A few days ago my fellow Red Hatters Mario Fusco, Matteo Mortari, Mark Proctor, Donato Marrazzo and myself (Edson Tirelli) had the opportunity to attend Decision Camp 2019. Following the tradition from previous years, this is a conference focused on Decision Management and related topics, with an emphasis on practitioners, vendors and users of the technology. In other words, a 3-day conference that packs a lot of content, mostly technical and strategic. This year in particular the agenda was packed full of interesting and relevant topics, ranging from human centric topics (like coordination of collaborative decisions), to compelling use cases (like airport gate scheduling), to glimpses of what is coming on the DMN standard (like temporal reasoning and discussions about DMN 2.0). You can find a good review of all the presentations on Sandy Kemsley's blog.

John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri of Forrester Research have just published a new piece of research – The Dawn Of Digital Decisioning: New Software Automates Immediate Insight-To-Action Cycles Crucial For Digital Business. This is a great paper – not only does it mention some Decision Management Solutions' clients as examples, it makes some great points about the power of Decision Management and some great recommendations about how best to approach Digital Decisioning. In particular I liked the paper's emphasis on keeping business rules and analytics/ML/AI integrated and its reminder to focus first on decisions (especially operational decisions) and not analytic insights. These are key elements in our DecisionsFirst methodology and platform and have proven themselves repeatedly in customer projects – including those mentioned in the report. Our DecisionsFirst approach begins by discovering and modeling these operational decisions, then automating them as decision services and finally, as also noted in the report, creating a learn and improve feedback loop.