Practical DMN: The Basics Want to learn DMN decision modeling without training? DMN Method and Style, 2nd edition is a good place to start. But to really learn it, you need to go beyond books. You need to get your hands dirty in a tool. I suggest starting with a free trial of Trisotech DMN Modeler. When you log in, go to the EU-Rent repository (File/Open/EU-Rent) and open the model called EU-Rent Pricing.
Over the summer I have been hard at work on a new kind of BPMN training, an app completely based on gamification. Today it's ready and open to the public. Called bpmnPRO, it covers the same material as my BPMessentials BPMN Method and Style training, but in a complementary way. In addition to explaining how to use the important BPMN shapes and symbols, the BPMessentials training is long on explanation of concepts and context: how is BPMN similar to and different from traditional flowcharting?
My luck with publishing for Kindle has not been good. Most of my books' negative comments on Amazon are specific to Kindle issues, but since the paper and Kindle versions are linked, it reflects badly on the books overall. My first book BPMN Method and Style tried to use the original Kindle reflowable format. Even though I spent dozens of hours trying to make the graphics look good, the Kindle format itself rendered them at too low a resolution to be useful.
The link is https://www.amazon.com/Dmn-Method-Style-2nd-Pracitioners/dp/0982368178. As I posted recently, the second edition is completely rewritten and updated to DMN 1.2. The examples are all executable and the book follows closely my updated DMN Method and Style Basics (available now) and Advanced (about a week away) training. It's just gone up today, and looking lonely with zero reviewers. So please, if you like it, post a review on Amazon.
In any emerging area it is possible to be too early, and with DMN Method and Style, published in 2016, I plead guilty to that. It seemed like a good idea at the time. DMN 1.1 was finalized, and the bugs that had prevented implementation of DMN 1.0 were fixed. But it's one thing to have a standard be implementable and quite another for real tools actually to implement it. The best tool at that time didn't support BKMs or proper decision table syntax or FEEL, and it couldn't execute everything it could model.
Today we released our completely revised and updated DMN Method and Style Basics training and certification, based on DMN 1.2 with the latest build of Trisotech DMN Modeler, including decision services, glossary, model import, and more. Price is the same, $695 including 60-day use of the tool and post-class certification. Click here to register. Here are the details: DMN Method and Style Basics DMN Method and Style Basics provides business users with hands-on instruction in the use of DMN, the Decision Modeling and Notation standard.
One of the most significant aspects of DMN 1.2 is the establishment of decision services as an important and useful feature of the standard. Decision services existed previously but offered little practical utility other than demarking units of execution within a DRD. Today that is just one of five distinct usage patterns for DMN decision services. Usage Pattern 1: As a unit of deployment Perhaps the most important use of decision services is not even mentioned in the spec, but it is implicit in DMN's architecture and a major theme of DMN Cookbook.
Here we go again. We saw this eight years ago with BPMN 2.0. A revision of the standard allows tools to work 99% the same as in the previous version, but adds some new features around the edges. This causes the proprietary tool vendors to howl in unison: Not business friendly! Why can't it work like the earlier version? (Of course their tools are not compliant with the earlier version, either.
Last week I presented a webinar on BPMN Modeling with Method and Style that explains what it's all about. You can see the recording by clicking here. Or click here to download the slides.
The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard is changing the practice of decision modeling and management. Up to now, it has primarily been used to define model-based decision requirements handed off to developers for implementation in some other rule language. DMN is good for that, and actually most tools that claim to support DMN cannot do any more than that. But DMN is much more than a language for defining business requirements.