver the greatest value to your customers and your business. IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced brings together data from different sources to recognize meaningful trends and patterns. It empowers business users to define, manage, and automate repeatable operational decisions. As a result, organizations can create and shape customer-centric business moments. This IBM Redbooks® publication explains the key concepts of systems of insight and how to implement a system of insight solution with examples. It is intended for IT architects and professionals who are responsible for implementing a systems of insights solution requiring event-based context pattern detection and deterministic decision services to enhance other analytics solution components with IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced.
This completely refreshed IBM Redbooks® publication provides a detailed introduction to the latest capabilities for business event processing with IBM® CICS® V5. Events make it possible to identify and react to situations as they occur, and an event-driven approach, where changes are detected as they happen, can enable an application or an Enterprise to respond in a much more timely fashion. CICS event processing support was first introduced in CICS TS V4.1, and this IBM Redbooks® publication now covers all the significant enhancements and extensions which have been made since then. CICS Transaction Server for z/OS provides capabilities for capturing application events, which can give insight into the business activities carried out within CICS applications, and system events, which give insight into changes in state within the CICS system. Application events can be generated from existing applications, without requiring any application changes. Simple tooling allows both application and system events to be defined and deployed into CICS without disruption to the system, and the resulting events can be made available to a variety of event consumers. CICS events can amongst other things be used to drive processing within CICS, to populate dashboards that are provided by IBM Business Monitor and to search for patterns in events using IBM Operational Decision Manager. This IBM Redbooks® publication is divided into the following parts: Part 1 introduces event processing. We explain what it is and why you need it, and discuss how CICS makes it easy to both capture and emit events. Part 2 of the book focuses on the details of event processing with CICS. It gives a step-by-step guide to implementing CICS events, along with the environment used in the examples. Part 3 provides some guidance on governance and troubleshooting for CICS events, and describes how to integrate CICS events with IBM Operational Decision Manager and IBM Business Monitor. The Appendices include additional reference information.
In this IBM® Redbooks® publication we describe how to build an advanced business application from end to end. We use a fictional scenario to define the application, document the deployment methodology, and confirm the roles needed to support its development and deployment. Through step-by-step instructions you learn how to: - Define the project lifecycle using IBM Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management - Build a logical and physical data model in IBM InfoSphere® Data Architect - Confirm business rules and business events using IBM WebSphere® Operational Decision Management - Map a business process and mediation using IBM Business Process Manager - Use IBM Cognos® Business Intelligence to develop business insight In addition, we articulate a testing strategy using IBM Rational® Quality Manager and deployment options using IBM Workload Deployer. Taken together, this book provides comprehensive guidance for building and testing a solution using core IBM Rational, Information Management, WebSphere, Cognos and Business Process Management software. It seeks to demystify the notion that developing and deploying advanced solutions is taxing. This book will appeal to IT architects and specialists who seek straightforward guidance on how to build comprehensive solutions. They will be able to adapt these materials to kick-start their own end-to-end projects.
This Redpaper introduces the integration between two IBM products that you might like to consider when implementing a modern agile solution on your Z systems. The document briefly introduces Operational Decision Manager on z/OS and Machine learning on z/OS. In the case of Machine Learning we focus on the aspect of real-time scoring models and how these can be used with Business Rules to give better decisions. Note: Important changes since this document was written: This document was written for an older release of Operational Decision Manager for z/OS (ODM for z/OS). ODM for z/OS 8.9.1 required the writing of custom Java code to access a Watson Machine Learning for z/OS Scoring Service (this can be seen in ). Since that time ODM for z/OS version 8.10.1 has been released and much improves the integration experience. Integrating the two products no longer requires custom Java code. Using ODM for z/OS 8.10.1 or later you can use an automated wizard in the ODM tooling to: Browse and select a model from Watson Machine Learning Import the Machine Learning data model into your rule project Automatically generate a template rule that integrates a call to the Watson Machine Learning scoring service Download and read this document for: Individual introductions to ODM for z/OS and Machine learning Discussions on the benefits of using the two technologies together Information on integrating if you have not yet updated to ODM for z/OS 8.10.1 For information about the machine learning integration in ODM for z/OS 8.10.1 see IBM Watson Machine Learning for z/OS integration topic in the ODM for z/OS 8.10.x Knowledge Center
Today many organizations face challenges when developing a realistic plan or schedule that provides the best possible balance between customer service and revenue goals. Optimization technology has long been used to find the best solutions to complex planning and scheduling problems. A decision-support environment that enables the flexible exploration of all the trade-offs and sensitivities needs to provide the following capabilities: Flexibility to develop and compare realistic planning and scheduling scenarios Quality sensitivity analysis and explanations Collaborative planning and scenario sharing Decision recommendations This IBM® Redbooks® publication introduces you to the IBM ILOG® Optimization Decision Manager (ODM) Enterprise. This decision-support application provides the capabilities you need to take full advantage of optimization technology. Applications built with IBM ILOG ODM Enterprise can help users create, compare, and understand planning or scheduling scenarios. They can also adjust any of the model inputs or goals, and fully understanding the binding constraints, trade-offs, sensitivities, and business options. This book enables business analysts, architects, and administrators to design and use their own operational decision management solution.
