The mortgage industry – like most others looking to FinTech – have been exploring a variety of emerging technologies. All the usual suspects are included: artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation, blockchain, etc. Surprisingly, the exploration of APIs and microservices has been at the top of the list for many. Coming from a technical background I was somewhat surprised to hear these brought up. However, it became increasingly clear how important this concept truly is to the industry.

The financial services industry has long been a driver for technology innovation. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, volatile regulations, increased demands for compliance, and a requirement for transparency necessitate the ability to quickly create and easily manage decisions across systems.  This is a perfect use case for DMN and its incorporation in the evolution of disruptive “FinTech” systems has attempted to address some of these needs.  As the DMN standard is solidified, platforms become more mature, and more people are educated with respect to its power, we can move to examining more places where it can (and will) play a critical role.

As the number and maturity of platforms supporting the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard continues to grow, it is time to take a look at the third Conformance Level defined in DMN. The Friendly Enough Expression Language (FEEL) is the language used by DMN to formalize decision logic in applicable points of a decision model. Conformance Level 3 supplements the notation and modeling in Conformance Level 1 and the decision table support defined in S-FEEL (simple Friendly Enough Expression Language) of Level 2 with the full FEEL expression language. FEEL provides powerful capabilities to satisfy the needs of DMN:

• Built-in types, functions and operators
• Enables a formal expression that can define every decision in a model
• Formal expressions that may be encapsulated as functions • Supports abstraction, composition, and scalability

With this capability in mind, let’s remind ourselves of the stated goals of DMN:

Industry guru Bruce Silver recently posted essays discussing the parallels between the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and the more recent Decision Model and Notation (DMN).  Both standards, as he notes, were created with the goal of business user acceptance.  In his view BPMN has been a success because it provided a clear, business-friendly way for users to communicate, and (with BPMN 2.0) established a means to tie the modeling and execution language. It was truly “What You Model is What You Execute.”

With the (almost) official release of DMN1.1 we find ourselves at an interesting crossroads in the industry as the concept of consistently modeling decisions becomes more widespread. It seems clear that we’ve moved from questions of “What is this?” to “How can we effectively leverage it?”. A plethora of companies have developed platforms to support DMN or at least support it through some kind of adapter.  Gartner has commented on it and MISMO (Mortgage Industry Standards and Maintenance Organization) is moving towards adopting it as an official standard for exchange and interchange in the mortgage industry.

This crossroads also includes fundamental questions surrounding what we can do, what we can’t do, and what we should be doing with the standard. I’ve seen this manifest itself in two primary ways:

1. Modeling vs. Implementation
2. Methods to implement, share, disseminate and execute decision logic

These will both be discussed here.

Collaboration and agility have always been noted as key benefits of business rule systems – collaborate and be agile! This has typically been discussed in terms of rule management – enabling business user control over an established rule base. But this often overlooks how we first get to a baseline rule base.

My last posting (“Transitioning to a World of Decisions”) began presenting observations of decision modeling, implementation and management as they have moved from theory to practice. These observations have been made from both the Business and IT sides of the Enterprise. Although the sample size is still relatively small, some definite trends are beginning to take shape. While the previous article focused primarily on testing, I also alluded to some difficulties arising from a strict reliance on using decision tables for ALL rules. I have observed this on several projects.

As the concepts of decision modeling and management increasingly move from theory to practice, it has been interesting to note how it is perceived and approached by both business and IT. Perhaps not surprisingly, my experience has shown this to be a smoother transition for business. This is something we should expect as it presents a more natural representation of the business for the business. The IT side has certainly had a variety of tools available in numerous platforms to support this approach and the emergence of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard now brings a cohesive view across industries. However, it does seem to present a few challenges to IT in this early stage of evolution.