IT

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. [...]

Read the full article →

A decision-centric platform supports collaboration

January 29, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
Finally the platform must allow effective collaboration between all the various groups involved in decision making. The IT department that runs the operational systems, the business people who make decisions and set policy, the executives who drive strategy and even the analytic team [...]

Read the full article →

A decision-centric platform delivers traceability

January 28, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
Because compliance is essential in decision making, the traceability of decisions and decision making logic to the organization’s objectives, regulations and policies is essential. Business users changing decision making must understand how that change will impact the organization, how it supports the organization’s [...]

Read the full article →

Decision-centric organizations focus on decisions

January 20, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
The first critical characteristic of a decision-centric organization, obviously enough, is a focus on decisions instead of processes or functions. The decisions an organization makes, the actions it selects from the possible alternatives are critical. Decisions are what make strategy real and drive results and performance against metrics. Implementing a strategy defined at [...]

Read the full article →

Webinar: What is an enterprise rule repository and do I need one?

November 29, 2009

[ December 9, 2009; 10:00 am to 11:00 am. ] Another webinar in the ongoing series this fall. There is growing consensus among business rule practitioners and thought leaders regarding the importance of the rule repository in developing a scalable, sustainable business rule management capability. This session will provide an overview of business rule repositories and identify the three “must have” capabilities for supporting [...]

Read the full article →

Corticon launches RulesWorld – free software

October 19, 2009

Cost, time and expertise are obstacles to business rules adoption. Corticon’s recently announced RulesWorld is designed to let individuals prove the value of rules without cost or risk. RulesWorld is an online community supplying learning materials, samples and forums as well as access to the software itself. All of this at no cost. Users can [...]

Read the full article →

Some thoughts on rules, decisions, agility and more

October 9, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
I got an interesting comment on my recent post about the top 4 concerns of CIOs.
Joanne makes a number of points in her comment that I thought should be addressed:
a business rules engine is not nearly enough. What is needed instead is a means to model manage and measure the impact of a [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Looking at code from both sides with business rules

September 18, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Sharon Machlis had a great piece over on Computerworld titled Opinion: I’ve looked at code from both sides now on her experience of being a developer on a project where she was usually a user. It’s an interesting experience that she describes and I was struck particularly by a couple of comments. First, [...]

Read the full article →

Decision-intensive process management for .Net

September 14, 2009

My friends at InRule have an interesting announcement today – they are partnering with a SharePoint-based Business Process Management Solution called ShareVis. The combination of SharePoint with ShareVis and InRule will, I believe, help companies take SharePoint from document management to forms automation and ultimately to real process management. The combination, still in its early [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Enterprise Application 2.0

August 24, 2009

As organizations try to achieve agility, productivity and efficiency they often look to new technologies, new approaches to change the status quo. But when it comes to information systems, most large enterprises have an electronic backbone of legacy enterprise applications. Whether packaged or custom developed, these are “1.0″ enterprise applications. Or, more bluntly, dumb applications. [...]

Read the full article →

Getting business and IT alignment with business rules

July 22, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Michael Cote of Redmonk had a nice piece on over on his People over Process blog. He made a series of great points about the risk of business and IT people not being aligned – risks to the business and to IT. In particular I was struck by this comment:
What happens here [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Accelerating BPM Adoption

July 1, 2009

I am speaking at the Brainstorm conference in San Francisco and blogging a couple of sesssions. First up today is Michael Melenovsky (formerly of Gartner) on Accelerating BPM Adoption – creating a vision and establishing a roadmap. Michael made the great point that companies sometimes get started with BPM to try it out and then [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Sneak Peek – ILOG Rules 7.0

June 16, 2009

ILOG, now an IBM company, is releasing the 7.0 version of their business rule management system (BRMS) family tomorrow (June 17th). Based on the demonstrations I saw, these mark a big step forward for the ILOG product range. I am going to post a full review tomorrow but I thought I would give everyone a [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →