The Decision Model: A Business Logic Framework Linking Business and Technology Book Review

This book is a very interesting read. It is about a new type of modeling called the decision model. The decision model has the potential to add great value to the software development process. It is intended to bridge the gap between the business users and the technical team on any given project. This book does an excellent job of explaining the decision model by putting it into its proper context. The book also does a great job of showing how the decision model would integrate with common industry standard UML diagrams used today. The authors show how the decision model can be integrated with the traditional business process model using BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation), use case models, the TOGAF process, and the Zachman Framework. The major downside to the book is that tooling has not been developed to support the decision model. I did contact the authors and ask what tools they were using. They gave me the same list of the few listed in the book. IBM has a plug-in and New Wisdom has something in the works. Not having any tools available to make decision models will hurt the potential this book has for making a big impact on the current industry standards for gathering requirements. I have been trying to make a UML Profile in SPARX EA, but just can’t get the time to complete it. It will be a rather complete and should probably be created as a plug-in instead. If tooling, that is cheap tooling, becomes available I think the Decision Model has great potential, until that happens it is great theory, but that will be all it is.  SPARX EA and Visio templates will be a must for it to reach the masses that I deal with. Because the book does such a great job of explaining the decision model I have a hard time dinging it because of the lack of tools. It is very thorough and a very good read. The theory is sound and has a ton of potential. I highly recommend reading this book for the theory itself, and if modeling tools become available you will be a step ahead in the industry.