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?
Was Regeln und Entscheidungen zusammenhält und was sie unterscheidet, ist eine oft gestellte Frage, wenn Sowatec zum Thema Business Rules Management berät: Was unterscheidet sie eigentlich genau und welche Abhängigkeiten sind am Werk.
Grundsätzlich lassen sich zu Entscheidungen und ihren Bedingungen drei wesentliche Aussagen treffen.
Entscheidungen sind von den Prozessen, Systemen bzw. Events strikt zu unterschieden d. h. sie müssen getrennt betrachtet werden. Erst dadurch ist erste ihre Identifizierung und damit Verwaltung möglich.
Regeln, die für Entscheidungen nötig sind, werden in je nach Ziel bzw. Fokus orientierten Regel”gruppen” zusammengefasst.
Die Verwaltung eines Regelsets obliegt den Verantwortlichen für die Herkunft der jeweiligen Regeln (Legal, Marketing, Firmenpolitik etc.). Erst wenn Regeln sich ändern, hat das Auswirkungen auf zu treffende Entschedungen, nicht umgekehrt.
Regeln bzw. Business Rules sind also Bedingungen für das Decision Management und seine Werkzeuge, den Decision Services. Bei James Taylor habe ich einen recht guten Artikel zu Decision Services gefunden: Here’s how decisions and rules relate
Vergleichbar mit BPMS werden nicht alle Anwender diese komplexe Funktionalität eines BRMS in gleichem Umfang nutzen. Entscheiden für einen Einsatz eines komplexen Management von Geschäftsregeln ist die Komplexitiät der Regeln. Grundsätzlich entscheidend für den Einsatz von regelbasierten Prozessen ist ja immer noch, wieviele Prozesse automatisierte werden können/müssen, wie komplex diese Prozesse sind und wie “teuer” es ein Unternehmen kommt, diese Prozesse nicht zu automatisieren. Entscheidend für den Einsatz eines ausgewachsenen BRMS ist deshalb immer noch, wie schnell ein Unternehmen auf Veränderungen am Markt reagieren können muss, wie agil ein Unternehmen sein muss.
Unlike traditional BI, an operational BI system should be focused on influencing the interaction with your customer to provide benefit to both the customer and your business. Traditional BI, while often seen as a tool with a very fuzzy ROI, is nonetheless necessary for conducting business. Operational BI, on the other hand, provides a much clearer benefit because it directly addresses your business.
The success of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has created the foundation for information
and service sharing across application and organizational boundaries. Through the use of SOA,
organizations are demanding solutions that provide vast scalability, increased reusability of
business services, and greater efficiency of computing resources. More importantly,
organizations need agile architectures that can adapt to rapidly changing business requirements
without the long development cycles that are typically associated with these efforts. Event-Driven
Architecture (EDA) has emerged to provide more sophisticated capabilities that address these
dynamic environments. EDA enables business agility by empowering software engineers with
complex processing techniques to develop substantial functionality in days or weeks rather than
months or years. As a result, EDA is positioned to enhance the business value of SOA.
The purpose of this white paper is to describe the approach employed to overcome the significant
technical challenges required to design a dynamic grid computing architecture for a US
government program. The program required optimization of the overall business process while
maximizing scalability to support dramatic increases in throughput. To realize this goal, an
architecture was developed to support the dynamic placement and removal of business services
across the enterprise.
Incanto can be implemented to solve the following kinds of decision making problems:
Problems where the expert rule set is large or complex. Incanto is especially suited to managing complexity.
Problems where the rules change frequently. Incanto`s testing capabilities mean amended rule sets can be introduced swiftly and with confidence.
Problems where the expert rules set needs to be applied to large volumes of data.
Where all these conditions apply Incanto is probably the only good answer in the market at present.
For those of you that could not make it, I wanted to give you the gist of what I presented. This presentation covers the evolution of the business rules technology focusing first on the drivers that forced the market to shift its focus from Business Rules Engines (BRE) to Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS). In a nutshell, the main ideas are summarized below. In a few days, the recording will also be posted on our community site for your convenience.
Rob sees three key areas where rules can help:
Tighter warranty controls
Claims processing is improved because financial limits, detailed coverage types, materials return and more can be automated and rapidly changed when necessary. The rules also allow “what-if” testing and impact analysis.
Better built vehicles
The decision making is tracked very closely thanks to rules so you can analyze specific repair types, specific VINs and so on. More effective parts return and generally better information also contribute.
Lower cost repairs
Rules allow goodwill repairs, labor-only repairs and specific kinds of repairs to be managed very precisely. Rules-driven decisioning can reduce the variation of costs between dealers and help intervene, rejecting or editing claims that seem overly expensive. The ability of rules to deploy data mining and predictive analytics can also really help here.
In diesem Buch werden alle relevanten modernen Standards der Geschäftsprozessanalyse und -modellierung miteinander verbunden und ihre praktische Handhabung dargestellt.
