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.
RuleSpeak® beinhaltet eine Menge von Richtlinien für die Darstellung von Geschäftsregeln in prägnanter, anwenderfreundlicher Art. Es ist keine Sprache oder Syntax per se, vielmehr eine Sammlung von "Best Practices" für deutsch-sprechende Geschäftsanwender.
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.
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)