What Are You Modeling For?

Hi, I’m Sandy Kemsley of column2.com. I’m here today for the Trisotech blog with some practical design tips for designing models.

I spent quite a bit of last week helping to run the DecisionCAMP conference, which is a non-commercial community event where practitioners and vendors related to decision management come together. They exchange ideas, they make presentations, they give demos, and because a lot of the people have known each other for a long time, they engage in some friendly banter. Before last year this was an in-person event but the last two years has been online, and I somehow volunteered to wrangle the logistics. Although I’m not really a decision management expert there’s a lot of overlap with process management, and there are many lessons to be learned in the journey that the BPMN process management standard has taken. For example to imagine how the DMN decision management is likely to be adopted over the years, and other analogies that we can see between the process and decision management worlds.

Because it’s a small community event, we’re able to do this on the cheap with a Zoom pro account, Youtube for live streaming, and a free tier of Slack for discussions. And the discussions get pretty interesting. So based on what someone’s saying in their presentation, you might see a whole thread of conversation pop into the Slack channel including one or two questions for the presenter plus a lot of back and forth between the other attendees.

Now one of the presentations sparked a discussion about how modeling might be different depending on what you’re doing it for. And this was about decision modeling, but the same is true for process modeling or what I’ve found in my experience anyway. In short, if you’re creating models, knowing that they will be automated, are the results different from when you’re modeling mainly for analysis and documentation? And I believe they almost always are different.

The question is: Why are they different?

Watch this short video for more…

Follow Sandy on her personal blog Column 2.