JT on EDM

Continuing my series on the opportunity for IBM now it has completed its acquisition of ILOG, I wanted to discuss multi-platform support in the ILOG BRMS. This is an issue because there is an apparent tension between IBM’s behavior over the last few years and ILOG’s:

IBM is seen as a very Java-centric company
IBM’s recent focus [...]

In a blog post about Hardcoding Considered Harmful – or is it? Jeff Palermo said
Oren Eini boldly makes the assertion that a system is simpler to maintain when configuration is hard-coded in one place within the system. Coupled with an automated testing and deployment process, changing configuration can be just as simple and predictable [...]

Dan Rosanova wrote a piece on The SOA Knowledge Gap that made me think (again) about the value of business rules as a way to manage requirements. Dan points out that

“A unique SOA challenge is its need to bring together SMEs from across the enterprise.”

Now this is true but I don’t believe that better management of requirements is the answer. In fact what is needed is a way to turn what the SMEs know into something that can be managed in a repository and used to power systems directly. Working with SMEs to create sets of business rules to represent their know-how not only allows this knowledge to be stored in an executable format – reducing the likelihood of implementation error and speeding deployment and maintenance – it also allows each SME or SME group to manage their own rules. A modern Business Rules Management System (BRMS) will allow different users to have different access to rule sets, allowing each set of rules to be managed by those who know them best or those who “own” them. The BRMS can then be used to package up the relevant rules – typically many sets from many SMEs – into a decision service that can be deployed into a service-oriented architecture.
Because the SME’s can edit the rules directly, business agility is increased because the time from the SME realizing that a change is needed to the time when that change is deployed can be cut dramatically using the rule management features of a typical BRMS.
Dan’s comments about how to gather the know-how from SMEs are all good, but gathering their know how as requirements and not rules is going to limit the good it can do. I have blogged a lot on this topic but check out these two posts on the difference between requirements and Requirements and on how to fit business rules into a software development lifecycle.

Mike Gualtieri published a nice piece on business rules engine algorithms last July that I wanted to point out to my readers. Mike summarizes the mainstream rules engine algorithms into those that deliver inferencing at run time, those that execute…

Dick Lee had an interesting post titled We Know Where We’re Going, But IT Can’t Get Us There. He made a number of points of which three stood out: Business often fails to communicate effectively to IT Poor process definition…

Inspired by a post of Jim Sinur’s – Can the Business Really Use BPM Technologies Without Help? – I started thinking about the decision management corollary: Can the business use decision management technology without help?
Regular readers will know that I often refer to the dirty secret of business rules:
Business users don’t want to “maintain rules” [...]

I got an update from Ishmael Ghalimi at Intalio this week. I have blogged about Intalio a few times, including a set of posts from their user group – check out the intalio tag. Intalio is a company built on a variant of the open source model with 80% of their code in open source, [...]

Fred Cummins had a post on the topic of measuring agility in which he gives two ways to assess how well SOA supports agility.
When a business change is considered

how many services must change to accommodate the new business requirements
for services that change, how significant are the changes

It is this second point that interests me. When [...]

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 [...]

A panel of the keynote presenters discussed critical success factors for BI and analytics. Panels are tricky to blog so this is just going to be a list of thoughts generated by the panelists with no attempt to assign them to the individuals. Critical success factors, then, include:

You must understand what drives high performance for [...]