The business rules (BR) approach now has a new emphasis on addressing the needs of business analysts, but also with the new life injected into the workflow concept that business process management (BPM) and service oriented architecture (SOA) is engendering.
The BR approach essentially de-couples the business logic from the rest of an application and processes that logic as a set of rules that are fired or not depending on the data streaming in. There are a number of different ways in which the firing of rules is undertaken. For a relatively simple business application, a business analyst can specify through a BR tool the order in which the rules should be evaluated, but for applications comprising hundreds of rules there are sophisticated algorithms that can process rules in sets.
One of the crucial questions in designing a BR system is the level of logic granularity that should be de-coupled from the remaining application. An example is directing the flow between consuming services in a SOA environment; this is where the tie-in with BPM enters the frame.
BR naturally complements BPM by providing advanced processing of workflow options in a complex business process. Thus, rules that govern policy on compliance and internal standards (and these can run to many tens if not hundreds), or that are highly interdependent, or that are changing regularly such as on a daily basis, are best managed by a dedicated BR tool. These tools are now aimed at business analysts, developers, or a combination of the two.
The optimism in the field is well founded as the barriers to adoption are lessening. In some industries the BR approach has been in use for many years, but under a different name, such as ‘expert system’ or ‘knowledge system’. These various approaches are converging under the single umbrella of the BR approach, or business rules management systems (BRMS).
Some barriers will persist: organizations bureaucratic in nature will find that business managers feel threatened by BRMS that take away their decision-making role. There are many jobs that are purely based on making the connections between input data and directing action based on rules. Organizations that are more people-capital focused will, on the other hand, gain the full benefit of the efficiencies that BRMS introduce, with managers gaining the freedom to spend time on more productive activities.
However, the niche players may find that BRMS will become a staple of the large BPM players as the need for it is realized. The standards in IT tend to be steered by these larger players so that BRMS may become overtaken by the standards being adopted in BPM and SOA. This is good for the BR approach, but the niche players need to be alert to where the future is heading. Ultimately event-driven systems, such as complex event processing, which again have BR at their core, will end up driving this field forward.
A highlight of the EBRC meeting was the presentation on tesco.com by one of these niche players, IVIS Group. The BRMS system implemented helped transform the retailer into one of the largest online presences. BRMS is one area where being an early adopter can deliver differentiation with commercial benefits.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
