In thanking everyone for joining in the conversation at DIALOG 08, Jean-François Abramatic, ILOG’s Chief Product Officer was reminded of the second World Wide Web Conference that he attended in Chicago in 1994.

In the closing session of that event, the attendees were invited to debate the question of whether or not a physical conference was actually needed any more. After all, we now had the Web and email, so did we really need to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to a conference to meet each other in person?

After much debate, for and against the idea, the conclusion was that yes, face to face meetings like this were still an absolute necessity. The main argument put forward at the time? There is no such thing as a virtual beer…

So here we are, 14 years later. We’ve done a lot to leverage the web for this conference, both via our DIABLOG event blog and the DIALOG 08 website, and will continue to do so. Watch out for presentation slides and video footage of all track and keynote sessions that will be posted to the DIALOG website in the next few weeks.

Despite that, the value and enjoyment generated by this face-to-face meeting in Palm Springs is undeniable. Early feedback from our customers, prospects, partners, users, staff and executives has been overwhelmingly positive and plans are already underway to create an even bigger and better experience for DIALOG 09 (unless, of course, we decide to hold the conference in Second Life next year - where, incidentally, virtual beer has now been available for quite some time…) Watch this space!

This year’s DIALOG conference happened to coincide with the 80th Annual Academy Awards ceremony, so in true Hollywood style, I would like to take this opportunity to thank…

• Bruno for his Gallic charm and his faith in the whole DIALOG team,
• Pierre, for his good humor, his inspiration, … and his faith in my golf car driving abilities,
• Jessica, for her great blog input and for sharing her cookie with me,
• MC Joe, for keeping things moving,
• Aimee (aka Herbie), for her seemingly endless supply of USB keys and team spirit,
• Julie F, for her boundless energy and enthusiasm,
• Julie J, for her skills as a movie director (next stop Hollywood),
• Felicia, for her 9+ months of dedication,
• Rosemary, for her professional approach to customer service, and her calmness under pressure,
• Kevin, for just getting the job done,
• Cheryl, for her awesome xylophone skills - and for just being plain awesome,
  Check it out: here
• Nyrie, for her exec travel coordination talents, and for giving me a ride back from the airport,
• Monika, for her boundless devotion to the cause, her effortless charm and sophistication,
• Irv, for teaching me everything I’ve always wanted to know about mixed integer programming but had been too afraid to ask,
• Susan, for trusting in the blog initiative, even if I did get a bit ahead of the curve once or twice,
• Daryl, for taking time out from his vacation to drive to Palm Springs and blog from the trenches with me (I love you, man!)
• Martha, for her commitment to our customers and partners and her great input to the blog,
• James T, for lunch (even if I did have to bring my own),
• Jean-François for the free beer (even if it was just virtual),
• Allen, for the $2 bill,

Not forgetting everyone else in the back office, off-stage, on stage, or back at the office, who contributed above and beyond the call of duty. Also, thanks to the guys and girls from BrainSonic for their wall-to-wall video coverage of the event, and for the staff and management of the Westin Mission Hills Resort and Spa for accommodating our every need. It has been a great pleasure to work with such a talented and dedicated group of professionals on what has been a truly genuine team effort.

I join with the whole DIALOG team and everyone at ILOG in also thanking all the customers, prospects, partners, sponsors, journalists, and of course all our speakers, for being part of the conversation and making DIALOG 08 such a successful event.

As we look forward to next year’s event, we hope that you too will join the conversation and share your comments and feedback about DIALOG 08 here on the blog. Tell us what you enjoyed about this year’s event, what we could have done better, and what you would like to see more of at DIALOG 09.

The Dialog goes on…!

After a follow-up paper vote on Monday, the most popular presentation selected for Irv Lustig’s last Opti session of the day was “Writing Better Mixed Integer Programming Models.”

I suspect Irv organized a second vote because he wanted to avoid having to give the “Introduction to ILOG CP Optimizer” presentation which actually won the original electronic vote. Whether or not there was any vote-rigging involved, I don’t know, but I do know that the vote was quite spread, showing that there was interest in all the proposed topics. I thought of suggesting to Irv that he combine all seven proposed topics into a single talk, but who knows how that would have turned out!

