Overview: Decision Center

With Decision Center, business users can manage decisions that are directly based on organizational knowledge and best practices, with limited dependence on the IT department. Decision Center includes a rule repository and collaborative web consoles for business users to author, manage, validate, and deploy rules.

Note:

You should be familiar with the following topics, which are in other sections of the documentation:

Overview: Operational Decision Manager: To see how Decision Center fits into Operational Decision Manager, and to see the new features in the current version of Decision Center.
Overview: Decision Server Rules: To understand some of the features implemented in Rule Designer that affect Decision Center.
Configuring: To deploy and configure Decision Center on your platform and application server. As the administrator Decision Center, you must complete the configuration of Decision Center by preparing the database (see Administering the Decision Center database).

Rule editing

You author rules by using a natural language syntax in the rule editors that are provided in the Decision Center consoles. The editors make sure that you use the correct business vocabulary and comply with proper business rule syntax. There are two consoles available:

Business console - The preferred environment for business users to take advantage of change management and deployment of decision services (see Governing rules with the Business console).
Enterprise console - The standard environment for the power user, where you implement administrative features (see Managing business rules with the Enterprise console).

Synchronization

IT and business users work on rules in different environments and save them to different locations. IT users typically work in source code control and business users save to the Decision Center repository.

To enable collaboration between the development cycle and the business cycles of rules, you must synchronize the work that is done by both types of users. You must use the synchronization tool in Rule Designer (see Synchronizing and storing rules).

Deploying rules

When the development and testing of rules is complete, you can deploy to the Rule Execution Server runtime environment.

In Decision Center, you can deploy from both consoles as follows:

In the Business console, users with configuration manager rights can create and edit deployment configurations in decision services. These deployment configurations can then be used to deploy releases, change activities, and regular branches of the decision service.
In the Enterprise console, users with configuration manager permissions can create and deploy RuleApps for classic rule projects. Other users can deploy existing RuleApps.

When you deploy decision services, the XOM can also be deployed if XOM management from Decision Center is enabled in Rule Designer.

See Deploying rules in Decision Center for orientation on the different deployment possibilities.

Decision governance framework

Decision Center offers a ready-to-use approach to change management and governance that is based on decision services, releases, and activities.

The decision governance framework is the preferred way of working. You should be familiar with the following sections:

You can also manage your own releases by working directly on projects and branches. If you work only in the Enterprise console, you can implement custom governance instead.

Validating rules

You can validate the behavior of rules or assess the effects of potential rule changes.

Both Decision Center consoles contain features to run tests and simulations:

Tests: Compare expected results with the actual results from applying rules to usage scenarios.
Simulations: Determine how changes to rules affect business.

To understand the implementation of testing and simulation features in Decision Center, see Testing and simulating decisions.

Security access and permissions

Decision Center provides a security mechanism to control access to branches of decision services and enable permissions on artifacts.

This mechanism is based on Decision Center groups. You upload groups and users to the Decision Center database as part of user management. See Decision Center Security for information and orientation if you want to implement security.

Administrator responsibilities

A description of the administrator tasks that you might be responsible for is available in the section Administering Decision Center. These tasks include setting up and administering the database, managing users, and improving the performance of Decision Center.

Customizing

You can customize the Enterprise console GUI, the rule model, and rule authoring extensions to adapt them to the needs of your business users (see Customizing Decision Center).