I got an update on the Oracle Business Rules product recently. Oracle is an interesting company - they have the components of decision management but do not yet have them under a single umbrella. For instance, they have in-database data mining (blogged about here), the Real Time Decisions (RTD) engine, event processing rules and so on. Anyway, this update was on business rules.
Technically, BPM/Business Rules approach place process logic with the BPM suite and decision logic in the business rules management system (BRMS). The process logic in a BPM suite sequences and controls activities and launches and cancels processes. Control is achieved with timers and exception handlers. Processes can be designed to recover from errors, restart processes and coordinate activities. The BRMS effectively designs, organizes and executes the logic behind a process decision. An effective BRMS can handle any depth and complexity of decision logic, including computationally complex logic and dense logic.
Bruce makes an interesting comment on business rules too: that “routing logic in process gateways” are not “business rules”. That doesn’t really make sense: for sure some gateways will be process-housekeeping decisions of little interest to the business user, but others will surely embed business-critical decisions. On the other hand, it has long been acknowledged that a best practice for BPM is to delegate such business decisions to a managed decision service - hence the explicit new business rule (aka decision) task in BPMN 2.0. And,in the CEP world, for tools like TIBCO BusinessEvents to invoke a decision managed by its Decision Manager tool.
Term: a word or phrase used to describe a thing or to express a concept [1]
Concept: an abstract idea. Concepts are expressed by terms. [1]
Fact: Facts relate terms [2]
Fact Type: a fact type is an association between two or more concepts
Vocabulary: the body of words used in a particular language or in a particular sphere [1]
Terminology: the body of terms used in a subject of study, profession, etc. [1]
Fact Model: A fact model establishes the basis for shared operational business knowledge. [2] This model is usually graphical and can also be called the business object model or BOM.
There are obvious benefits in making business policies/rules explicit and easily changed via accompanying quick-change processes. The apparent benefits revolve around faster reaction to competitors and markets, as well as quick response to management and collaborative tuning. There are more subtle opportunities to get ahead of the game and anticipate customer demand, thus creating the ability to generate incremental revenue streams that play off of increased demands. Customers may also be enabled to make changes to their individual processes as they interact with an organization. CRM efforts are struggling to have a differentiating customer experience. BPM with explicit rules will allow this experience to evolve and become individualized.
Based on feedback from clients and earlier surveys, I have compiled and listed the benefit themes below:
Business Agility: Faster reactive and proactive time to market
Decision Making: Test rule-based scenarios at lower cost
Revenue Opportunities: Greater product, pricing and flexibility
Customer Satisfaction: More-customizable products and services
Compliance; Greater visibility into policy adherence
OpenLexicon is an open-source business rules and process management tool that rapidly develops applications for transaction and process-based applications. OpenLexicon is known for providing high performance solutions and has been used in a number of enterprise-level applications. You can read about these here . You can use either product separately or in concert. There are two main components of OpenLexicon: the metadata repository and the business rules engine. Major components of OpenLexicon are released as open source software under the OpenLexicon OpenSource License. A good overview of the business rules approach is available here .OpenLexicon has a Wizard that is a web-form based collaborative tool for building business rules and business use cases. For a brief overview of the wizard, look at this link . We have designed the Wizard for non-developers and analysts with light technical skills. It features a richer experience for the users on the web, traditionally only offered by thick-client UIs. The collaboration team assembles groups of business rules into a business use case and published in a metadata file or the database. OpenLexicon provides solid support for web services. You can read about the OpenLexicon WSDL here . There is also an eclipse plug-in for web services here . You create complex application behavior with OpenLexicon’s process management. OpenLexicon can build an application reads data from a file, performs reference data lookups, validates the entire object, and then stores it in a database table. You can read about this here . Plus, you can build the application in the Wizard while writing no code! OpenLexicon also supports web services. A simple architecture diagram for OpenLexicon is included here .
On Wednesday morning, June 12, I gave my paper on the three business rules projects to the ERBC: The projects were: Drools, OpenLexicon and OpenRules. It was well attended and well received. Pete Skangos and I gave everyone a copy of the book and we started an impromptu signing line, until it was a bit past the beginning of the next paper.
Vor einigen Tagen fand ich einen Artikel, der auf sehr anschauliche Weise erklärte, weshalb der Business-Rules-Ansatz so wichtig ist. Es sind immer noch wenige Experten, die von jener Relevanz des Business Rules Managements (BRM) ausgehen. Drei entscheidende Fragen werden sich all jene stellen, die ernsthaft über einen Einsatz von BRM sprich automatisierbaren Geschäftsregeln nachdenken:
1. Was sind die Vorteile von Business Rules, die ein zusätzliches Investment rechtfertigen?
2. Warum sollte man nicht nur die Regeln codieren?
3. Werden die Regeln verlässlich funktionieren und vor allem sich reibungslos in das System integrieren lassen?
M. zur Muehlen, M. Indulska, and K. Kittel. 19th Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2008), Christchurch, New Zealand, Australasian Computer Society, (2008)
J. Schiefer, S. Rozsnyai, C. Rauscher, and G. Saurer. DEBS '07: Proceedings of the 2007 inaugural international conference on Distributed event-based systems, page 198--205. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)
M. zur Muehlen, M. Indulska, and G. Kamp. EDOCW '07: Proceedings of the 2007 Eleventh International IEEE EDOC Conference Workshop, page 189--196. Washington, DC, USA, IEEE Computer Society, (2007)
M. zur Muehlen, M. Indulska, and G. Kamp. ER '07: Tutorials, posters, panels and industrial contributions at the 26th international conference on Conceptual modeling, page 127--132. Darlinghurst, Australia, Australia, Australian Computer Society, Inc., (2007)