Business

First Look – Vitria M3O

June 16, 2009

I got an update on Vitria for the first time in a few years a little while back. Vitria started back in 1994 with Enterprise Application Integration capabilities and has added Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring and ultimately Business Event Management/Complex Event Processing functionality over the last few years. They are using “Operational Intelligence” [...]

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First Look – Lyza

June 10, 2009

I got a chance to see Lyzasoft‘s new product in action recently. Lyzasoft aims to provide a desktop product for business people to do analysis that can seamlessly scale up, unlike (say) spreadsheet based analysis. The product is based around a column store.
Workbooks are the core metaphor and these are used to assemble flows. Data [...]

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First Look – FICO Blaze Advisor 6.7 and Decision Simulator

June 1, 2009

Back in March FICO released 6.7 of their BRMS Blaze Advisor. I got a chance to catch up with the release just recently. The focus of this release was the business user experience – an improved out of the box experience for business users. The business user experience has become increasingly critical as business users [...]

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Nice report on the value of end-user developers

May 29, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Mike Gualtieri of Forrester Research recently wrote a nice piece called Deputize End-User Developers To Deliver Business Agility And Reduce Costs. The report is available from Forrester (for subscribers and for those who purchase it) but the summary is on their website:
The ranks of businesspeople who are capable of developing applications are swelling [...]

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Open Source Enterprise Business Rules Arrive

May 19, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Today is the official release day for the new release of JBoss Enterprise BRMS – Drools 5.0 as was. Key features in this release are the repository/repository management tools and the new features that let business users and business analysts participate directly in editing the rules. Craig Muzilla, the VP Middleware Business Unit [...]

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Here’s how you know you need business rules

May 14, 2009

Jim Sinur asked (and answered) a similar question on this blog recently – Do I Really Need a Business Rule Capability? Now I generally talk about Decision Services as the driver for business rules – services that answer business questions for other services – so how can you tell that a service is ideal for [...]

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Empowering Business Users To Embrace Change

May 5, 2009

Connie Moore of Forrester presented on empowering business users to embrace change and began with a great quote from a customer – “Change NEVER settles down”! You need to embrace change and accept it as a norm – to accept that business processes and dynamic business processes. In this environment, business people play an essential [...]

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A Response to a cowardly programmer

April 22, 2009

I got a comment recently from “Joe” who was too much of a coward to actually post his name, his email or to link to his own blog/site/twitter feed. You can read it on my post Here’s a couple of skills developers will need in the years ahead. His comment was so indicative of the [...]

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A reader asks – how to document decision logic

April 9, 2009

I got an interesting question last week:
In you experience do you believe that the rules editors will become self documenting tools and, if so, is there any danger to this?
With regard to products I have used in the past I am not convinced they have evolved sufficiently to do this and I always see users [...]

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First Look – WorkXpress 2

April 2, 2009

I got a chance to see a pre-release demonstration of WorkXpress 2.0, announced today, some weeks back. WorkXpress are focused on customized business application software for large and small businesses. About 7 years ago they started building out what we would now call a Platform-as-a-Service or PaaS offering and have had customers for about 5 [...]

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Warranty Management – New rules to apply

March 11, 2009

Rob Pritchard of Infosys presented on the power of business rules in warranty. His focus is on agility – most warranty systems are inflexible and hard to change. Organizations cannot make changes to warranty policy to respond to competitors, can’t create what-if scenarios, can’t tighten claims control or pre-valid claims or repairs. These problems come [...]

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Putting your ultimate asset to work with decision management

March 9, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
In a recent piece Data Strategy Journal – DATA: YOUR ULTIMATE ASSET Thomas Redman had a nice intro on the value of data:
An exercise popular in many training courses goes something like this. The class is asked to imagine a fine antique French desk, recently purchased for $20,000. Atop the desk [...]

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Here’s how decisions and rules relate (and how to manage them)

March 5, 2009

One of the questions I get often is around how decisions and business rules relate. People want to know so they can design their system and so they can manage change. I recently got a request for a link to a post describing the difference and I realize that, though I have lots of posts [...]

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First Look – Visual Rules

March 5, 2009

I sat down with Innovations Software Technology, now part of the Bosch group, to get my first good look at Visual Rules in a while. Release 4.4 is the current version (they released 4.3 in November and 4.4 just this week).
The tool is written in Java and based on Eclipse. About half their users are [...]

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First Look – RuleXpress

March 2, 2009

RuleXpress is a tool from RuleArts designed to allow business analysts to capture their vocabulary or terms and source business rules relevant to their business and their business problems. RuleXpress is not a business rules management system nor is it a modeling tool in the sense of a UML modeling tool. It is a tool [...]

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Business Rules to Programmers – Methink thou doest protest too much III

February 27, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Concluding my response to – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To it’s time to answer the specific comments I got. First, the reasonable ones:
Ken said:
It depends on the business requirement. If business rules need to be changed on the fly then a rules engine framework makes the most sense. If, as [...]

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Business Rules to Programmers – Methink thou doest protest too much II

February 27, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Continuing my response to – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To it’s time to take some of the arguments Alex makes and show why I think his arguments should lead one to adopt a business rules approach. Despite the vociferousness of some of the comments and the tone of Alex’s post, [...]

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Business Rules to Programmers – Methink thou doest protest too much I

February 27, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Well last week was exciting on the ebizQ blog – thousands of new visitors after a link from a popular programming blog. This article – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – referred to an old article of mine – Don’t soft-code, use business rules that had been prompted by his [...]

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Decision Management and software development II – Model Driven Engineering

February 13, 2009

Continuing this weeks posts on using decision management to improve development,  I thought I would post on how decision management should be part of model-driven development (model-driven engineering, a model-driven architecture or whatever).
The recent, and premature, discussion of the death of SOA led Johan den Haan to post SOA is dead; long live Model-Driven SOA [...]

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Decision Management and software development I – Agile

February 13, 2009

Last week I posted Focusing on decisions to improve the software end product and I decided that this week’s posts would be a series of follow-ups on how decision management can and should impact software development. Today on how it should impact/be a part of Agile, tomorrow on Model-Drive Engineering and Thursday on DSLs (Domain [...]

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