In a recent post, I showed how DMN could be used to model and execute decision logic on complex XML input data such as loan application information in MISMO format. The MISMO schema was envisioned as an enterprise data dictionary for the mortgage industry, standardizing the names of various information elements for use across any [...]
Newcomers to DMN may wonder, What is the point of Business Knowledge Models (BKMs), those funny-looking boxes with clipped corners in the DRD? When I was first introduced to DMN, struggling to understand the DMN 1.0 spec, I wondered the same thing. The spec was (and remains) largely impenetrable to decision modelers, except for the [...]
Fannie Mae is one of two major Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs) underpinning the residential mortgage market in the USA. They supply liquidity to the system by purchasing mortgages from lenders and repackaging them as interest-paying securities sold to investors. Without them, we wouldn't have the low-rate long-term fixed rate loans that so many home buyers [...]
When BPMN 2.0 was developed a decade ago, the task force’s primary goal was making BPMN models directly executable on an automation engine, something that wasn’t exactly possible with BPMN 1.x. Consequently, the rules of the BPMN spec focused almost exclusively on “operational semantics.” In doing so, they lost sight of what the majority of [...]
While DMN adoption continues to accelerate, we can only admire the current frenzied interest in machine learning. Both technologies are trying to do similar things - make decisions - but they go about it in very different ways. DMN, which evolved from business rules and, before that, expert systems, is based on intuitive understanding of [...]
DMN is excellent at working with tables of data. Such a table in DMN is called a relation. A relation is defined as a list of rows with a specific number of named columns. The number of rows in a DMN relation is unspecified. Most decision models work with tables in this form. But what [...]
Practical DMN: The Basics Want to learn DMN decision modeling without training? DMN Method and Style, 2nd edition is a good place to start. But to really learn it, you need to go beyond books. You need to get your hands dirty in a tool. I suggest starting with a free trial of Trisotech DMN [...]
My luck with publishing for Kindle has not been good. Most of my books' negative comments on Amazon are specific to Kindle issues, but since the paper and Kindle versions are linked, it reflects badly on the books overall. My first book BPMN Method and Style tried to use the original Kindle reflowable format. Even [...]
The link is https://www.amazon.com/Dmn-Method-Style-2nd-Pracitioners/dp/0982368178. As I posted recently, the second edition is completely rewritten and updated to DMN 1.2. The examples are all executable and the book follows closely my updated DMN Method and Style Basics (available now) and Advanced (about a week away) training. It's just gone up today, and looking lonely with zero reviewers. [...]
In any emerging area it is possible to be too early, and with DMN Method and Style, published in 2016, I plead guilty to that. It seemed like a good idea at the time. DMN 1.1 was finalized, and the bugs that had prevented implementation of DMN 1.0 were fixed. But it's one thing to have [...]