-- Posted by Carole-Ann
Interested in a live performance? In preparation for Business Rules Forum, it will be my pleasure to offer a free webinar on the evolution of the business rules management systems on October 8th.
Details on the Business Rules Forum website, under the "free webinar" category.
-- Posted by Carole-Ann
I remember the days when BRE (business rules engine) was a hot topic. The analysts tracked the BRE market, customers looked for engine features, vendors were competing against spaghetti code. Back then we were a handful of passionate individuals and we believed there was more to it than just execution. We made BRMS happen.
BRMS made it because it addresses real problems: the management of those business rules. Having a BRE is better than code for sure but without management you only get another technique of writing code. Management allows you to make your policies visible, auditable, trackable. With key features such as the Rules Maintenance Application (RMA) and a truckload of repository services such as versioning, verification, validation, and finally lifecycle management, end users are empowered. They are part of the picture and they are accountable for the decisions companies make.
BRMS is at its top, with now the attention of platform vendors, and again a handful of passionate individuals are putting into words the real problems that still need to be addressed.
A couple of years ago, we saw interest in that vision. Early adopters jumped into the Decision Management bandwagon. Now this is getting more and more of a reality, Decision Management is officially there to stay (until we reach the next frontier). BRMS is not dead, but it is becoming a feature rather than the whole thing.
-- Posted by Carole-Ann
On September 30th, we will launch a Decision Management Tools community. The objective is to allow developers to interact and learn about the DM Tools products. Business users may find some useful discussion threads too but keep in mind that the focus is primarily technical.
You will find interesting details on the product (new cool features, best practices...), on the market (customer case studies, events...), and your own discussion topics. We want to open the dialogue we have one-on-one to a global web platform.
We look forward to this new way of interacting and learning more about each other!
See you there in 5 days...
-- Posted by Carole-Ann
With the new school year starting (and my return from extended vacation), I thought it would be appropriate to review a few highlights of the business rules activity...
In January, Blaze Advisor received the 2008 Best BRMS of the year award from Infoworld -
-- Posted by Carole-Ann
IBM has announced their intention to buy ILOG. This is quite interesting for the BRMS market. Let me make a couple of comments on how this may change the dynamics.
After SAP acquired YASU last year, we all expected the beginning of a new acquisition cycle. Platform vendors have been shopping heavily for Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Intelligence (BI), skimming the marketplace to some extent...
A sample of BPM acquisitions:
A sample of BI acquisitions:
So, the YASU acquisition lead us to believe that Platform vendors were going to focus next on Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS). IBM just confirmed that trend. The size of the acquisition (one of two dominant players, Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor(r) being the other one of course) confirms what we have been advocating: "BRMS is a key component of the modern software architecture".
This is of course significant for us all, business rules evangelists and practitioners. IBM weight will now expose the technology -- and actually the entire discipline -- to a greater audience. Assuming that they are serious about getting into this business (which I do not doubt), this should boost adoption of BRMS at large.
What I find extremely exciting with this catalyst event is the prospect of elevating the debate to a whole new level. As BRMS will become a de-facto standard piece of enterprise software, Decision Management will spread as well. Why? This is actually a simple answer: as more people will understand the value of automating decisions, more people will also realize they need to make better decisions. Whether they drive those decisions from historical data using predictive analytics or they simulate and optimize those strategies in their labs, the Decision Management ecosystem will ignite the enterprise.
With the right determination on our part, and that of our followers, Decision Management may happen much sooner than anyone expected. That is a great prospect, for all of us.
-- Posted by Carole-Ann
The key premise of business rules management has been historically to empower business users. Since they own the business, they should be able to maintain the way they want to do business without being subject to IT interpretation and other backlog prioritization. This is the core value proposition. After 10 years of pitching this idea and making it real for hundreds of customers, one may wonder "can it really work?".
Given my responsibility of steering Blaze Advisor, you can guess that I have been a big fan of this idea from day 1. That said, regardless of the time and energy we have spent for over 10 years educating the marketplace, our work is not over yet... Let me illustrate.
I was recently in a friendly customer meeting. Several architects new to the product attended my presentation. I was surprised when one of them asked how business users could be trained to write performant rules. This is not a bad question when you know that some vendors put "lipstick on the pig". Providing a business user interface is far more creative than revamping the rule language with what looks like English or some business lingo. At least, it is if you want that exercise to be really successful.
The real secret for empowering business users is to separate the policies from the rule syntax, really. The approach I typically recommend is to design the rules maintenance application independently of what rules will be executed in the end. As a matter of fact, it does not even matter that a policy will eventually map to a rule, a portion of a rule, a function or a class or anything else. If you put those concepts forward, you will see yourself designing "business user" interface that appeals to rule developers, not business users. If you ignore those artifacts, you will likely focus on what those business users really care about: defining new mortgage or insurance products, drug interaction alerts or pricing schemes. Once you have collected the types of activity they need to perform, the complete screens they want to maintain (this is what we call the templates), you are then free to architect the business rules that support those and at that stage you (the IT person) can worry about performance and other important design considerations that should not be left on the business user's plate.
