IBM Operational Decision Manager Reviews

My primary use case is to manage rules for the business.

ODM allows for faster deployment.

The most valuable features are the Decision center, a web UI that allows us to make direct edits to our policies or rules; the Rule Execution Server, which allows us to analyze the rules and performance; and Rule Designer, where you can write rules and decision tables. 

The documentation has become more optimized. 

An area for improvement is that the documentation for ODM is not very clear. It has improved. There are very few open-source videos online to learn from. But that is a challenge for a lot of companies. 

I've been working with this solution for over six years.

The tools have good stability and performance.

This solution is scalable.

The technical support could be improved.

The initial setup is a little complex, but deployment can be done at the click of a button.

ODM is suitable for all sizes of companies. I would rate it as eight out of ten.

We use ODM for rules management for many of our systems to manage rules for business coming in. We also use it to manage rules for our BPM solutions.

The effects of allowing business users to update business rules instead of IT are business users have a closer relationship with what rules they need and are able to make those rules a lot quicker in the tools that ODM provides than if an IT person had to do it, and do it in code, requiring compiling code and deploying it. 

The solution has reduced the backlog for IT.

By using ODM, we get rules to our applications, then we get those applications to go to market a lot faster. 

Get to the cloud.

ODM has probably been one of the more stable IBM products I have used.

Scalability is really good. We have it deployed on ODM, which comes on WebSphere Application Server. We have it on a cluster environment of two nodes, production and test. It is scalable as much as we need it, if needed. Two node is good for us right now. If we would ever need to scale higher than that, the scalability of WebSphere would allow us to do it. 

We have used IBM technical support with the product. The feedback has been that the support has been very helpful at times. We have had some issues here and there that they have had to dig into. However, for the most part, they have been helpful.  

The decision to purchase ODM was made before I was hired on with my current company.

It was one of the first IBM products that I had experience with installing. 

It has an easy installation and administration to use. If you read the knowledge center and do your research on the instructions needed, it is easy to follow. You just have to be prepared to gather the knowledge and know what needs to happen to get it installed. If you do your homework, there will be no issues. 

If you are looking for a good rule solution that is easy to implement if you do your homework, which also has good support, then I would say go for IBM ODM.

We are looking into using Decision Server Insights (DSI) within ODM going forward.

If our compliance department needed to have a better understanding of what rules were implemented, it would probably be easy just to pull them out of the one system, since they are not dispersed across multiple applications. Though, we have never had compliance ask for this type of information.

ODM is mainly used in banks to handle large numbers of transactions.

I've been working with this solution since 2012.

ODM's most valuable features are that it's easy to define and divide business rules, and it can handle very large numbers of transactions per second.

ODM could be improved with better integration with other platforms. In the next release, IBM should include integrated analysis tools, summary metrics, and a friendlier way to integrate with dashboards or columns.

ODM is very stable and has good uptime. 

Scalability was the main reason we chose ODM, as it can handle almost a magnitude more transactions per second than its competitors. 

IBM's technical support is good - they're good at communication and are really helpful.

The initial setup was straightforward as we got a lot of help from IBM and were able to hire people who were already trained in the product.

ODM's pricing could be more competitive as there are open-source business rules engines that are becoming standard, like Drooms from the Java Open Source Enterprise Suite, although ODM is a better product than those. 

If implementing ODM, I'd recommend finding a partner with experience who understands the responsibilities and functions this product should provide, which can ease the transition. I would give ODM a rating of nine out of ten.

To automate business decisions and allow businesses to make smarter decisions faster with a moden business friendly Web Application, the users adore.

The business owns the rules and they're taken away from IT, so business doesn't need to ask IT to implement them, and IT doesn't need to implement them. So the business owns their decisions and their rules, and therefore, finally, they take proper ownership, and model and maintain them properly.

In terms of compliance and reporting, that's tricky because we are not using it in such a hard way. It's more a help for business to automate their decision-making. They are improving that and they are much, much, faster than before. Instead of having quarterly, or yearly cycles and changes, they have them, now, pretty much daily.

It's very business friendly and rock solid.

We manage business rules within this product and the benefit is that businesses can manage these rules themselves.

One area for improvement is master data integration. That should be more fluid. The others are hierarchical drop-down lists, and hierarchical master data. We have a few hundred others that I have on the list.

Every software has small glitches, but generally it's a rock solid product. It's proven, and that's what it should do. 

We are pushing it quite crazily and, currently, from the scaling, we don't see an issue. So it scales.

They're really, really good. We only have the problem of getting them the data that they need because they're basically supporting us from a black box perspective. But besides that, they work day and night to get our problems solved. We're impressed.

Initially, it's straightforward, but you then need to tune it to your needs. Like your own car, you tune it if you have many kids, or if you have just a mistress. You configure the same car slightly differently, depending how you evolve. And same with platforms. So, it starts in vanilla and then you get creative.

When looking for a vendor I want to have the confidence that they are competent and they have a proper team behind it, that they have a big team. So I know that in 10 years, the product will still be around, and we will not have to rebuild our solutions every two years because they change everything.

I give it an eight out of 10 overall. Software never gets a 10. They can still add a lot of things. There's a very good base, vanilla setup, but all the other things that are customer-specific, you need to add.

We use ODM for credit evaluation, online.

It helps keep our business areas independent, because they can make decisions without IT. It also reduces costs, because we can make the decisions online, in seconds.

What I'm really interested in, what I'd really like to see with this technology, is artificial intelligence, RPA. How can that interface with ODM?

It's 100 percent stable.

In terms of scalability, we have some 2,000 rules. In the next year, we expect to increase that amount by ten percent. It gives us that kind of scalability.

I have used IBM technical support in Peru. It has been really good.

The installation was easy. ODM enabled us to make decisions with a GUI. My business areas designed their rules, and it was very good.

We purchased the solution directly through IBM.

We looked at a lot of vendors, many open-source products.

We would recommend this solution.

We went with this solution from IBM because IBM has a roadmap and because Watson is the best software for artificial intelligence. We expect that our company's efficiency will increase, given the roadmap: ODM, RPA, Watson, etc. And the scalability was also an important factor for us.

We use it for a cable company in a contract with Comcast.

It makes things easier for us. Productivity-wise, it helps. It has also helped to reduce operating costs by about 20 percent. In terms of decision-making it has helped some users. It has helped improve business processes. But it hasn't totally helped our decision-making.

The management features, based on the server side, have worked for us. So far, the usability is great. It's also easy to set up.

I don't see a need for additional features. I like it just the way it is. 

It does the job.

I have called technical support once or twice and they fixed the problems. I don't have any issues with tech support.

The setup is straightforward.

We did it ourselves.

It was not a large cost. It was a one-time cost.

It works. I would recommend trying it.

It is to drive our rules engine for our revenue cycle.

We are just signing the contract and migrating to it now.

Its ability to untangle hard coded rules and put them in a more manageable structure.

Its ability to use decision tables to codify the rules and manage them better.

We are still testing and figuring it out.

We have not contacted technical support yet.

We have a homegrown solution. We are switching because it is not scalable nor performing as well as we would like it to.

It will definitely improve the cash flow of our clients, thereby it will improve the cash flow to us.

I came in at the very end of the decision-making process and do not know who was evaluated.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Scalability
• The ability to migrate away from having developers be the only ones able to create rules. 
• The ability to free up our resources to look for other sources of rules which currently are not an effective aid.