About this Course

This 5-day instructor-led course introduces business analysts to IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management V8. You learn the concepts and skills that are necessary to capture, author, validate, and manage business rules with WebSphere Operational Decision Management.

The course focuses on the iterative nature of working collaboratively with business policy experts and development teams on rule projects and event projects. Through instructor-led presentations, product demonstrations, and hands-on lab exercises, you learn about the core features of Operational Decision Management, and receive intensive training in modeling business and event rule vocabulary, rule discovery, and rule authoring. The course uses realistic scenarios and a case study to illustrate the principles and good practices for discovering, analyzing, and authoring business rules and event rules.

The course begins with an overview of Operational Decision Management and the modeling concepts that are related to business rule applications. You work with Unified Modeling Notation (UML) to document use cases and draw class diagrams. You also work with real-life business models, use cases, and business policies during the rule discovery and analysis labs. After learning how to transform business policy into rules, you learn how to write rules in Decision Center and Rule Designer, including the Decision Center Business Console, which is new to version 8. You then run tests and simulations with Decision Validation Services.

Subsequent units and exercises introduce you to business event processing and the role of business analysts in planning an event-driven solution. You learn how to create an event project in Event Designer, and how to author rules in both Event Designer and Decision Center. You also use Business Space widgets to run tests and simulate business event processing.

In addition, the course covers Decision Center management features, such as permission management, version control, baselines, and multiple release management of business rule and event projects. You learn how to identify governance issues and use Operational Decision Management features to support decision governance.

The lab environment for this course uses the Windows XP platform.

Audience Profile

This intermediate course is for business analysts.

At Course Completion

Upon completing this course, students will be able to:

• Describe the benefits of implementing an Operational Decision Management solution, and the collaboration that is required between the business and development teams
• Identify the main user roles that are involved in designing and developing an Operational Decision Management solution, and the tasks that are associated with each role
• Explain modeling concepts and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) notation that is relevant to modeling for business rules and events
• Define and implement object models for business rules and event rules
• Use good practices to discover and analyze business rules for implementation
• Set up the rule authoring environment in Designer by working with rule and event projects, and synchronizing across development and business environments
• Customize the vocabulary that is used in rules
• Use the Operational Decision Management rule editors to author business rules, decision tables, and event rules
• Run tests and simulations in Decision Center and Business Space to validate decision logic and rule changes
• Use various Decision Center features that support project management, such as permission management, version control, smart folders, and multiple release management
• Explain governance issues and identify Operational Decision Management features that support decision governance and lifecycle management

Prerequisites

You should have:

• Experience with identifying and defining business policies and rules
• A basic understanding of business models

Course Outline

• Course introduction
• Introducing IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management V8
• Operational Decision Management: Business rules
• Exercise: WebSphere Operational Decision Management in action
• Modeling for business rules
• Exercise: Building the model on paper
• Exercise: Implementing the model
• Discovering and analyzing rules
• Exercise: Discovering rules
• Exercise: Analyzing rules
• Understanding rule projects
• Exercise: Setting up a rule project
• Working with the BOM
• Exercise: Working with the BOM
• Introducing rule authoring
• Introducing Decision Center: Enterprise Console and Business Console
• Exercise: Exploring Decision Center Enterprise Console and Business Console
• Authoring rules in Rule Designer
• Exercise: Authoring rules in Rule Designer
• Running tests and simulations with Decision Validation Services
• Exercise: Running tests and simulations
• Operational Decision Management: Business event processing
• Exercise: Exploring an event project in Event Designer
• Planning a business event processing application
• Exercise: Defining business event processing requirements
• Working with objects to build an event project
• Exercise: Building an event project
• Authoring event rules
• Exercise: Authoring event filters and rules
• Validating business event processing
• Exercise: Visualizing event processing in Business Space
• Introducing Decision Center management features
• Exercise: Working with Decision Center management features
• Introducing decision governance
• Exercise: Applying decision governance in Decision Center
• Course summary