Whether it’s because math was never really my strong point at school, or whether it’s because my brain was fried by 3.30pm on Day 3, I’m afraid Irv’s suggestions for improving MIP models was way over my head. I suppose I should have guessed that when he started with “It’s going to include a lot of math, and if you get lost in the math, so be it.” Oh boy.

If you’re interested in this topic, I think your best bet is to wait until the video is published online some time in the next few weeks! In the mean time, though, if you have any questions for Irv, feel free to post a comment here. Anyone got any Advil?

It was another working lunch today. I sat in on James’ “lunch and learn” session to hear him sharing feedback from the event and discussing best practices with about a dozen or so customers and ILOGers. Below are a few snippets from the informal discussion.

James was blogging the BRMS track throughout the conference and you can find more insights and commentary in his Live from DIALOG series over on his blog.

James used to work for Fair Isaac until about 6 months ago when he left to set up his own company, Smart (Enough) Systems LLC, which provides research, advisory services and implementation support for the enterprise decision management marketplace. James has been working with business rules and other decision management technologies for many years, and is both a well-known proponent of the approach and a passionate advocate of business rules.

Several customers at the table were looking to make rules more accessible to their business users. Many are still at the stage where developers manage the rules, but there is clear drive towards removing this bottleneck. This certainly fits with ILOG’s BRMS product strategy and these customers came to DIALOG to hear how other users were tackling this problem, and to discover best practices regarding rule governance, change management, and the rule development lifecycle.

James’ main piece of advice regarding rule governance was to avoid having a centralized rule governance team for all your enterprise rule projects. That would just create another bottleneck. Each project team should have its own governance processes built in. The role of the central governance team should be to simply ensure that projects are doing governance correctly.

He explained that when implementing a rule-based system for the first time, you shouldn’t expect to get everything right the first time. If changes are required once an application is in production, the business users should drive this change when they are ready for it, not IT.

He added that it is a far better approach to get good at managing change incrementally. You don’t have to roll out new systems to everyone simultaneously. Better to do so gradually, based on business need rather than IT schedules.

Other issues that had brought participants to DIALOG included enterprise architecture, best practices, performance, and migration to the new version of JRules.

Q: Many implementations don’t seem to be realizing the key benefits of the BR approach (business agility, turnaround, transparency, auditability, etc.) These systems are being implemented without active participation of the business stakeholders. Why is this?

A: There are several possible scenarios here. IT might be implementing a business rules approach as an internal project to optimize their own processes, and therefore the active participation of business users might not be appropriate. However, business rule vendors need to work harder to make things more accessible to business users.

R&D folk love to include cool and powerful features that add unnecessary complexity into their solutions, such as the ability to use the programming construct “++” for incremental additions. If you’re a programmer, that’s great, you save yourself some keystrokes and the system runs a millisecond faster. However, your average business user just won’t get it!

Part of any rule governance exercise is to determine who really cares about the project and to get them involved. Just because you use BAL [Business Action Language - ILOG’s “natural language-like” syntax for writing business rules] doesn’t mean it will be legible. You need to work together with business users on the object model and “verbalization” so that the vocabulary and language constructs you use to write your rules actually means something to the business users, and maps to their business user mindset.

If business users weren’t involved in the beginning, that’s going to be harder. It will also be harder to hand over the project to them later (IT have difficulty letting go and business users are not implicated/engaged in the project). It’s possible to refactor to correct early mistakes, but that might require a lot of additional work.

Q: What are the bottlenecks and pitfalls of moving rules towards an enterprise rule repository?

A: Managing all rules as a corporate asset might actually not be the best approach. You should only concentrate at the corporate level on those key rules that actually drive the business. When rules are reused throughout the organization, the impetus for change must come from the business side, not the IT side. For example, on Jan 1st there may be regulatory or price changes that requires the system to be updated. This is a business driver and may be completed unrelated to ongoing IT revision cycles.

Avoid implementing a project-driven, and technology driven repository structure. It should be business-driven. Rule governance is potentially the biggest bottleneck in any BRMS. Avoid having a centralized governance group. Make sure governance is built into individual projects. If you are sharing rules across different projects, it is better to do so at the ruleset level, not the individual rule level, as that makes things much easier to manage and leeps things modular.