Kern des Buches ist eine Geschäftsprozess-Methodik, die die verschiedenen Standards in praxisrelevanter und harmonischer Weise verbindet. Sie erfahren, welche Standards es gibt, wofür und wie diese eingesetzt werden können und welche Möglichkeiten aber auch möglichen Einschränkungen in der Praxis damit verbunden sind. Basis sind die BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation), OSM (...), BMM (...), SBVR (..) und UML (...) - wobei diese Standards zielgerichtet nur soweit behandelt werden, wie es für die Auseinandersetzung mit Geschäftsprozessen notwendig ist.
Sie erfahren wie Strategien, Geschäftsregeln und Geschäftsprozesse dargestellt werden können und welche Strukturierungsmöglichkeiten es für Unternehmensarchitekten es gibt.
Das Buch richtet sich an Business-Analysten, Prozessdesigner, Betriebsorganisatoren und verwandte Rollen.
Let’s start by recapping decisions services. Decision services are services, generally stateless ones, that answer business questions for other services. Decision Services typically have no side effects so they can be called whenever they are needed without the caller worrying that something will change in the system. This means that database updates, event generation or other actions taken as a result of the decision are taken by the caller not by the Decision Service. This is not 100% true but works as a general rule. To work, Decision Services need to contain all the logic and algorithms necessary to make the decision correctly.
Continuing some posts on next generation warranty systems in the build up to speaking at the Warranty Chain management conference I thought I would contrast how current generation warranty systems handle critical decisions with how next generation systems do so.
1. Decisions are the unit of work to which BI initiatives should be applied.
2. Providing access to data and tools isn't enough if you want to ensure that decisions are actually improved.
3. If you're going to supply data to a decision-maker, it should be only what is needed to make the decision.
4. The relationship between information and decisions is a choice organizations can make--from "loosely coupled," which is what happens in traditional BI, to "automated," in which the decision is made through automation.
5. "Loosely coupled" decision and information relationships are efficient to provision with information (hence many decisions can be supported), but don't often lead to better decisions.
6. The most interesting relationship involves "structured human" decisions, in which human beings still make the final decision, but the specific information used to make the decision is made available to the decision-maker in some enhanced fashion.
7. You can't really determine the value of BI or data warehousing unless they're linked to a particular initiative to improve decision-making. Otherwise, you'll have no idea how the information and tools are being used.
8. The more closely you want to link information and decisions, the more specific you have to get in focusing on a particular decision.
9. Efforts to create "one version of the truth" are useful in creating better decisions, but you can spend a lot of time and money on that goal for uncertain return unless you are very focused on the decisions to be made as a result.
10. Business intelligence results will increasingly be achieved by IT solutions that are specific to particular industries and decisions within them.
- First, event management is primarily about the identification and generation of business events from the ambient events. Similar to what Carole-Ann and I had written in previous posts.- Second, IBM wants to introduce high level EPLs to express the logic for that processing that are business-centric, something very similar to what Business Rules Languages and approaches are in the business rules management area.
Substitute a standard web services interface for a speaking tube, a business rules management system for his encyclopedic knowledge of policies and regulations, data mining or predictive analytics for his customer knowledge and adaptive control for his experimentation and you have Decision Management. The Answerer but on an industrial scale.
business processes and business rules capturing the operational logic and decisioning logic respectively.
To study this analysis, we first need to understand theory which is the basis of their analysis i.e. BWW. Representational analysis is basically comparing constructs of representation theory with the constructs of the modeling grammar. The two evaluation criteria used are ontological completeness which determines the extent of lack of constructs in modeling grammar and ontological clarity. Now BWW is the representational theory to represent real world and has been earlier used to benchmark many languages. SRML and SBVR are compared to BWW to benchmark their representational power.
This is EDA! Model your business events right and have their software representations travel in real-time through a global (enterprise wide) data space (call it an ESB), then you are offering your business huge opportunities. Think of connecting your global data space with those controlled by other enterprises: your fantasy is the limit.
A business analyst should get the right rules and get them right, to answer compliance questions, to avoid unedning re-work, and to retain your business ‘smarts’ in a single-source. RuleArts develops the new work environment that proactively addresses the costs of business-level miscommunications, stovepipe vocabularies, and misinterpretation of policy.
RuleXpress can help you today with business-oriented support for measuring and improving quality in: capturing, assessing and changing business rules; retaining core business-worker knowledge; and ensuring compliance with regulation.
RuleXpress is a repository-based tool that can be used offline or in a multi-user environment. Models are stored in a central repository and can be checked out to a local copy and then merged back. Within the tool the key organizing principle is that of a community - a group of people who share the same understanding about their vocabulary and rules. Within this you can have projects but the focus of the tool is on the activity of vocabulary/rule management as an ongoing task. The key activities are to manage vocabulary and rules or, more specifically terms, fact model, rules, decision tables and rule groups.
What is a business rule? What is the business rule approach?
In this Second Edition of his popular handbook, first published in 1998, Mr. Ross brings you up-to-date on these and related questions.
Compliance. Requirements. Adaptability. Knowledge.
