AIG Trade Credit - a case study

Digging around in some old case studies and I found this one from AIG Trade Credit. This one was an interesting one for a couple of reasons. Firstly its a great example of how business rules can help IT and the business collaborate when designed right and secondly because of its focus both on agility (responding quickly to market changing events) and on costs savings (allowing more IT dollars to be spent on development and fewer on maintenance). A couple of quotes from the case study stand out in this respect:

Above all, Blaze Advisor allows business users and analysts who understand credit risk to write and audit changes to the system’s credit models without resorting to a programming language or relying on IT resources for changes made during application release cycles.

[The CIO] says “We see business rules as an essential technology that will continue to be fundamental to our agility in reacting to external market forces and rapidly executing our business strategies."

AIG Trade Credit achieved this by having the IT folks lead the development of a system that separated out the "business" logic from the "technical" logic. The IT team was then able to define templates for the kinds of business rules needed for new products and new countries and use these templates to generate a controlled, point-and-click interface for business users to use to manage the rules needed. This allowed them to effectively collaborate by having IT focus on the technical aspects while giving the business users a controlled ability to manage the business aspects.