Overview for Decision Center
With the Decision Center Business console, business users can author and manage decisions that are directly based on organizational knowledge and best practices, with limited or no dependence on the IT department.
Decision Center provides a collaborative environment for developing decision services. Both developers and business users can access Decision Center to develop and deploy solutions for use with client applications.
Depending on your user role, you have different tasks in Decision Center. Business experts and rule developers author rules in the Business console, manage their decision services with the decision governance framework, and validate and test their rules. IT users synchronize their work from Rule Designer to Decision Center. Configuration managers and administrators, as well a users with specific permissions, deploy rules to the Rule Execution Server runtime environment. Administrators have access to all features, as well as specific features to carry out their administrative responsibilities, such as enforcing security, managing users, or administering the database. Developers and administrators customize back-end behavior of Decision Center and the appearance of the consoles.
Rule authoring
Business experts and rule developers author rules by using a natural language syntax in the rule editors that are provided in the Decision Center Business console. The editors make sure that you use the correct business vocabulary and comply with proper business rule syntax.
For more information, see Authoring and managing rules.
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. You can also manage your own releases by working directly on projects and branches.
For more information, see Using governance with decision services.
Validating and testing rules
Business experts and rule developers can validate the behavior of rules or assess the effects of potential rule changes.
- Tests: Compare expected results with the actual results from applying rules to usage scenarios.
- Simulations: Determine how changes to rules affect business.
For more information, see Tests and simulations for business rules.
Synchronizing rules
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.
For more information, see Storing and synchronizing rules.
Deploying rules
When the development and testing of rules is complete, you can deploy to the Rule Execution Server runtime environment.
- In the Business console, users with administrator or configuration manager rights create and edit deployment configurations in decision services. They can use these deployment configurations to deploy releases, change activities, and regular branches of the decision service to the production environment. Other users who have the permission to deploy can also use these deployment configuration to deploy to nonproduction environments.
- In the Decision Center REST API, you can build, download, or deploy a RuleApp for a deployment configuration.
When you deploy decision services, the XOM can also be deployed if XOM management from Decision Center is enabled in Rule Designer.
For more information, see Deploying rules in Decision Center.
Administrator responsibilities
The administrator tasks include setting up and administering the database, managing users, and improving the performance of Decision Center.
For more information, see Administering Decision Center.
You can do some administrative tasks in the Business console, including managing servers, configuring the behavior of Decision Center, or running diagnostics.
For more information, see Administering projects from the Business console.
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.
For more information, see Decision Center Security.
Customizing
Developers and users with administrator rights can customize the Decision Center consoles, the rule model, and rule authoring extensions to adapt them to the needs of business users.
For more information, see Customizing Decision Center.