Enterprise Decision Management - a Weblog

Live from EBRC - Production Rule Standards

Last session today at the EBRC was my pal Christian (from ILOG) talking about production rules - Production Rule Representation (PRR - no link yet but the BMI Domain Task Force is here) and Rule Interchange Format (RIF). Christian began...

Why business rules? A curious reader asks..

I got a comment yesterday from Alexander asking some pithy and pertinent questions about business rules. Here then are my answers (somewhat delayed due to a machine crash wiping out the first version of the post). Personally, I have nevery...

Gathering requirements, and rules

I saw this post on gathering requirements by Scott Sehlhorst today. Now I don't think requirements are the same as business rules (particularly given the nature of business rules is to change) and that one should keep them separate and...

Business rules standards - where are we now?

I thought I would include a short note for everyone as to the standards work around business rules. The absence of real standards in the business rules space has long been identified as an issue preventing broad adoption and, as...

The secret of business user rule maintenance

I saw this post on rule templates over on The Road Hits The Rubber and it made me think about business users and the promise that business rules makes of allowing business users to maintain business rules. But here's the...

Top 10 Excuses for not automating decisions

Over on my other blog I posted some notes on the top 10 excuses given for not adopting business rules and other decision automation technologies: 10. We tried before and never got any results 9. I would like to invest...

What do the analyst firms say about business rules?

There have been some posts around asking what coverage the leading analyst firms have of business rules. This has been picking up of late with Gartner, IDC and Forrester all doing some coverage. Here are some searches to help you...

How do I build a list of Business Rule Engine Selection Requirements?

One of the questions I get a lot is "how do I build a list of requirements" when selecting a business rules engine or business rules management system. These, it seems to me, fall into various categories: Rule Syntax -...

Why are business rules better than traditional code?

There are a number of advantages gained by expressing business logic in business rules and using the processing and management facilities included with a business rules management system to work with them. In brief summary: The separation of decision logic...

What is Rete III?

Rete III is the most advanced commercially-available inference engine, benchmarking more than 300% faster than its competitors, making it the ideal solution for organizations managing large, complex business rule sets, where high performance is critical. Benchmark programs test the ability...

How do business analysts maintain business rules?

The business analyst is responsible for defining the business processes which will be supported and then gathering and organizing the business rules that will provide the foundation for the application planning process. This list of rules will typically be in...

What can you use business rules for?

There is a huge range of solutions that can be built better with business rules. I discuss some of them, and try and post new interesting ones, here in my What do people do with this blog. Some examples might...

How can a business rules solution enable compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA or similar?

A formalized, auditable collection of rules for collecting and acting upon information is central to the requirements of regulatory mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. Companies must ensure and enforce compliance by every employee, for every transaction, and in every...

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...

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,...

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...