declarative

First Look – Starview

December 13, 2011

Starview Inc. have just launched their new platform – Business Analytics and Optimization Platform (BAOP). Growing out of a long standing consulting practice, the company sees an opportunity for a platform aimed at the continuous optimization of decision-making. They are focused on Telco, Finance, Energy and Manufacturing (especially Semiconductor) and they have a vertically-oriented strategy, [...]

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First Look – Sparkling Logic

April 27, 2011

Sparkling Logic is a new company founded by a couple of old colleagues of mine and focused on what they call “Social Logic”. They have developed a social, cloud-based environment designed to help companies find the best, most defined decision logic that launched today at the Gartner BPM Summit. Fundamentally the new platform aims to [...]

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Nationwide Implements a Business Rules Solution to Improve Financial Processes Across the Enterprise

April 12, 2011

Three folks from Nationwide Insurance introduced their ILOG business rules implementation. Nationwide is one of the largest insurance and financial services companies with multiple brands offering products in property and casualty, mortgages, lines of credit, retirement plans and more. They are 124 on the Fortune 500, 16M policies and 32,000 staff. This project focused on [...]

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Decisions in IBM WebSphere/ILOG BRMS

March 23, 2011

Christian de Sainte Marie from the ILOG group at IBM presented to the OMG Decision Model Notation day on the role of decisions in the ILOG Business Rules Management System. Christian started by describing a BRMS (see my brief on what is a BRMS) and the ILOG BRMS in particular. He drilled down a little [...]

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Decision Management and Insurance – Rethink Legacy and Fast Path New Product Development

February 17, 2011

Insurers face huge challenges with their installed base of legacy mainframe applications.  Many systems are 15-20 years old and are impeding insurers’ ability to respond to the market demands for new products and to the increased rate of consumerization. Maintenance costs are high and staffing challenges continue to mount.
Growing consumer buying power will force property [...]

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Update – Visual Rules 5.0

November 10, 2010

I got an update from the folks at Innovations Software while I was attending this year’s Building Business Capability conference. This week sees the release of Visual Rules 5.0 and it has some great new features. I last wrote about release 4.5 last year.
The big news with this release is web-based authoring of business rules. [...]

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Some thoughts on perfect application development

March 10, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
John Reynolds had an interesting post a little while back where he shared some thoughts on Perfect development tools. His emphasis was on support for things like iterative and test-driven development but it seems to me that there is also a need to move application development beyond code.
While developers do need development environments [...]

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More on replacing COBOL with something useful

February 10, 2010

Lisa posted an interesting comment on an old post of mine (Why don’t you replace COBOL with something useful (not Java)) in which she make some interesting comments:
I understand your last point that using a declarative “model” such business rules would be preferable to replace legacy COBOL applications instead of using a procedural language.
Indeed. [...]

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Is your legacy modernization program just “forward to the 70s”?

February 4, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ

Phil Murphey, over at Forrester, had a post on  Apps Modernization – What are Your Top Priorities in 2010/11? that reminded me I wanted to write about modernization a little before the year got too far advanced. As Phil says the coming years are going to be really interesting:
Leading edge technologies will become [...]

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Business processes and decisions – an emerging consensus?

January 21, 2010

Bruce Silver wrote a couple of interesting posts on this topic – Integrating Process and Rules – Part 1 and Part 2. Reading Bruce’s posts, and thinking back on the various posts I have written about business process and business decision management (Risks of pursuing BPM without decisioning, Adding decisioning to your BPM initiative or [...]

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Decision management and the top 4 concerns of CIOs

September 29, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
I was reading an article on The top 10 CIO concerns and I was struck by the first four:

Business productivity and cost reduction
IT and business alignment
Business agility and speed to market
Business process re-engineering

It seemed to me, reading this list, that all four of these were concerns that could be addressed [...]

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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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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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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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A message for the application developer in the mirror

July 7, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Mike Gualtieri is always interesting over at the Forrester Blog For Application Development & Program Management Professionals. This week he has a post called Do Application Developers Need To Change Their Ways? In the post he asks developers to look at the person in the mirror (he’s been listening to Michael Jackson’s song [...]

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Business Rules are a failed abstraction – so what?

July 3, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Jeff Attwood had a great post over on Coding Horror – All Abstractions Are Failed Abstractions in which he discussed a Joel Spolsky article in which that states
All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

At some level, of course, this is true and Jeff goes on to say
But I’d also argue that virtually [...]

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First Look – IBM/ILOG BRMS 7.0

June 17, 2009

As previewed yesterday, ILOG (now an IBM company) is releasing the 7.0 products of their business rule management system (BRMS) family. These mark a big step forward for the ILOG product range. ILOG BRMS 7.0 has the standard BRMS components – an Eclipse-based development environment (Rule Studio), a web-based collaboration environment for non-technical users (Rule [...]

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