From the category archives:

Business Rules

First Look – TOA Technologies

September 9, 2009

I got a quick overview of TOA Technologies recently. TOA Technologies was founded about 5 years ago to solve “the cable guy” problem – customers waiting at home for hours without knowing when the cable guy, or any other appointment, is going to arrive. Their core idea was that they would predict, with a high [...]

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Integrating customer preferences

September 8, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
I was talking to an interesting company today – TOA Technologies (review tomorrow) – and as we were talking we touched on something I think it both a great idea and underrated – the use of business rules to integrate customer preferences. We all know that giving customers an ability to influence our [...]

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Using busines rules in stable, core processes

September 3, 2009

Talking with SAP today I made the comment that the best place to use business rules was often in stable, core business processes because those processes don’t change, only the decision rules within them. This clearly struck a chord with @GregChase and it made me think I should write a slightly longer version of what [...]

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CEP = event correlation + decision management

September 2, 2009

There has been a lot of twittering between some of my colleagues (@CMatignon, @mgualtieri, @johnrrymer, @NeilRaden) around rules, decisioning and CEP. As such I thought I would write a quick blog post on the topic as it seems to me that the reason for confusion and for some of the back and forth I see [...]

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Savvion BRMS – an update

September 2, 2009

Savvion has just updated their BPMS product and the business rules module they released last year (I reviewed the Savvion BRMS previously). Savvion sees various kind of rules as being necessary for process management – data-driven rules, event-driven rules, conditions in processes, data validation rules and form validation rules. Their vision is to make it [...]

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New article contrasting decision management and various other topics

September 1, 2009

One of the most useful ways to define an approach is to contrast it with other established approaches. Decision Management is often compared with various kinds of Business Intelligence and with Business Process Management. And because Decision Management uses Business Rules and Data Mining or Business Analytics, it is also compared with these approaches individually. [...]

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Lands End needs some decisioning power

August 28, 2009

It’s been a while since I have used Lands End but just recently I needed to order some logo wear for my son’s school and they used Lands End as the supplier for this. I logged on, used the “find your school” option and found the code for my son’s school. The website then remembered [...]

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Rules-based innovation

August 27, 2009

An old friend of mine, Anders Björlin, has just won a 2009 Humanitarian Impact award from The Itanium Solutions Alliance. The press release says:
Judges selected Kiwok of Sweden for its BodyKom(TM) Series remote ECG monitor. Deployed in conjunction with caregivers and health systems, BodyKom allows heart patients to live independently while their heart is monitored [...]

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Getting to Enterprise Application 2.0

August 26, 2009

On Monday I posted about Enterprise Application 2.0 and promised to return with some thoughts on how to get from Enterprise Application 1.0 to Enterprise Application 2.0. Let’s see:

Expose core elements as services
Identify and manage processes – hook up legacy and new services into new, more effective workflows
Find and automate decisions using business rules
Manage simple [...]

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SAP NetWeaver BPM reviewed

August 23, 2009

Sandy Kemsley has posted a long and detailed review of SAP Netweaver BPM on her blog. It sounds like they have done some good work integrating the Yasu rules engine. Obviously she has better luck getting people at SAP to brief her than I do! Hopefully one day I will have something to add on [...]

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Some thoughts on Application Development 2.0

August 12, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
As the summer doldrums roll on I thought I would try and stir things up a little with a “2.0″ post – specifically some thoughts on a software stack for “Application Development 2.0″. Such a stack would:

Model processes, events and decisions as first class objects
Support declarative (rules-based) approaches to developing business logic
Use visual [...]

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A Realistic View of Business Rules Engines

August 4, 2009

I just published an article on BR Community – A Realistic View of Business Rules Engines – and as the four fallacies I tackle are pretty widely held you should check it out.

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Speaking at Business Rules Forum

August 2, 2009

[ November 1, 2009 to November 5, 2009. ] The Business Rules Forum/Enterprise Decision Management Summit in Las Vegas offers the most complete set of talks on business rules as well as some great sessions on rules in the context of BPM, adding analytics and focusing on decisions. I am giving a keynote on smarter systems for uncertain times, chairing the decision management track [...]

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Book Review – Principles of the Business Rule Approach

August 1, 2009

Principles of the Business Rule Approach by Ron Ross
This book is one of the classics on business rules from one of the most long-standing authors in the area, Ron Ross. The book is a little more than three years old but, as it is not really focused on technology for managing business rules so much [...]

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Book Review – Business Rules Applied: Building Better Systems Using the Business Rules Approach

August 1, 2009

Business Rules Applied: Building Better Systems Using the Business Rules Approach by Barbara von Halle
This book is one of the classics on developing information systems with a business rules approach. Not only does the book give a good overview of the key concepts in business rules, it also lays out the core tasks and techniques [...]

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Book Review – Business Rules Management and Service-Oriented Architecture

August 1, 2009

Business Rules Management and Service-Oriented Architecture by Ian Graeme
This is a fairly technical look at business rules, the technology of a business rules management system and patterns of using them. The book gives a fairly quick overview of SOA and then introduces business rules, both as an approach and as a class of technology. He [...]

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Book Review – Business Rule Revolution: Running Business the Right Way

August 1, 2009

Business Rule Revolution: Running Business the Right Way by Barbara Von Halle, Larry Goldberg
The book is a collection of chapters, not necessarily designed to be read in sequence. The chapters include:

A great summary of various rules projects surveyed by KPI showing the focus on agility, consistency, knowledge management, legacy modernization, business control (though interestingly not [...]

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How can decision management help with customer engagement?

July 30, 2009

Shantanu Narayen of Adobe recently said “Engagement is the new business mandate” and when Denise Shiffman (author of The Age of Engage) spoke at a recent CMO summit she added:
As I talk to customers, partners, and employees, it becomes increasingly clear to me that the health of a company relies on the extent to which [...]

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The dangers of scores in decision making

July 27, 2009

Last week I responded to some concerns raised about the dark side of analytics and this prompted a very thoughtful comment from Will Dwinnell who said
My fear is that much of the nuance about what a predictive model is really saying about airline passenger THX1138 is lost, and the security guard at the gate just [...]

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Is the Speed of Decision Making Accelerating? Yes

July 22, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Paul Brasch wrote a nice piece on Is the Speed of Decision Making Accelerating. He concludes, and I agree, that it is in fact doing so – the need to decide while customers are on the phone or on the website and the need for real-time systems to communicate and act instantaneously is [...]

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