We help a lot of clients select, install and adopt a Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS). These clients are looking to get automate decision-making with transparency, deliver business control of their critical decision-making logic and establish an ability to drive continuous improvement through simulation and impact analysis. Adopted correctly, these benefits ensure that a BRMS delivers a great ROI.
To maximize this ROI our clients are looking to get the benefits of their BRMS faster, spend less on implementing their BRMS and increase the size of the benefit they see. Here are some tips based on our experience:
Faster
The best way to get benefit from a BRMS faster is to get to a working decision service faster. More than anything, our experience shows this means capturing the requirements for that service faster.
For this we use decision modeling and the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard as well as our decision modeling software, DecisionsFirst™ Modeler. Experience is that this can reduce the time to get your decision requirements and business rules right by 5-10x, getting you to an ROI months earlier than traditional rules-first analysis approaches.
Cheaper
Decision modeling also dramatically reduces the amount of re-work by getting the requirements right the first time. This lowers cost too. More importantly, it creates the kinds of rules that business users can maintain themselves, reducing IT costs by eliminating the need for projects to make rule changes. It let’s you take more advantage of simulation tools in your BRMS, reducing the need for and cost of testing.
Small, regular changes also cost less than waiting until there are enough changes to justify a project. And these updates are themselves much cheaper because a decision model makes it easier to tell what change is needed.
Bigger
Bigger ROI comes from using the BRMS on a larger scope, something that getting faster, cheaper projects will help ensure. But it also comes from creating an environment in which the business can truly take advantage of rapid business rules updates – something a BRMS is really good at but that goes unused all too often. The role of a decision model in creating an environment where this kind of rapid iteration is the norm really can’t be overstated – it’s the key.
So, if you want a bigger, faster, cheaper ROI from your BRMS, don’t forget to add decision modeling. Check out our recently updated white paper Maximizing the Value of Business Rules for more. If you’d like our help with selecting or adopting a BRMS, drop us a line.
