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Understanding English promotes better policies and requirements

Capturing some policies from a publication by the Health and Human Services department recently turned up the following….
It’s probably the case that there are more specific lists than just “some list” or “any list”, as suggested below.
This is a good thing about applying deep natural language understanding to policy statements.  It helps you say precisely what you mean, even if you are not using a rule or logic engine, but just trying to articulate your policies or requirements clearly and precisely.

HHS on expedited review

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Accenture, Public Policy and Governance at Oracle

Some time ago I spoke with public sector leadership at Oracle and Accenture about  applications in Health and Human Services.   Oracle was already my client with what was then Haley Authority (now Oracle Policy Automation) integrated within Siebel CRM.  Lagan was also one of my clients who competed with Oracle and others, such as Curam Software, for public sector case management applications.  It was obvious then that then market-leading approach of Curam Software, which largely relied on IBM Global Services to codify the policies that determine eligibility and levels of benefit for various programs would not be viable for much longer.  Oracle and Lagan were going to change the playing field with a more accessible and knowledge-centric approach based in Haley’s natural language business rules management system. 

There was a current battle going on in one state (Kansas, as I recall) among these three companies which went Oracle’s way thanks to Accenture and support from Haley.  We were also working with them on a larger opportunity in Ontario.  Continue reading “Accenture, Public Policy and Governance at Oracle”

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Rule and event-driven business process M&A

On the heels of IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi comes Progress Software’s acquisition of Savvion.  The salient similarities are that IBM is adding BPM applications to its middleware stack as is Progress, at least with regard to its enterprise service bus offerings.  More interesting is the relationship between Progress’ complex event processing software and Savvion’s BPM.  Also of note is the vendor-provided integration of JBOSS Rules within Savvion versus the unrealized potential of IBM’s Ilog with respect to Lombardi.

We’ve written several times about the artificial distinction between CEP and BPM, their inevitable convergence, and the immature integration of business rules with business process management and event processing that inhibits knowledge-driven governance and decisioning. Continue reading “Rule and event-driven business process M&A”