JT on EDM

I got a briefing on IVIS Group’s Sonetto product this week. Sonetto is most famous as the platform for Tesco’s multi-channel strategy. Sonetto is a product designed to focus on multi-channel operations, especially (but not exclusively) multi-channel retail. They make the very valid point that multi-channel retail is complex. Not only do retailers have multiple [...]

Mike Kavtiz wrote a nice post on Agile SOA: Empower the Business with Business Rules Engines. One of the things his post shows, however, is that business process notations don’t do a good job with decisions. Mike has to annotate his diagram to show where he used rules. He could have considered one or more [...]

Blaze Advisor 6.6 is an incremental release to Fair Isaac’s business rules management system that has just become available. As Fair Isaac has used the product more extensively as the basis for its decisioning applications its own experience has driven a variety of useful features and this, combined with the Blaze Advisor team’s usual focus [...]

Some time ago I linked to an interesting looking research project and the results are now available – Development and Verification of Rule Based Systems – a Survey of Developers. Valentin did a nice job summarizing the results, comparing them to a previous study of more academic projects and drawing some distinctions between academic and [...]

A reader asked me last week about how I saw business rules engines fitting in with UML, SOA and Microsoft. The article discusses whether Microsoft’s Oslo strategy for SOA will be based on UML or merely offer support for it among many standards.
First, let me say that I think it is increasingly clear that application [...]

I got an interesting series of questions from a reader that seemed to me to justify a longish post. The initial question was quite harmless looking:
Can you give a clue as to what software engineering approach you use/recommend for EDM, but especially business rules that non-IT staff can alter safely?
But the whole thing got more [...]

Earlier this week I posted Application Development 2.0 in which I addressed what I see as some of the issues with current development practices and tried to explain why I think a declarative, business rules approach is essential. This (and some blog posts around the blogosphere) made me think about the mismatch I see when [...]

My friend Steve has been using the ILOG Rules for .NET product (which you can now download for an extended trial as I discussed here) and has written a nice little review of it – Lab test: ILOG Rules for .Net meshes well with Microsoft. There’s a lot to like in the .Net version of [...]

I got a chance to speak with ILOG today and do some thinking so it’s time to write more about the IBM and ILOG announcement. As it is an acquisition of one publicly traded company by another neither company can legally say very much. As a result I, like everyone else, have a bunch of [...]

Just heard that ILOG is going to be acquired by IBM! I don’t have any more detail yet but hopefully the folks at ILOG and IBM will brief me sometime soon…..