IBM Operational Decision Manager enables flexibility within organizations to quickly respond and adapt to changing business conditions. The release themes of V8.6 are Instant, Seamless, and Insightful.
- ODM is Instant, providing automated governance and operational decision-making at internet speed responsiveness.
- ODM is Seamless, it provides consistency through integrated operations decisions across lines of business and IT, and delivers compliance around automating business processes. By eliminating manual interventions through automating decisions, organizations speed up response time, improve customer satisfaction, and in turn save money.
- ODM is Insightful, validation capabilities enable business teams to define their own test scenario. In V8.6, they can now perform validation on non-production testing environments through the Business Console. This, along with the ability to directly deploy decision service with embedded decision management monitoring, permits organizations to act quickly for scenarios such as building customer specific marketing, or fraud detection sensors.
The following is an overview of some of the features introduced in Operational Decision Manager V8.6
Decision Services
IBM has introduced a unit of rule management called Decision Services, which is a grouping of rule projects. This is an improvement to the management of decision governance by providing consistent deployment of rule applications between IT (Rules Designer) and Business (Decision Center) environments. The rule sets are now managed through decision operations which contain the rule set signature, or rule set parameters, and source rule project references. As part of the decision service, you can now create a deployment configuration which contains RuleApp configurations and properties, decision operations and target environments for testing or production. The introduction of decision services means deployment configurations and target environments can now be synchronized between Rules Designer and Decision Center. Previously business users would rely on technical developers or rule administrators to deploy rule sets. In V8.6, business users can deploy the decision service from the Business Console into defined deployment target environments, allowing more control around change management.
Synchronization and deployment (c) IBM Corporation 2014
Rule projects defined from prior releases of ODM are required to be migrated into decision services before they can be synchronized in the V8.6 environment. Operation Decision Manager V8.6 comes with the capability to migrate these rule projects into decision services.
Rule Testing in Business Console
Validation Activity in Business Console
The automated governance framework was introduced in IBM Operational Decision Manager V8 with a completely new Decision Center Business Console web interface. The purpose was to enable business users to author, edit, organize, and search for rules in a collaborative environment. The latest generation of ODM has introduced new testing and deployment capabilities in the Business Console. Business users are able to easily and rapidly test and validate rule updates within their work activities. This provides business users with the ability to perform end-to-end decision updates with a more comprehensive governance workflow that includes testing and deployment from within the Decision Center Business Console.
Business Rules Embedded
The Business Rules Embedded component in V8.6 makes component installation and integration easier and more flexible than previous releases. More API documentation is provided and the enhanced web sample demonstrates a complete lifecycle scenario for embedding rules in a host application. Learn more….
Streamlined Installation
The installation manager has been enhanced to begin with the installation process with the selection of Decision Center and/or Decision Server. This is followed by the product purpose, server and sample selection. This installation does not require multiple Launchpad UIs or profile augmentations, thus providing a simpler and quicker installation.
New and Enhanced Features for z/OS
More functions and capabilities are added for the z/OS platform. With the PL/I BOM mapping support, you can now share and deploy a rule project in Java, COBOL, and PL/I applications. The results in simplified Java batch configuration and new COBOL and PL/I batch execution feature vastly reduce the general practitioner utilization and greatly increase the performance.
In addition, more application server types and database versions are supported in this release. The Eclipse level is also brought up to V4.2.2 so that the Operational Decision Manager designers are compatible and offer shell sharing with Rational brand products.
In summary, IBM Operational Decision Manager V8.6 enables organizations to build highly flexible solutions which can detect and react to threats and opportunities, and quickly adapt to changing business conditions by providing business users with end-to-end decision governance framework through the Decision Center Business Console.
What Next?
Contact Perficient to schedule a live solution presentation. Perficient also offers on-site workshops with business and IT stakeholders to evaluate the applicability of Business Rules and Business Events for your operational decisions.
Support Information
Application Servers
- WebSphereApplciation Server V8.5.5.1
- Support JBoss 6.1 Enterprise Application Platform and 7.2 GA
Databases
- DB2 V10.5 database (Distributed System)
- DB2 V11 database (z/OS)
Rule Designer and Event Designer – based on Eclipse 4.2.2 and compatible with
- Rational Application Deverper for WebSphere Software, V9.0.1
- Rational Deveoper for System z, V9.0.1
- Rational Software Architect for WebSphere, V9.0.0.1
