Decision Model and Notation

In business analysis, the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) is a standard published by the Object Management Group. It is a standard approach for describing and modeling repeatable decisions within organizations to ensure that decision models are interchangeable across organizations.

The DMN standard provides the industry with a modeling notation for decisions that will support decision management and business rules. The notation is designed to be readable by business and IT users alike. This enables various groups to effectively collaborate in defining a decision model:

• the business people who manage and monitor the decisions,
• the business analysts or functional analysts who document the initial decision requirements and specify the detailed decision models and decision logic,
• the technical developers responsible for the automation of systems that make the decisions.

The DMN standard can be effectively used standalone but it is also complementary to the BPMN and CMMN standards. BPMN defines a special kind of activity, the Business Rule Task, which "provides a mechanism for the process to provide input to a business rule engine and to get the output of calculations that the business rule engine might provide" that can be used to show where in a BPMN process a decision defined using DMN should be used.

DMN has been made a standard for Business Analysis according to BABOK v3.