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
It strikes me that many companies who think they have either a unique process or a lot of process variations actually do not - they have a standard set of activities that must be assembled dynamically based on the circumstances, customer etc. This leads to a rules-first approach to defining the process and much simpler processes. This is particularly useful when you start considering case management processes where using the rules to determine what state the case has reached and what, therefore, is the right next step is a clearly better approach.
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.
The power of Decision Management in this kind of scenario is threefold.
Firstly it focuses on the decisions themselves - what decisions matter to the customer interaction. This ensures that the data being collected and used is that which will make a difference. Beginning with the decision in mind in this way focuses analytics and data gathering.
Secondly it allows the decision to be made consistently across channels so that customers get the same service from the agent at the gate, the call center, the service center or the kiosk. Operational BI assumes there is a person to make the decision and so cannot deliver this true cross-channel consistency.
Thirdly, Decision Management recognizes that policies and regulations matter as much, sometimes more, than data. Presenting the data and even its analysis to someone who then fails to follow procedure is not helpful. Decision Management combines the policy aspects of a decision with the analytic aspects in a way Operational BI does not.
CEP module receives or intercepts a flurry of events and processes them with the objective of figuring out what those events are relevant for; it triggers the appropriate business processes or decision services
BPM module receives the request for a given process to be applied to a higher level entity (an application, a document...); it automates the steps defined in the business process
BRMS module is invoked with a given context to apply business rules; it makes a business decision
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.
G. Trentham, and H. Scholl. HICSS '08: Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, page 197. Washington, DC, USA, IEEE Computer Society, (2008)
C. Wild, K. Maly, C. Zhang, C. Roberts, D. Rosca, and T. Taylor. TENCON '94. IEEE Region 10's Ninth Annual International Conference. Theme: Frontiers of Computer Technology. Proceedings of 1994, (August 1994)