The experience gained in refactoring database systems could be useful here. Several books are available on that topic.

You should definitely plan to refactor because the first implementation of any system rarely reflects the optimum solution. Don’t be afraid of that.

One approach when starting out is to set up your rules application to initially flag major decisions for manual validation, then gradually automate them. This was something that was discussed in the BRMS workshop on Sunday.

With a well-implemented modular business rule architecture comes agility. Agility is the ability to make changes to your systems every day, not be tied into the 3, 6, or 9 month IT project cycle.

If you didn’t make it to James’ lunch and learn session (or even if you did), feel free to post additional comments or questions for James here, or directly over on his Smart (Enough) Systems blog.

In this session, Prasad Saraph from Bayer Healthcare’s Biotech Pharmaceuticals Division provided a fascinating insight into the supply chain issues that Bayer faces in producing one of its key biotech pharmaceutical products.

Kogenate is a leading treatment for hemophilia-A, a genetically transmitted condition that prevents blood clotting and affects 400,000+ people worldwide.

Prasad began with some startling figures: 1,600 employees in 15 manufacturing plants work continuously throughout the year to produce just 250 grams of active ingredient, supporting over one billion USD of annual sales of Kogenate.

250g. $1bn. Wow.

Biotech pharmaceutical companies function in massively regulated environments. Add to that the technical complexity of the supply chain and manufacturing process and you can understand why companies like Bayer can leave nothing to chance.

All batches follow the same process flow but may use alternative facilities at each stage: Expression, fermentation, purification, bulk, fill, freeze dry, and packaging. Only one batch can be processed in a facility at a time (to avoid cross-contamination). In certain stages of the manufacturing process, employees must work in multi-layer suits, with highly advanced air filtering and evacuation processes and for no longer than four-hour shifts at a time.

Demand side cosntraints: Large demand fluctuations. The tender process which is increasingly being used by customers, and public authorities creates uncertainty (you’re either in or you’re out of a market, depending on whether you win or lose the tender). Customer emergencies (accidents, cuts) can cause huge demand increases compared to normal prescription levels. Inventory risks: Cold chain needs to be permanently maintained (product must be kept refrigerated 2-8°C) - suppliers must always maintain mandated inventory levels.

Supply side constraints: Complexity in the process, regulatory approval, equipment, facility, and formulation. Process uncertainty: varying quality cycle times based on deviations. Varying reject rates. Biotech products are made using live proteins. The compounds are not produced synthetically and therefore the whole process is less predictable.

Supply chain Planning is a continuous process, with endless cycles of data updates, assumption updates, scenario revisions.

Bayer has close ties with UC Berkeley and is highly involved with the Biotech Forum.

Key objectives: Produce sufficient but not excessive material, as soon as possible, but not too soon, while meeting all regional regulatory requirements on product, process equipment, facilities and raw materials.

Key considerations: Traceability, No back orders. Stock outages is not an option (= loss of life … and law suits).

Bayer uses CPLEX for MIP formulation because it can handle their large problem size. It’s a reliable and proven platform. They needed a platform that developers were familiar with.

Solution times: 30,000 boolean variables, 500,000 float variables, 100,000 contraints. 90% optimum solution reached in about 12 hours on a 1.8Ghz quad core dual processor 64 bit machine with 16Gb RAM.

Challenges: Data quality from ERP, planning engine user interface bugs, interpretation of PE outputs, keeping PE assumptions up to date, WIFM issues from key users and end users

Benefits: One version of the truth. Data fidelity, scenario management, mid-term planning decision support (what-if scenarios). Planners are no longer afraid of calls from regulatory bodies. They can react much more quickly and easily.

The future: Ability to analyze historical batch data to better improve planning forecasts.

James R. Reid, senior director of technology—Analytics, Equifax

James covers how ILOG’s BRMS is integrated into Equifax InterConnect. InterConnecct is Equifax’s decisioning platform which automates credit and lending processes.

Some points from James’ presentation:

For rule development, typically the business requirements come in from the business user/analyst. Within the rules studio Equifax have their own custom plug-ins on top of the BRMS. For instance, a BOM plug-in to verbalize all BOMs.Equifax have written their own custom rules language so business analysts can interact directly with the data - write attributes and audit the results to ensure the attributes are performing as they should be, all without the need of a developer.

