I like the EDS "Next Big Thing" blog and saw this post - Elevator speech about the next big thingBeing able to proactively manage the complexity created by massive change through the application of new levels of automation. We live in a world of exponential change. It is overwhelming our ability to absorb and comprehend what’s going on. Automation and context aware computing techniques will be used to focus on managing our attention, bringing the information to us in a way we can both comprehend and taking appropriate action, wherever we are in the world. Now when I read this I was struck by how relevant an EDM approach is to delivering on this elevator pitch: Massive complexity requires automation - the complexity is increasingly in decisions and so a focus on automating decisions is required. The use of predictive analytics to predict appropriate actions and of business rules to deliver on these actions is key. The ability to use optimization tools and scenario analysis to both analyze what-if scenarios and plan possible responses to potential...

Interesting little snippet on the SOA blog – Survey: Java EE, .NET neck and neck. Clearly lots of companies are going to end up deploying systems to Java and .NET over the next few years. Add in the long tail of legacy COBOL applications and you have a typical heterogeneous environment. One of the attractions of a business rules approach is the separation of decision logic from the "plumbing" of applications. While an SOA approach – developing business rules as services – helps a lot, it can also be very effective to use a business rules management system that let’s you externalize all the rules, manage them in a repository and then deploy them as .NET services, Java services or COBOL programs while still ensuring that you can manage the rules once to ensure consistency. There are business rules management systems out there that support multiple deployment platforms from a single repository – Blaze Advisor is one.

EDM is often thought of as the platform for the better decisioning of the millions of operational decisions typical within an enterprise. These are the relatively “little” decisions – such as providing a call center response to an individual customer - that individually don’t have a large impact on the organization, but collectively do. Reading an excellent article by John S. Hammond, Ralph Keeney and Howard Raiffa titled “The Hidden Traps in Decision Making,” in the January 2006 edition of the Harvard Business Review, I was struck by how EDM can be a platform for the better decisioning not just of the millions of small impact decisions, but also for the better decisioning of the very high impact strategic decisions made by senior executives at companies. As Hammond, Keeney and Raiffa point out in their article, high level strategic decision making can often be sabotaged not just by the usual suspects such as a lack of information, defined alternatives, or complete cost-benefit analysis, but by the very way the human brain works! It appears that there...

Please welcome a colleague with an analytic bent, Rahul Asthana, who will be helping Barb and I add some predictive analytic flavor to the blog.

...

The lack of standards currently in the business rules space makes interoperability hard. Although many of the technical deployment standards are supported as deployment options by rules vendors, the standards specific to rules are limited: JSR-94 - some information on this first rules standard can be found at javarules.org. It is a fairly limited standard but fairly well supported by the major vendors. OMG Production Rules Representation - a standard for rule interchange under development by the OMG. More details on their site. W3C Rules Interchange Format - another standard under development by W3C. More information here. Hopefully the OMG and W3C ones will come together. It is also worth noting that these standards lack end-user customer participation so those interested should think about signing up. In answer to the questions posed in the comments: The leading vendors are active in both standards. Doubt they would invest the time if they weren't planning on supporting them. I suspect that failure to merge them might result in one getting more support...

There have been some posts around asking what coverage the leading analyst firms have of business rules. This has been picking up of late with Gartner, IDC and Forrester all doing some coverage. Here are some searches to help you find it: Gartner - tend to call business rules solutions BREs, work by various analysts but mostly by Jim Sinur (now joined by Dave McCoy) including a Magic Quadrant and market sizingIDC -  mostly work by Steve Hendrick including some market sizingForrester - mostly by John Rymer. None of the open source products, such as Drools, are getting coverage here presumably because the analysts don't get asked questions about them (not sure if this is cause or effect). In answer to the comment posted: I think the analyst firms should, and likely will, comment on the value of open source products in the context of the products in which they are embedded. I doubt they will comment on them as rules engines per se unless they get asked by their corporate clients to so do. Nothing stops reviewers sending in articles to magazines or...

At least 50% of our BR projects involve excavating "rules" from existing legacy code.  This does not mean simply chopping existing code into smaller pieces and forward engineering them into new technology. It usually means trying to salvage the true business rules out of the code, correlating them to business vocabulary, and analyzing them for business value prior to putting them into newer technology (such as a BRE).  At odds is that the mining of rules from code requires very technical resources while the analyzing of them for business value requires knowledgeable business leaders.  How have people addressed this challenge?  What kinds of people and skills are needed for a project that starts with mining rules from code, then analyzes them for business reasons, then forward engineers them into a BRE?  Do such projects often involve mining rules from code and from documents and from peoples' heads?  If so, how are these rules integrated safely into an automated solution that makes sense?  (We are finding that this is a...

...

...