Enterprise Decision Management - a Weblog

Basel IT Cost Higher Than Projected - Computerworld

BASEL II is more expensive than people think, becuase they are not adopting the right technology.

TowerGroup Research - Predictive Analytics in Insurance

Tower Group's recent reports on how predictive analytics can deliver great results for insurance companies.

Complex Event Processing

Complex Event Processing will drive the need for Enterprise Decision Management infrastructure as rules and analytics in combination are ideal for CEP.

Automating Compliance Is Priority in Year Two of Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance

Executives are starting to realize that SOx compliance is best automated. Time for business rules methinks.

How does analytics make business rules smarter?

There are two ways to use analytic techniques to improve business rules. Firstly you can use data mining techniques. This involves using data driven analysis to identify more profitable rules and strategies. With data mining you can use historical data...

What are the main benefits of business rules technology?

In many cases, a corporation’s business rules are defined in manuals or other documents, or possibly not defined formally at all—many organizations rely on business managers to interpret company policies as business rules. This can be inefficient and lead to...

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Business Rules Meet the Business User

Blaze Advisor is reviewed in Intelligent Enterprise Magazine

License Fee Calculations

The California DMV recently replaced the portion of a legacy system that dealt with license fee calculation with a business rules implementation. This was the one part of the old legacy system that had variable business rules - it required...

What kinds of things do people do with this?

I am going to post a ton of examples here over time. To be getting on with, The Norwegian police department does shift assignments for their personnel based on experience, union rules, etc. A company in Japan used rules to...

How do you make sure that rules don’t overlap or conflict when dealing with many of them in an application?

This is the kind of thing that separates a “Business Rule Management System” from a Business Rule Engine. It’s a complex problem and one that requires serious development work from a vendor. Blaze Advisor, for instance, includes automated tests that...

How many rules do companies work with in typical applications?

It’s all over the board. The average for a typical application is probably between 100-1000 rules. I know of some customers working with tens of thousands of rules, which they manage by collecting them into different groups that apply to...

What’s the deal on inference engines versus non-inferencing rules products?

The Gartner magic quadrant, and many writers on this topic, differentiate between inference engines and non-inferencing engines. An inference engine basically figures out what information is needed and in what order rules have to be executed in order to achieve...

Why should someone pay for rules software when you can just get JESS for free?

Well JESS is a technically-oriented language based squarely in the dark days of artificial intelligence exploration. It is a lot of fun for tech-heads to fool with, but it doesn’t really have the level of support, the interfaces, or the...

Why do you need special rules software if most packaged systems and BPM/Workflow software have rules abilities built in?

Well frankly every programming language that has ever included an IF-THEN kind of syntax allows rules at some level. It’s a question of how easy it is to work with the rules, make changes, share them for centralized decision making,...

The Customer is Always Right

Data is necessary but not sufficient to meet customer expectations. Business rules help turn that data into actionable insight.

Composite Applications and Decisioning

SOA and composite application approaches, such as one announced by IBM recently, make it easier and more profitable to adopt business rules management solutions.

Don't just see the future, change it

EDM is about changing the future, not understanding the past (traditional BI) or even seeing the future (new BI).

The McKinsey Quarterly: What global executives think about technology and innovation

Business rules represent a key way to address several issues around innovation and IT talent constraints identified in a recent McKinsey study.

New Business Rules FAQ

A new FAQ for business rules.

What does the future hold for Business Rules Management? What is on the horizon over the next few years?

The biggest opportunity for companies using business rules is to begin to combine the business agility and automation features of business rules with the segmentation of analytics and optimization software to create a new class of automated, predictive analytics. This...

Isn’t the business rules hype just a re-labeling of the whole expert systems fiasco of the 1980’s?

Expert Systems vendors promised that their packaged software would perform tasks just like the companies’ most experienced employees, with intelligence and best practices painstakingly collected from industry experts. By and large, the expert systems promise did not succeed in practical...

Who are the major players in this space?

Are you a major enterprise-sized organization with a lot of rules and lots of programming disciplines to worry about? Then there’s really Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor and ILOG JRules – and then there’s everyone else. Those two are always noted...

What sort of organizations should consider implementing Business Rules?

Companies that would immediately benefit from business rules management software include those in financial services (mortgage, lending, credit cards), insurance, telecommunications, healthcare, government and increasingly retail vendors (online, mail order). These are all business that have a large number of...

Why should organizations consider this type of technology?

With converging and opposing business trends of a need to be increasing agile in business while continuing to maintain and ensure compliance, business rules deliver a unique benefit. They allow rapid and accurate operational implementation of new business strategies (i.e....

What's the difference between Business Rules Management Systems and Business Rules Engines?

A Business Rule Engine is one part of a complete system for handling all the things involved in working with rules. Admittedly, it’s an important part, but it deals only with execution… which rules need to be executed in what...

SOA - A New Blueprint for IT

SOA has great value and potential and a business rules management system ought to be part of your SOA designs.

High Performance Marketing: Justifying Your Analytic CRM Investments

An analytic CRM investment is easy to justify if you follow the advice in this article and even easier if you use EDM technologies to deliver more value.

Writing Better Requirements - Key to Success or false hope?

Requirements need to be good but sometimes they just change too fast. That's where business rules technology lets you teach your users to fish, not just feed them.

Analytics + CRM = Happiness

Getting more value from your CRM investment is a key topic these days, automating decisions about customer treatment in a way that leverages your CRM data for precision and delivers consistency across channels is key.

Giving your mainframe a new "brain"

Legacy modernization is a hot topic and business rules technology allows you to modernize just the high maintenance bit of your system and so save dollars.

Business Intelligence Pipeline | IT Detours On the Road To BPM

Business Process Management implementation WILL drive you to consider and implement business rules if you want to get Straight Through Processing. BPM tools automate processes, not decisions.

Explainer: Data mining - Computerworld

Data mining is a great way to derive the business rules you ought to be using. Its more reliable in some ways that mining that old legacy code.

KDnuggets: Successful Data Mining Applications

Data Mining success is focused on the same areas as business rules and predictive analytics.

Finance Organizations Need to Improve Operational Efficiency But Don't Know How

Business rules technology is key to delivering the operational efficiency companies are looking for.

Decisioning in Healthcare

Healthcare companies need to move from decision support to decision automation using business rules.

Connecting the Web of Consumer Information: Data Spiders Weave the Path of Predictive Variables for Marketers

New analytic techniques like data spiders can help build the analytic infrastructure marketers need.

Different Perspectives

Different perspectives from IT and the business are nothing new but business rules technology can bridge the gap.

Decision Management and Government

Government agencies can get great value out of automating decisions using business rules and predictive analytics.

The differences between BI and EDM

What is the difference between Business Intelligence and EDM? The simple answer is that Enterprise Decision Management differs from traditional BI in that it is focused on execution of decisions and actions rather than reporting.

Are Business Rules the fastest growing market you have never heard of?

Business rules may be the fastest growing market you have never heard of.