JT on EDM

Another panel, this time on how business rules fits into an agile IT infrastructure. British Airways, PMI (mortgage related services), Swiss Medical (Argentinian health insurance) and Wyndham Group were represented. Panels are tough to blog so here’s a list of takeaways:

Start small and in a well known area to prove out the technology but have [...]

I took some notes from an interesting panel on governance and change control. Panels are always tough to blog so this is a summary of my takeaways not a record of the panel:

Executive sponsorship and active evangelism are key
Build expertise – centers of excellence – within the groups that are managing rules
Start early and iterate [...]

Sodexo provides all sorts of services around food and facilities management. Labor is the number one cost for Sodexo. Each of their businesses, and they have businesses in 7,000 locations, is run somewhat separately. Most staff are hourly, many are unionized and each State has different rules. Tracking and managing hours worked is critical to [...]

Frank DiGiovanni of Group RCI (a vacation exchange and vacation rental company, part of Wyndham Worldwide) presented on their journey  – a legacy modernization using ILOG Rules. Frank  identified SOA, legacy migration from mainframe to SOA and how business rules complements these as his key topics. Group RCI’s core problem was threefold:

Members: had to call [...]

The Forrester Blog For Application Development & Program Management Professionals had a post on a 21st Century Software Development Process that reminded me of one of my favorite topics – the need for programmers, especially Agile programmers, to get on…

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” [...]