Equifax extensively use ILOG’s Rule Team Server web interface to expose rules to customers.Components of Equifax rules (there can be up to 2000 rules for a given credit policy):

• meta-model of business domain
• attributes
• score models
• rule flow

Equifax business rules require a very rich structured business domain object model or fact model. This allows Equifax to build their own language and score-model to expose scorecards to customers.

What are the challenges with JRules 6.x?

• External resources coupled with business rules
• Performance when loading (pre-loading vs. lazy loading - both have issues)
• High migration cost between previous version
• Run-time vs build-time (specific ASP issue)
• Uses J2EE declarative course-grained security model which is a drawback for fluid a ASP environment
• No support for Decision Table Templates
• Lack of documentation for best practices using Advanced Concepts to see these in action

What are the benefits?

• Flexibility
• Agility
• Speed
• Reuse
• Quality

In this session, Ian Isaac and his colleagues from aigdirect.com described how they use ILOG BRMS and a Service Oriented Architecure to ease the process of integrating mergers and acquisitions into their IT infrastructure.

In the insurance industry, mergers and acquisitions often leave companies with multiple systems for billing, claims and policy administration that tend to fragment processing and impede growth and change management.

ILOG BRMS’s enabled aigdirect.com to face this challenge with agility and transparency while meeting their corporate quality control requirements.

The team took questions from the audience and shared their best practices and lessons learned when leveraging BRMS and SOA across the enterprise, as well as some of the benefits and milestones already achieved.

My major takeaway from this session was when the team explained the significant resistance they had initially encountered from the business side to the BRMS approach. People were concerned that the automated system would have an adverse affect on customer service unless all automated decisions and processes were manually reviewed. This resistance to change was quite understandable. These people own the business process and needed to see clear proof that the BRMS solution was effective and reliable before putting their trust in it. They quickly discovered, however, that the BRMS system actually helped them enormously to improve customer service and provide a faster, more consistent service.

Allen Fahden only carries two dollar bills*. Why?

He uses the question to gather feedback from the audience and explore different people’s approaches to innovation and change. He’s quick to point out that there are no wrong answers to the question and hands out two dollar bills to everyone who makes a suggestion. Because two is better than one? Because two dollars is worth (slightly) more than a euro? Because it makes a great ice-breaker for his presentations? Because it annoys people?

It turns out that this last one isn’t so far from the truth, but you’ll need to attend one of Allen’s presentations yourself to find out his own favorite answer to the question…

He goes on to explain that different people react to his two dollar bills in different ways when he tries to spend them in stores, depending on their personality.

• Creators love to break the rules. They are great at solving problems and exploring new ideas. Allen is a creator.
• Executors love to follow the rules but can’t cope with large amounts of change. They love to keep the system working smoothly. These are the people who run off to get their manager when presented with a $2 bill and then call 911.
• Refiners love to make the rules. They are thinkers and have the ability to see around corners and tell you what’s going to wrong with any particular idea. They love picking ideas apart. These people are likely to study the $2 bill, foresee the potential issues of accepting it, then turn round and ask you for another means of payment.
• Advancers are great at setting priorities, defining strategies, and creating action plans. They love new ideas and are key to getting them implemented. Allen recognizes the importance of this kind of person and is keen to meet more of them. Unfortunately for Allen, advancers are generally the most difficult people to annoy with his $2 bill prank.

Allen suggests that the signing of the Declaration of Independence (featured on the back of the $2 note) was perhaps the original dysfunctional meeting. Only about a third of people at the time wanted revolution, another third were fine with the status quo, and the other third just didn’t want their names associated with either side… The moral of the story: it’s a diverse world!

The key to success is playing to your strengths (see Marcus Buckingham’s series of “strength books”). Did you know that Winston Churchill failed 6th grade? That Einstein couldn’t walk until he was four or read until he was seven? It might have been easy to dismiss these people as idiots, but once they found and worked to their strengths, they had the power to change the world.

Creativity = having ideas. Innovation = implementing ideas.

In order to get ideas implemented, everyone must work to their strengths. If this session turned out ideally for you, what would happen today, in two weeks, in six months? What advantages would you gain? What barriers to success would be removed? How are you going to manage to convey the excitement and innovation from this conference back to your colleagues at the office?