I often feel that this is underestimated. Too many rules specialists focus on rules that will get executed and not enough on the people that will maintain those rules, although this is where the success of the project resides.
Additional freebie for the Agile enterprise: when IT is working on the "rules content" of the templates, business users can start populating the rules repository. As long as the templates contain the display information, the business user interface is fully functional and therefore business rules can be authored. When those two parallel activities meet in time, you will be able to test the execution. With a fair amount of business rules available very early on, you can also adopt continuous testing for maximum agility.
So the answer is "yes" we can trust them but only if they can rely on IT to provide the right rules maintenance application. As always, it is teamwork.
Posted by Carole-Ann Matignon
A topic that passionates us at Fair Isaac is analytics deployment. We have spent 52 years figuring out how to build best of breed predictive models and how to make them available. I do fall in the same category... It keeps me awake at night. Not that I am worried about it, but I find exciting to keep pushing the challenge a step further.
You may have read many great posts from my colleagues on why it is a good idea, if not a necessity, to deploy predictive models and rules together. I would only quote one of those arguments here: time to deploy. We have heard many Financial Institutions complaining about how long it takes to deploy their current analytics. Almost half of the respondents to our survey said it takes 3-9 months or longer, over a year for many of them. Assuming those models address competitive pressure or a change in consumer habits / business conditions, it feels like a long time to endure once you have defined your new strategy.
With this context in mind, we have been working on many different ways to deploys those models in combination with business rules. The obvious reason we have explored this path is that business rules can be deployed in a very short time frame (technically in seconds, practically in hours given formal quality control processes). In one word: Agility.
We started many years ago with black box deployment that are made available to IT. For example, a Java deployment could then be integrated in a Java application. Many vendors are following this lead nowadays. We have since then adopted a complementary white box integration via PMML (predictive model markup language from Data Management Group). I would like to illustrate here a handful of lessons learned in that process.
With those tips in your hand, you can now question the technologies that you have selected and the current design for addressing decision management. How effectively can your system deploy predictive analytics and business rules together? Have you architected the process with enough flexibility?
Posted by Carole-Ann Matignon
I have met many of you over the years at industry shows or in customer meetings, probably not all of you though, so an introduction may be in order. I am in charge of Product Management for the Decision Management tools at Fair Isaac, which means that I am responsible for elaborating the vision for our technology products, building the roadmap and making it happen with the collaboration of Product Development of course, and all other necessary functions. As you will soon discover, I have a real passion for decision management.
Several customers have insisted over time to have people like me reveal what we do, why we do it and how you will benefit from it. As this blog is changing hands, we have decided to finally give you this insider story directly from the Product team. It is an exciting opportunity to share my perspective and my excitement on our products, what new features are to be released and how we thought they would help you. I have also convinced by dear friend and colleague Carlos, head of Product Development, to join me on this blog.
Another area I would like to explore with you is our take on the direction of the marketplace, and our vision of how new technologies or new trends are impacting our industry,
Being in product management, I can't help myself... and have to ask for your feedback : -) That also includes anything else you would like me to blog about!
I am not afraid of speaking my mind but that does not mean that I am not also interested in a constructive argument: I encourage you to speak up and share your views on the blog, or for a private discussion send me an email at caroleannmatignon@fairisaac.com.
I look forward to our lively discussions.
Carole-Ann
(Posted by guest blogger, James Taylor)
Here's a quick summary of the posts from InterACT. Hope you enjoyed it.
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
This may be my last post on this blog - it's been over 250,000 page views, more than 800 posts and about 3 years, and it's been fun. Hope to "see" you all on my other blog - www.smartenoughsystems.com/wp
Visit my Smart (Enough) Systems Blog(Subscribe using RSS) or my ebizQ blog (RSS). Buy the book or visit the companion wiki.
(Posted by guest blogger, James Taylor)
Fair Isaac recently worked with TowerGroup, a well known analyst firm in financial services, to survey 108 executives at the top 50 U.S. banks and credit card issuers. The press release is here and there were a number of interesting results but two caught my eye:
Ted Iacobuzio of TowerGroup has a great quote in the press release:
No one doubts the seriousness of the current credit crisis, but it’s noteworthy that the largest financial institutions are more likely than others to characterize its impact as severe or worse. The fact that these larger institutions took on more risk in recent years and are feeling more pressure now that delinquencies are rising and defaults are increasing certainly has something to do with that perspective.
This reminded me of the presentation Joe Breeden gave yesterday in which he laid out the pattern of behavior that drove lenders, particularly large ones focused on how Wall Street sees their results, to put themselves on the path to the current crisis.
Ted is about to present and I will be blogging that over on the Smart (enough) Systems blog.
Visit my Smart (Enough) Systems Blog(Subscribe using RSS) or my ebizQ blog (RSS). Buy the book or visit the companion wiki.
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