repository

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 [...]

Jerry Cuomo has been talking about WebSphere in 2009 and he published his top 10 list on his blog  WebSphere: Into the wild BLUE yonder!. Business Mash-ups Business Rules Middleware-as-a-Service Rainmaker Extreme Scale WAS.NEXT Restful – Agile DataPower-lution POWERful Middleware Industry-savvy Middleware He expanded this list with some additional thoughts in an article on InfoQ. [...]

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.

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 [...]

Savvion today announced it has released a Business Rules Management System. Now this may suprise you – after all Savvion is a Business Process Management vendor – but I think it is a sign of the growing recognition that decision management is important to business process management. Before this announcement Savvion was using Yasu’s product [...]

Last week I got a chance to catch up with a Dutch company in the decision management space – Be Informed. Be Informed arose out of work within a big systems integrator building complex processes, especially in government, that was unable to find good tools for case management and complex knowledge-based processes. The company started [...]

Risk management is necessary at Sun as new products are constantly being introduced. Each time there are challenges getting information out to people. Also find the same problem repeatedly in different geographies and were challenged to share information about problems and solutions between teams. By 2001 they found over 300 user developed applications supporting risk [...]

When I was in the UK recently I got a chance to have a coffee with Mark Proctor and get a detailed demo of the new Drools release – 5.0. Mark spent most of the time showing Guvnor, the new web-based business rule management system for Drools. Built with GWT this looks and works great [...]

Bruce Silver had an interesting article recently on The Next Innovation in BPMS in which he discusses the need for repository capabilities in BPM. Bruce makes the point that “next generation” repositories for process management must not only support process models, they must also support “decision models”, business object definitions, performance measurement information and service [...]

Erudine is a British company a few years old and has released some new technology in a new process context – the Erudine Behaviour Engine (yes, the British spelling). Like many technologies, Erudine is targeting the business-IT divide, focusing on problems like those of translating requirements into systems, integrating the expertise of lots of people [...]

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 [...]

Version 17? Yes, SPSS has been at this a while. Today they announced version 17 of their Statistics package. While this has some new features to handle more data and some improved asset management (an analytic repository), the big features are really about bringing more business users into the analytic fold. One feature in this [...]

I got a walkthrough of Corticon‘s Business Rules product last week – the first time I have discussed it in a while. Version 5 has some interesting features. The Business Rules Foundation is a set of headless services, designed to support a variety of development tools, UI frameworks and metaphors along with a variety of [...]

Next up Discover and Fair Isaac talking about Discover’s Enterprise Decision Management initiative. Dave Wodall from Discover co-presented with Xun Shao of Fair Isaac. Discover use Blaze Advisor (rules), Model Builder (analytics) and Decision Optimizer (portfolio optimization). Discover was launched in 1985 and, like Amex, has both the network and the consumer relationship. 50M members, [...]

Next up was Chris Collard of Dell talking about building a decision engine. Chris had done an implementation at Dell Financial Services and was sharing some of his experience with replicating that at Dell. Chris talks about decision engines as full decomposed applications – data, process and logic all externalized. Chris’ central thesis is Effective [...]

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 [...]

Darren from ASG presented next on Metadata enabled Business/IT Integration. Business metadata can be contained in all sorts of things like data models, XML and database schemas, process definitions, ERP/CRM etc. Not clear who created what or which ones are “right” and things like mergers and acquisitions may create new problems. There is no “right” [...]

Mike replied to my post about his question on enterprise metadata. He, like me, prefers David Marco’s definition of metadata as “all physical data and knowledge from inside and outside an organization, including information about the physical data, technical and business processes, rules and constraints of the data, and structures of the data used by [...]