IBM Operational Decision Manager Reviews & Insights

Score7.1 out of 10

20 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for IBM Operational Decision Manager are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Stability and Performance: Users consistently commend the software for its exceptional stability and performance, citing instances where it facilitated swift deployment processes effectively without any glitches. For example, some users have mentioned how the software's robustness has been crucial in meeting tight project deadlines. User-Friendly Interface: Reviewers appreciate the straightforward yet powerful web-based user interface, noting how it enables them to effortlessly update policies or rules with minimal effort. They have highlighted specific features like drag-and-drop functionality that enhance usability. Business User Empowerment: Customers value the software's empowering features that allow business users to easily implement changes, ensuring up-to-date rules without the need for extensive technical knowledge. Some reviewers have shared success stories of non-technical staff making significant updates independently, showcasing the platform's accessibility and empowerment capabilities.

IBM Operational Decision Manager Reviews

5 Reviews

A good software to manage complex business processes and decision making.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

April 21, 2022

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM Operational Decision Manager can be used to manage complex business processes with less use of IT infrastructure and more use of centralized decision making. Decision-making depends on a logical framework and the creation of commands for better futuristic decisions with less time consumption and more precision and accuracy. IBM's Operational decision manager application is well suited for such scenarios where complex processes have to be streamlined.

Dr. ROOPESH RAO

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

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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Meets business need - IBM Operational Decision Manager

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 19, 2022

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).

Likelihood to Recommend

Appropriate case: Evolving business rules for any system can be easily integrated into IBM Operational Decision Manager which can be easily tested and traced using logs. Inappropriate case: Legacy system consolidation of rule (Mainframe or As400) and standard protocol API services offers are available like (FTP, HTTP, SOAP, SMTP) and missing token or Oauth-based authentication options.

Balaji Venugopal

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

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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A stateless business rules management system that is easy to use and straightforward to understand

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 19, 2022

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

As a component of Cloud Pak for business automation, it enables organizations to achieve maximum automation by combining it with IBM RPA as a rules engine for external applications and IBM BPM as a rules engine for organization workflows. Additionally, it can be integrated with other applications, resulting in an incredible experience that no other application can provide.

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Empowering the business users!

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

April 19, 2022

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM Operational Decision Manager works well for empowering your business teams to establish, refine and deploy rules in a shared platform without relying on IT teams. The hosted version of IBM Operational Decision Manager offers advanced capabilities to manage complex rules and is well suited for large organizations. It also offers a cloud-based version with limited features which is well suited for smaller organizations that want to avoid investment in infrastructure.

Verified User

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

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

User friendly, intuitive stateless business rules management system

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 1, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) is used for several use cases. It is used on multiple applications where static/stateless rules are needed as well as decision tables. There are rule applications and decision services that have rules, rulesets and decision tables that the business can create and set up and they are exposed to applications through the use of REST API.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

ODM is well suited wherever there is business logic involved, specifically if the logic does not have a state. If there are business rules that can be defined, the context known and returns the same decision every time the same inputs are provided (stateless), it would be a good fit.

If there are a lot of business rules, set of rules that need to be executed in an order, rules that may need to execute conditionally, etc., basically complex rules and rule flows or decision tables, this is a great product. It helps businesses to manage and make changes to those rules dynamically and quickly and easily to adapt to changes.

When it may not be suitable is if rules can't be verbalized or if there is state or decision changes based on time or location or need context to be built. In that case a complex event processing engine might be a better fit.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience