exceptions – Commercial Intelligence

Don’t miss the great post about his and Ilog’s take on rule and decision management methodologies by James Taylor today (available here).

Here’s the bottom line:

Focus on what the system does or decides.
- Focus on the actions taken during a business process and the decisions that govern them and the deductions that they rely on.
- In priority order, focus on actions, then decisions, then deductions.
Don’t expect to automate every nuance of an evolving business process on day one – iterate.
- Iteratively elaborate and refine the conditions and exceptions under which
  - actions show be taken,
  - decisions are appropriate, and
  - deductions hold true

Another way of summing this up is:

Try not to use the word “then” in your rules!

Do check out the Ilog methodology as well as the one I developed for Haley that is available here. The key thing Continue reading “Agile Business Rules Management Requires Methodology”

Some strategy folks in an enterprise architecture group recently asked for help making rules more relevant to their organization. Their concerns ranged from when to embed rules in their middle tier versus encapsulate them within services to identifying ideal use cases and reference implementations. They were specifically interested in coupling rules with BPM and BI.

Such questions occur every time a group or enterprise considers adopting rules technology for more than a specific application. They are looking for guidelines, blueprints, or patterns that will help them disseminate understanding about when and how to use rules. They have adopted a BPM vendor which will be integrated with their selected rule vendor, each as enterprise standards, so they are particularly interested in the integration requirements between the two.

Two high level understandings are critical for success in furthering adoption of rules technology.

abstract activities for which rules technology well-suited and
when and why rules technology is better than familiar alternatives

Continue reading “Business Rules Process Management”