Find out about practical solutions for these and other urgent business challenges. In readable,get-to-the-point style, this book gives you a fast-paced, up-to-the-minute inspection tour of the breakthrough ideas and innovations that have the industry abuzz.
Semantics in Business Systems begins with a description of what semantics are and how they affect business systems. It examines four main aspects of the application of semantics to systems, specifically: How do we infer meaning from unstructured information, how do application systems make meaning as they operate, how do practitioners uncover meaning in business settings, and how do we understand and communicate what we have deduced? This book illustrates how this applies to the future of application system development, especially how it informs and affects Web services and business rule- based approaches, and how semantics will play out with XML and the semantic Web. The book also contains a quick reference guide to related terms and technologies. It is part of Morgan Kaufmann's series of Savvy Manager's Guides.
Most BREs today are deployed as “decision services”, and are used in “stateless” transactions to make “decisions” as a part of a business process. A CEP application is instead processing multiple event streams and sources over time, which requires a “stateful” rule service optimized for long running. This is an important distinction, as a stateful BRE for long-running processes needs to have failover support - the ability to cache its working memory for application restarting or distribution. And of course long-running processes need to be very particular over issues like memory handling - no memory leaks allowed!
The one, really big, difference between Complex Event Processing and traditional BRMS tools is that the former is loosely associated with EDA and decisions that are based on multiple events, whereas the latter is more associated with conventional request-reply SOA and automating decisions made in managed business processes.
Business Process Management (BPM) und Business Rules Management (BRM) zusammen in einer service-orientierten Architektur (SOA) sind die methodischen und technischen Voraussetzungen, um Geschäftsprozesse zu industrialisieren und agil zu sein. BPM schafft die Automatisierung und Standardisierung von Geschäftsprozessen, BRM die Standardisierung und Transparenz von Management-Politiken und -Prinzipien. Und eine SOA bringt die Service-Orientierung, die uns erlaubt zwischen spezifischen Logiken einzelner Prozesse und prozessübergreifenden Logiken gebündelter Kompetenzen und Dienstleistungen sauber zu trennen. Das schafft Agilität zusammen mit Industrialisierung.
EDM ist ein wichtiger Bestandteil eines umfassenden Enterprise-Architektur-Management. Technologien wie BRMS können heute das EDM unterstützen und bei dessen Automatisierung helfen. Voraussetzung dafür ist allerdings ein erfolgreicher Umgang mit Entwurf und Inbetriebnahme komplexer Business-Rules-Modelle. Die Enterprise-Architektur-Methodik ist eine wichtige Vorgehensweise für das gesamthafte und erfolgreiche Entwerfen und implementieren des Rule Lifecycles. Das Management und die Gestaltung reibungsloser Iterationen ist hierfür von großer Bedeutung. Die Wiederverwendung von Architektur-Blue-Prints und Regel-Templates unterstützt dabei, den gesamten Prozess straff zu gestalten. Es gilt, die voneinander abhängigen Aufgaben des Business und der IT im Entwicklungsprozess zu identifizieren, um die Ressourcen aktiv planen zu können und Terminabweichungen zu vermeiden – und letztendlich allen zu ermöglichen, von Projektbeginn an ihre Verantwortlichkeiten voll wahrnehmen zu können. Wie ein BRMS die Phasen des Rule Lifecycles unterstützt, muss bei der Tool-Auswahl bewertet werden, und zwar unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Benutzerfreundlichkeit wie auch der technischen Funktionskriterien. Im nächsten Schritt sollte explizit im Prozess der Regelentwicklung modelliert und implementiert werden – vor allem mit der Komponente, die für die Änderung von Entscheidungen verwendet werden soll. Die Kombination von Enterprise-Architektur, einschließlich Decision Management, SOA, des BRLC und hoch entwickelter BRM-Tools ist ein ausgereifter und historischer Quantensprung in der Produktivität und Qualität von Business und IT.
Business intelligence has “invaded” the operational space in a big way, offering in-line analytics, real-time or near real-time decision-making support for all employees in the enterprise.
A key component of a company's IT framework is a business intelligence (BI) system. Traditional BI systems were designed for senior management and business analysts to report on, analyze and optimize business operations to reduce costs and increase revenues. Organizations use BI for strategic and tactical decision making where the decision-making cycle may span a time period of several weeks or months. Competitive pressures coming from a very dynamic business environment are forcing companies to react faster to changing business conditions and customer requirements. As a result, there is now a need to use BI to help drive and optimize business operations on a daily basis, and, in some cases, even for intraday decision making. This type of BI is called operational business intelligence and real-time business intelligence and it is used not only by senior management and analysts (as in traditional BI) but also by line of business managers and operational users. In other words this is BI for everyone.
This article discusses why business intelligence is often too closely associated with data warehousing and should be replaced by a concept such as decision intelligence, which could be considered a modern version of earlier decision support systems.
Embedded operational analytics help applications and business users take close to real-time action. However, there is another class of applications where even close to real-time analytics are not
sufficient.
M. zur Muehlen, M. Indulska, and K. Kittel. 19th Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2008), Christchurch, New Zealand, Australasian Computer Society, (2008)
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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)