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.
Business Agility
Two articles I saw recently (Is SOA Enabling Intelligent Agents? and Three Keys to Enabling Agile Business Services) made me think about decision services in the context of agility and of so-called “intelligent agents”. Clearly SOA, web 2.0 and network-centric…
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…
Wrapping up my responses to John Schmidt’s post on Customer Centricity with a discussion of Mass Customization. John describes this as managing trade-offs and building sophisticated models to customize your response to each and every customer based on their value…
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 [...]
Fred Cummins had a post on the topic of measuring agility in which he gives two ways to assess how well SOA supports agility. When a business change is considered how many services must change to accommodate the new business requirements for services that change, how significant are the changes It is this second point [...]
Mike Kavtiz wrote a nice post on Agile SOA: Empower the Business with Business Rules Engines. One of the things his post shows, however, is that business process notations don’t do a good job with decisions. Mike has to annotate his diagram to show where he used rules. He could have considered one or more [...]
Recently, Ronan Bradley discussed the challenges for banks in the area of compliance, given the rapidly changing environment. He made three specific points with which I agree and that I think shows the value of a decision management approach for banks and others facing an unknown but difficult regulatory environment in the next year or [...]
An old friend sent me a link to an article on the Financial Times – How to survive an IT squeeze. I was struck by a couple of quotes: Scarcity of capital will generate increased competition for the cash that is available. Consequently it will be even more important that businesses do everything they can [...]
Michele Edelman of Discover presented on Building Blocks of Decision Management: “Tools to Rule”. Michele spends a lot of time educating people inside Discover and her team use sources like McKinsey to show executives why EDM matters. For instance, a report on top 10 macro-economic trends: Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly not just [...]
I am at the EDM Summit this week and will be blogging live from some of the sessions and posting random thoughts and comments in addition. Despite the difficult market conditions, attendance looks good with a nice full room for the keynote and attendees from 17 countries. This year’s event also has a dozen new [...]
An old colleague of mine, Vaughn Merlin, had a really interesting post this week When Strategy Becomes Continuous. It’s a great post and he makes three key points: IT strategy is not the point – it’s all about business strategy. Much ‘strategy’ effort is not very strategic. Strategy formulation and execution are too loosely coupled. [...]
The folks from Cordys presented their view of the new business operations platform. Current systems development is in the context of four key game-changing trends: Consumerization Not just technology but can deliver business processes as services using the Internet Commoditization Virtualization Not just of hardware but of processes and teams Globalization In this environment, processes [...]
The SOA Symposium started today in the AJAX Stadium in Amsterdam. The opening keynotes were actually in the Stadium itself – we all sat at the halfway line. Thomas Erl and Sandy Carter gave quick intros and I will add some comments later but I could not type so this is just a placeholder have [...]
An interesting article on the role of the business analyst in creating a common vision caught my eye this morning. The article focused on creating a common vision but it made me think about maintaining and developing that common vision over time, particularly of the complex logic in a system. Procedural code does not lend [...]
Chris Berg wrote a nice piece on Pressure Points that seemed like it was worth highlighting. Chris outlines some great reasons for using business rules and he seems to Believe in business rules (as I do).
I saw this piece on DSL and MDE, necessary assets for Model-Driven approaches and it made me think about DSLs. First, here’s the definition of a DSL from the article DSL is a programming language or executable specification language that offers, through appropriate notations and abstractions, expressive power focused on, and usually restricted to, a [...]
I got an interesting series of questions from a reader that seemed to me to justify a longish post. The initial question was quite harmless looking: Can you give a clue as to what software engineering approach you use/recommend for EDM, but especially business rules that non-IT staff can alter safely? But the whole thing [...]
Ann All had a post on Agile development brings IT, business together that had the great phrase “application development 2.0”. In the article she mentioned some very worthy objectives for this 2.0 version of application development. Here they are, paraphrased slightly. Encourage close collaboration between developers and end users Involve users in quality assurance processes [...]
I have often posted on the need to combine decision management and process management but it seemed to me that recently I have seen more BPM writers talking about this. For instance the folks over on the ARIS blog posted BPM + BRM = Greater than the Sum of the Parts (talking about a webinar [...]
