I was another fly-on-the-wall for the second analysts breakfast. This time round analysts from Gartner were on hand to answer questions around business process management (BPM), service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business rules management systems (BRMS) issues.

Analysts:
David McCoy (DM), managing vice president and Gartner Fellow
Daryl Plummer (DP), group vice president and Chief Gartner Fellow

Here’s a few of the questions I picked up on:

Question: Do you find that you don’t need a rules engine if you are using BPM?

DP: A BPM suite is supposed to do everything, include handling the rules although you can switch out the rules engine, if needed. You get the extra flexibility but you need a way to link the rules with the process. For this reason, in the BPM suite it can be easier to use the rules within the BPM suite. However if you do switch to a product such as ILOG’s BRMS, this will allow you to be more flexible with your rules.

Question: How do you see the BPM/BRMS market right now?

DM: There are many components that make up a BPM - one of those is the integrated BRMS. Most BPM systems have some rules. They are the main consumers of BRMS products. In many cases, a standalone BRMS makes less sense.

Question: what is the advantage of pulling out the BRMS from the BPM?

DM: You could pull all rules out of a service. But this is not always valid. You’ll end up with 1000’s of rules as a result, including all the programmatic rules. You should concentrate on pulling out the rules that correspond to business decisions. Concentrate on:

• Volatile rules
• Rules that affect business value - those that will make you more competitive and responsive
• Auditable rules - the rules that you need to monitor

A good rule of thumb is to look at the rule. If switching it will make a meaningful difference to the business, then externalize it.

Question: How do we deal with old systems? Should we apply an SOA to them and then apply rules?

DM: Yes, take the old application and wrap it with an SOA layer. Let the layer talk to the API for the application. The advantage of SOA is that you don’t need to care what goes on inside.

Tags: BPM, BRMS, SOA

Posted by Daryl Pereira in Dialog 08, Dialog day 3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.