2 posts tagged with "DMN"

DMN — Decision Model and Notation — is an OMG standard for describing operational business decisions. It gives you a visual, vendor-neutral way to express the rules that take an input context, apply business logic, and return an answer — and crucially, the model is directly executable. The same diagram a domain expert reviews is the artefact a runtime evaluates.

This post is the engineer's-eye view: what DMN is, why teams reach for it instead of if/else in code, and what the moving parts are in a real decision.

BPMN and DMN are two of the most-cited OMG standards in business automation, and they're often confused. The short version: BPMN models processes over time. DMN models decisions at a point in time. They're complementary, not competitors. Most non-trivial systems end up using both.

This post walks through what each standard is, where each one fits, the boundary between them, and a worked example of the two working together.