Rethinking development with SOA and business rules

Saw an interesting blog entry today - Rethinking development - which talked about a report from the Burton Group. A couple of comments in particular caught my eye:

Choose development tools and infrastructure products that support SOA design practices.

Well that's pretty straightforward. Business rules products like Blaze Advisor with its focus on deploying rules services or decision services clearly meet this criteria. The blog entry goes on to say:

[W]ith slow and steady commitment, SOA will decrease duplication of development work, simplify maintenance of service code, and improve overall consistency of business processes." The objective is "business flexibility and adaptability."

This seems like a plug for business rules! Business rules management systems can reduce duplication by:

• Centrally managing business rules in a repository.
• Simplify maintenance by making it possible for business users to maintain their own business rules using a controlled but flexible interface.
• Make processes more consistent and simpler by automating previously manual decisions and re-using those decisions across processes.

Business flexibility and adaptability are the watchwords of business rules. SOA and business rules together are a great way to deliver them.