IT

As organizations try to achieve agility, productivity and efficiency they often look to new technologies, new approaches to change the status quo. But when it comes to information systems, most large enterprises have an electronic backbone of legacy enterprise applications. Whether packaged or custom developed, these are “1.0” enterprise applications. Or, more bluntly, dumb applications. [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Michael Cote of Redmonk had a nice piece on over on his People over Process blog. He made a series of great points about the risk of business and IT people not being aligned – risks to the business and to IT. In particular I was struck by this comment: What happens [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Jeff Attwood had a great post over on Coding Horror – All Abstractions Are Failed Abstractions in which he discussed a Joel Spolsky article in which that states All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky. At some level, of course, this is true and Jeff goes on to say But I’d [...]

I am speaking at the Brainstorm conference in San Francisco and blogging a couple of sesssions. First up today is Michael Melenovsky (formerly of Gartner) on Accelerating BPM Adoption – creating a vision and establishing a roadmap. Michael made the great point that companies sometimes get started with BPM to try it out and then [...]

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 [...]

Back in March FICO released 6.7 of their BRMS Blaze Advisor. I got a chance to catch up with the release just recently. The focus of this release was the business user experience – an improved out of the box experience for business users. The business user experience has become increasingly critical as business users [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Mike Gualtieri of Forrester Research recently wrote a nice piece called Deputize End-User Developers To Deliver Business Agility And Reduce Costs. The report is available from Forrester (for subscribers and for those who purchase it) but the summary is on their website: The ranks of businesspeople who are capable of developing applications [...]

Jim Sinur asked (and answered) a similar question on this blog recently – Do I Really Need a Business Rule Capability? Now I generally talk about Decision Services as the driver for business rules – services that answer business questions for other services – so how can you tell that a service is ideal for [...]

Connie Moore of Forrester presented on empowering business users to embrace change and began with a great quote from a customer – “Change NEVER settles down”! You need to embrace change and accept it as a norm – to accept that business processes and dynamic business processes. In this environment, business people play an essential [...]

I got a comment recently from “Joe” who was too much of a coward to actually post his name, his email or to link to his own blog/site/twitter feed. You can read it on my post Here’s a couple of skills developers will need in the years ahead. His comment was so indicative of the [...]

I got an interesting question last week: In you experience do you believe that the rules editors will become self documenting tools and, if so, is there any danger to this? With regard to products I have used in the past I am not convinced they have evolved sufficiently to do this and I always [...]

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork In a recent piece Data Strategy Journal – DATA: YOUR ULTIMATE ASSET Thomas Redman had a nice intro on the value of data: An exercise popular in many training courses goes something like this. The class is asked to imagine a fine antique French desk, recently purchased for $20,000. Atop the desk [...]

One of the questions I get often is around how decisions and business rules relate. People want to know so they can design their system and so they can manage change. I recently got a request for a link to a post describing the difference and I realize that, though I have lots of posts [...]

I sat down with Innovations Software Technology, now part of the Bosch group, to get my first good look at Visual Rules in a while. Release 4.4 is the current version (they released 4.3 in November and 4.4 just this week). The tool is written in Java and based on Eclipse. About half their users [...]

RuleXpress is a tool from RuleArts designed to allow business analysts to capture their vocabulary or terms and source business rules relevant to their business and their business problems. RuleXpress is not a business rules management system nor is it a modeling tool in the sense of a UML modeling tool. It is a tool [...]

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 [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Continuing my response to – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To it’s time to take some of the arguments Alex makes and show why I think his arguments should lead one to adopt a business rules approach. Despite the vociferousness of some of the comments and the tone of Alex’s [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Well last week was exciting on the ebizQ blog – thousands of new visitors after a link from a popular programming blog. This article – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – referred to an old article of mine – Don’t soft-code, use business rules that had been prompted by [...]