Here is an excerpt from our Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies Report on the overall architecture of decision management systems:
Overall Architecture
These capabilities come together in an overall platform for building Decision Management Systems as shown in Figure 1: The capabilities of a Platform for Decision Management Systems below.
Decision Logic capabilities allow for the editing of the business rules that represent the decision logic. These business rules are deployed to a Decision Service for execution.
Predictive Analytic capabilities allow for data to be analyzed and turned into either additional business rules (representing what has worked in the past and is likely to work in the future) or predictive analytic models that can be deployed either to a Decision Service or to the operational datastore being used by the Decision Service.
Figure 1: The capabilities of a Platform for Decision Management Systems
Simulation and optimization capabilities are used to manage tradeoffs and constraints and can result in business rules that have been optimized, optimization models that can be solved in a Decision Service, or an explicit set of actions to be taken that can be pushed into an operational datastore to drive behavior.
All three sets of capabilities rely on data infrastructure to deliver test and historical data while the predictive analytic capabilities can take advantage also of in-database modeling and scoring. The Decision Service itself can execute business rules, score records using predictive analytic models, solve constraint optimization problems and potentially tune predictive analytic models to improve their predictive power while in use. All the capabilities can consume actuals information generated by a Decision Service’s ability to log its decision making.
Vendors with all these capabilities could produce a product that provides all four capabilities in a single, integrated environment. However, because the capabilities discussed above can be used for more than building Decision Management Systems, it is likely that some vendors will continue to package up each capability as a separate product while integrating them ever more tightly to make it easier to use them as a set. Other vendors will remain focused on a specific area of capability and will work with partners and standards organizations to ensure that other capabilities can be integrated with theirs. What organizations will need to build Decision Management Systems is an ability to manage decision logic, create and embed predictive analytic insight and simulate/optimize outcomes. How best to assemble this functionality will be different for different organizations.
You can download the free full report here.