IBM Operational Decision Manager

Score10 out of 10

21 Reviews and Ratings

What is IBM Operational Decision Manager?

IBM Operational Decision Manager is presented as a comprehensive decision automation solution that helps users discover, capture, analyze, automate and govern rules-based business decisions, on premises or on cloud. It is formerly known as the IBM Websphere Operational Decision Management, and before that as the ILOG JRules Business Rules Management System (BRMS).

Categories & Use Cases

Business Rules Management

Dr. ROOPESH RAO View profile

Head Industry Institute Initiatives/Training and placement officer in Customer Service at Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Operational Decision Manager helps in solving complex business decision making, creating and extracting data for decision making using the old databases to create logical decisions for the business process. Decision-making is crucial when it comes to solving crucial business issues. Timely decisions save a good amount of money and it adds to the bottom line of the company.

Pros

Business decisions.
Business analytics.
Software management.
Event management.
Logical execution.
Execution management.

Cons

Complex structure.
Usability
Graphical user interface.

Most Important Features

Easy of decision making.
Reduction of complexification of important things.
Logical reasoning and rationale behind decisions.
Proper business management.

Return on Investment

Can be little budget friendly.
Streamline various business processes.
Helping manage complex decision making scenarios.

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), 360dialog WhatsApp Business API, Facebook Business Manager (formerly Pages Manager)

Balaji Venugopal View profile

RPA Sr Solution Architect in Information Technology at Cognizant (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

To change/build a business rule management system to easy to analyze logs, trace, and test. One of our use cases is very often business policy changes based on customer spending. Each month based on spending customer has to provide some benefits, hence translating those into business rules made easy with IBM Operational Decision Manager.

Pros

Converting business policy to business rule.
Intelligent and responsive automation decision.
Reduction of duplicated functionality.

Cons

Business rule application development available only in Java, .net, and Cobol.
Integration supports with legacy system need to be improved (Mainframe).
Migration to latest -version (iLog JRules to ODM).

Most Important Features

Decision server rules and Decision center.
Rule Designer Logging.
Online community to troubleshoot/assist.

Return on Investment

Licenses and metering support.

Alternatives Considered

Appian

Other Software Used

Appian, UiPath Document Understanding, Automation Anywhere IQ Bot

Verified User

Manager in Product Management (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used IBM Operations Decision Manager as a central repository to define, manage, deploy, execute and monitor business rules and decision logic. It also enabled business users to set up and modify rules for their department without depending on technical/IT teams to implement changes which resulted in better operational efficiency and outcomes.

Pros

Decision management for business users.
Business rule application development.
Managing Tasks and roles.

Cons

Compatibility with third party software.
Use interface can be simplified.
Better Error handling framework.

Most Important Features

Rule Designer to authoring business rules logic.
Business rule applications development to meet organizational needs.
Develop event applications.

Return on Investment

Improved Time to Market for new products.
Operational efficiency.
Cost savings in application maintenance.

Alternatives Considered

Hyperon

Other Software Used

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We depend on IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) for a number of different applications and scenarios. A variety of applications where static/stateless rules, as well as decision tables, are required have been implemented using this technology. In addition to rule applications and decision services, there are rule sets, rulesets, and decision tables that may be created and configured by the company, and these are provided to applications via the usage of REST APIs.

Pros

Excellent stability and performance, as well as the possibility to deploy more quickly.
Simple but effective web-based user interface that enables us to make direct updates to our policies or rules.
Effective rule Execution Server, which allows us to assess the rules and their performance
After the rules are delivered, business users can make changes and keep them up to date without having to know a lot about technology.

Cons

Some of our needs lead to a new package for the product. It would be great if it could be changed like how the governance framework can be changed.
It is not really Cloud Native, and not all features and functionalities are accessible across deployment platforms.
There should be further support for developing models using the decision modeling notation (DMN). Businesses must be able to model their knowledge, and DMN provides a common method to do so.

Most Important Features

Rules are straightforward to implement and maintain.
Comprehensible business language.
Simulation improves comprehension while reducing reliance on developers.

Return on Investment

Rapid change enables firms to be adaptable.
Enhancements to the process of developing business rules for DBA applications.
We were able to provide out-of-hours support to mission-critical application users by assigning rules matching frequent issues clients were facing.

Alternatives Considered

UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform

Other Software Used

OneTrust, ProcessUnity Vendor Risk Management, UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

Provides users ability to define business objects and generates an execution object model behind the scenes so they don't have to worry about it.
It provides an English like rule language to define the rules.
It provides a Rule designer, an eclipse based IDE for technical users to create projects to have a decision service, rules, rulesets, etc, test it and deploy it on the server. You can use it on a local server or on a server environment to the RES runtime. It provides a context map that tells you what to do next and click on the icon or link to take you there and helps you finish the task. It is intuitive and user friendly.
It provides a Business console that can be used by non technical users or business users to view, edit and deploy the rules on the RES. They can also create versions and save it in the decision center.
It provides a way for users to define vocabulary so that the rules can use a user-friendly text instead of names of entity defined in the business object model.

Cons

There is some confusion for users as they have many different tools and consoles to use and write/edit rules. There is the rule designer, an enterprise console, a business console, etc and there is overlapping functionality between the consoles.
There needs to be support added for creating models using the decision modeling notation (DMN). Businesses need to be able to represent the knowledge using a model and DMN is a standard way of representing the information.
Also to be able to import and export models that have been created using DMN. There are tools that companies use to create DMN models and represent the business domain and logic. This tool needs to be able to import those models and provide execution runtime for the same.

Return on Investment

It has a positive impact as it provides a great way to define business rules, execute them, update them, manage different versions of rules.
Depending on the complexity of the applications, you can have thousands of rules.
It provides a nice way to test the rules, run simulations with different scenarios, different scales of requests and verify the decisions, performance, etc., and that helps a lot.
Since the decisions can be exposed through REST interface, it makes it very convenient to integrate with different applications, applications using different technologies.
The Business console makes it easy for business users to be able to define, modify rules and not have to depend on IT to do a lot of that work. This helps in bringing the time to change and use the rules to be very short as well as lets IT do more IT related tasks and provide better value to the organization.

Alternatives Considered

Drools and Red Hat Decision Manager (formerly JBoss BRMS)

Other Software Used

Apache Kafka, Apache Hive, WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere Application Server