COBOL

4. It will never work There is sometimes an almost irrational fear that this stuff does not work. Old school programmers who resist any technology that does not require JCL Organizations where it’s “just not how we do things here” “We are using methodology X and business rules does not fit” “We do agile programming [...]

John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri of Forrester have published two interesting new reports on business rules – The Future Of Business Rules Platforms and Market Overview: Business Rules Platforms 2011. The first of these is a short piece emphasizing the growing role of business rules management systems in event processing and in Decision Management. The [...]

Three folks from Nationwide Insurance introduced their ILOG business rules implementation. Nationwide is one of the largest insurance and financial services companies with multiple brands offering products in property and casualty, mortgages, lines of credit, retirement plans and more. They are 124 on the Fortune 500, 16M policies and 32,000 staff. This project focused on [...]

Insurers face huge challenges with their installed base of legacy mainframe applications.  Many systems are 15-20 years old and are impeding insurers’ ability to respond to the market demands for new products and to the increased rate of consumerization. Maintenance costs are high and staffing challenges continue to mount. Growing consumer buying power will force [...]

I saw this white paper by IBM on Legacy Modernization with business rules and thought I should quickly re-summarize my point of view on this and link to my various posts on the topic. The white paper does a nice, if IBM-centric, job of outlining the key issues: You don’t need to modernize the whole [...]

Model Builder 7.0, Decision Optimizer 6.1, Blaze Advisor 6.9 Decision Management remains the core focus for FICO with both a Decision Management platform and decisioning applications. The applications are increasingly built on top of the platform, sharing execution and modeling infrastructure. FICO still sees business rules as the basis for decisions, being improved and extended [...]

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. [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Phil Murphey, over at Forrester, had a post on  Apps Modernization – What are Your Top Priorities in 2010/11? that reminded me I wanted to write about modernization a little before the year got too far advanced. As Phil says the coming years are going to be really interesting: Leading edge technologies [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Cyrus Montakab posted on Business Rules in Legacy Modernization recently in response to a post of mine and I wanted to respond to it. I wanted to respond in particular to his comment that: even for the modules that can be fitted into a business rule, is it viable to re-architect re-factor the existing COBOL [...]

Vision Service Plan, VSP, presented on their use of business rules to build agile business processes in healthcare. VSP has some 55M customers in their plans and have been an IBM/ILOG customer since 2002. Every process in healthcare is governed by policies, regulations – every process has decisions that must be made following the rules [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Concluding my response to – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To it’s time to answer the specific comments I got. First, the reasonable ones: Ken said: It depends on the business requirement. If business rules need to be changed on the fly then a rules engine framework makes the most [...]

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 [...]

Nicolas Robbe came next to give some updates on the product roadmaps. To be honest what he mostly did was summarize recent developments – nothing really about futures. First he talked about optimization and CPLEX’s 20 year history. With CPLEX 11 they feel they can solve 70% of the very hardest optimization problems – way [...]

Last post in my series as I am off to DIALOG next week and will get a chance to meet some of the IBM folks and chat about their plans. Here, then, are some quickie ideas for ways IBM could use rules besides the ones I mentioned already: Modernizing Legacy IBM customers have LOTS of [...]

Continuing my series on the opportunity for IBM now it has completed its acquisition of ILOG, I wanted to discuss multi-platform support in the ILOG BRMS. This is an issue because there is an apparent tension between IBM’s behavior over the last few years and ILOG’s: IBM is seen as a very Java-centric company IBM’s [...]

The folks at ILOG and Relativitiy recently announced a new integration between their products – Legacy IT Modernization enabled by ILOG and Relativity Technologies Business Rules Solutions. I got a chance to chat with them today about what was new and different in this latest attempt to bring legacy modernization and business rules together. Relativity’s [...]

There was more discussion in the blogosphere about the James McGovern COBOL is Evil post – COBOL is not evil, but COBOL programmers are. Now I already posted a response to James’ post (Why don’t you replace COBOL with something useful – not Java) but this new post made me think. I should say that [...]