business rules engine

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 [...]

Blaze Advisor 6.6 is an incremental release to Fair Isaac’s business rules management system that has just become available. As Fair Isaac has used the product more extensively as the basis for its decisioning applications its own experience has driven a variety of useful features and this, combined with the Blaze Advisor team’s usual focus [...]

Some time ago I linked to an interesting looking research project and the results are now available – Development and Verification of Rule Based Systems – a Survey of Developers. Valentin did a nice job summarizing the results, comparing them to a previous study of more academic projects and drawing some distinctions between academic and [...]

A reader asked me last week about how I saw business rules engines fitting in with UML, SOA and Microsoft. The article discusses whether Microsoft’s Oslo strategy for SOA will be based on UML or merely offer support for it among many standards. First, let me say that I think it is increasingly clear that [...]

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 [...]

Earlier this week I posted Application Development 2.0 in which I addressed what I see as some of the issues with current development practices and tried to explain why I think a declarative, business rules approach is essential. This (and some blog posts around the blogosphere) made me think about the mismatch I see when [...]

My friend Steve has been using the ILOG Rules for .NET product (which you can now download for an extended trial as I discussed here) and has written a nice little review of it – Lab test: ILOG Rules for .Net meshes well with Microsoft. There’s a lot to like in the .Net version of [...]

I got a chance to speak with ILOG today and do some thinking so it’s time to write more about the IBM and ILOG announcement. As it is an acquisition of one publicly traded company by another neither company can legally say very much. As a result I, like everyone else, have a bunch of [...]

Just heard that ILOG is going to be acquired by IBM! I don’t have any more detail yet but hopefully the folks at ILOG and IBM will brief me sometime soon…..

I am a firm believer in getting the technology for decision management into the hands of those who might use it – I often feel that people just don’t understand what’s possible. The folks over at ILOG have been offering a 6 month JRules trial since last fall. This full version has everything but the [...]

Wednesday begins with Antonio Paulo Conde from Citibank Brazil talking about an enterprise decision engine for originations in their retail bank.   Measuring and understanding the risk of new financial products is important and became more so as the sales teams gained more negotiation power. To address this Citibank used Blaze Advisor to build an [...]

Next up was Stuart Crawford, part of Fair Isaac’s extensive research staff, on new approaches to the creation, visualization and comparison of decision trees or, as Fair Isaac calls them, Strategies. Stuart has been working at Fair Isaac for many years and has a lot of background in analytics. This work is about how to [...]

A couple of weeks ago I got an update from the folks at InRule. InRule was founded in 2002 in Chicago and has 100+ customers. Their focus, like most business rules vendors, is on dynamic decisioning and process agility. They estimate that nearly half their prospective customers are also doing BPM not just rules. InRule [...]

Last session for me today, indeed the last session before I go home, is Janelle Hill of Gartner and Kramer Reeves of IBM on improving agility through end-to-end process agility. Janelle went first sharing Gartner’s BPM Scenario for the next five years. She had two initial points: In 2013, do you know where your work [...]

Paul Haley has done an amazingly thorough job walking through a business rule harvesting example over on his blog. If this is something you either do for a living or are considering, read the post. Where Paul finds the time to write such long, detailed posts I will never know….

A little while ago I got to talk to Mike Zeller and his team at Zementis about their decision management platform – ADAPA, what they call a predictive analytics decision engine. ADAPA stands for Adaptive Decision And Predictive Analytics. The folks at Zementis started trying to solve a fairly common problem in organizations adopting data [...]

The nice folks on the Drools blog pointed me to an article today called Implement business logic with the Drools rules engine. This article was written by Ricardo Olivieri of IBM. Richard does a nice job of walking through both the basic case for using a business rules engine (BRE). I feel compelled to make [...]

Stephen Brobst of Teradata was next with A Reference Architecture for Integrating an Active Data Warehouse into the Real-Time Enterprise. He started with a great quote from a Gartner analyst: No such thing as a business surprise – there is always a warning in advance but were you listening – did you collect data about [...]

I was reading Johan den Haan’s really good article on Model Driven Engineering or MDE today and a particular comment caught my eye: MDE aims to increase the return a company derives from its software development effort. He went on to quote Atkinson & Kühne for two ways to do this: By improving the short-term [...]