hi my name is Julia pearis and I'm a principal product manager with the workflow automation team and today we're going to talk about decision tables one of the questions we commonly encounter is what's the purpose of decision tables before I answer this question I want to talk about how business logic is historically managed in service now historically service now admins and developers have had hardcoded application rules and logic into code workflows and flows we see this here in a flow with a number of nested IFL statements that control assignment group logic and incident routing and we see it across the platform in scripts with if statements and case switch statements again hardcoding business logic that powers applications and workflows building complex logic into code can be timec consuming and burdensome from the start including the back and forth with business stakeholders to confirm it's correct the greatest challenges can come in maintaining this logic over time as it's not built in a reusable format and can be hard to decode and you have to update code in multiple places to update a single piece of business Logic for the platform workflow automation team this created an opportunity to Envision A Better Way decision tables provide developers a way to intuitively capture and maintain reusable business logic in partnership with business stakeholders decision tables provide a way to capture business logic outside of code in a reusable format that can then be used to power applications as you can see decision tables consist of input variables and condition columns that Define what data the rules will evaluate result columns that specify what data will be returned if a rule evaluates to true and a set of decision rules in the rows with specific evaluation criteria and result values to evaluate data against decision tables can be managed independently from code and can be executed in any workflow in a flow like the examples you see here or in a script decision tables are now available to support any use case for decoupling logic from code and capturing reusable Logic on the now platform we hope you enjoy them and that they help you streamline your workflows and facilitate Partnerships between developers and business stakeholders thank you for your time I hope this answered the question what is the purpose of decision tables