A common reaction when colleagues return from a conference is to immediately reject and ridicule any new ideas or enthusiasm they may have picked up. People will reject new ideas because it’s their nature.

Different people resist change for different reasons. This is not bad in itself; each group is just playing to their strengths, dong what they do best. The net result, though, is that many new ideas are shot down before they even get off the ground.

• Creators (35% of people) will say NO - because it’s not their idea.
• Refiners (25% of people) will say NO - because they can see the things that won’t work.
• Executors (25% of people) will say NO because they simply don’t like change.
• Only advancers will say Yes -that’s only - 15% - so you have to go and find them!

So how do you sell an idea to people whose natural tendency is to reject new ideas?

Allen shared a few de-motivational posters that he thought might help:

Never quit. Wait to get fired: you get more.

Or:

Give up. You’re a loser. No poster is going to change that.

Or, my favorite:

Momentum: You spin a lot faster towards the bottom as you’re circling the drain!

Innovation black hole #1: The meeting.

In a typical meeting, 26 ideas might be put out and 25 of them will be shot down. The only idea left standing is probably not the best idea. Instead, it’s likely to be the one that is most devoid of greatness and innovation. These kind of meetings suck the money right out from under you and down the drain.

You need to use speed meetings. Get your Advancer to host a meeting with your Creators, and give them the room to create. Keep the Refiners are out of the room. Then get the Refiners in to refine the ideas - but make sure your Creators are out of the room. Rinse, and repeat. Allen compares the approach to the Newton’s Cradle.

Close the drain and you can do 3 weeks of work in 3 days.

Innovation Black Hole #2: The deliverables

Most CEOs, it seems, are creators or refiners. Most people in IT are refiners and executors. You need a diverse team to get things done. Don’t get bogged down in refining and revising individual deliverables. Keep your eye on the overall goal. Keep the momentum going.

Innovation Black Hole #3: The idea paradox

The bigger your idea, the more it has wrong with it. Every big idea is born drowning. The moon is big and bright, but it too has a dark side.

The Black Hole Solution

The solution to this whole scenario is the radical reinvention of work.

If you haven’t yet read the book Who Moved My Cheese? Go and do so right now.

New discoveries let you make change without changing you. Research shows that strengths and talents drive results. Studies show passion drives success. Marcus Buckingham’s first rule: First Break All the Rules.

Most business books talk about one of four things: Strategy, Process, Roles, Strengths, but fail to connect them together. You need to be able to go to the right strength at the right time.

People work in their strengths only 17% of the time. We love trying to get square pegs into round holes. Dont’ send people to “roundness training”. Change the shape of the hole! Make a better world by playing your own tune. Give the work you hate to someone who loves it.

Allen suggested a refinement on Scott Klososky’s circular org chart from yesterday: Think of the center of the chart as the Death Star (where the Refiners and Executors live) and the tie-fighters as the Creators (with the Advancers as their point men. Hmmm…. %-)

Allen closed with a mention of one of his favorite projects: His “one-book bookstore”. He set up a real brick and mortar book store fully stocked with just one book. His own book. The idea was picked up by local news, NPR, and even People magazine - and he never even had to pick up the phone once to promote the idea. The power of being different.

* As an Englishman, I never even knew that $2 bills existed, but apparently they are actually legal tender. He gave me one to prove it!

Daryl Plummer, group vice president and Chief Gartner Fellow

In this lively presentation, Daryl Plummer highlighted the changing perspective around the way systems are built, deployed and used.

Daryl started by pointing out that when it comes to adopting a technology like SOA, you need to build a case for the business value. You also need to be aware that SOA is not something you choose to do, it’s something that will be forced upon you. Why? Because the frequency and level of change in the business world is continually increasing.

If we don’t plan for this change:

• Chaos reigns
• Costs are increased
• Business agility decreases
• ‘Seat of the pants’ decision making increases

It’s not just about being quick - you need to plan in order to be agile. How does BPM help us with this? If the business processes are more dynamic, this will have a positive impact on these areas of the enterprise:

• Business agility
• Decision making
• Revenue opportunities
• Customer satisfaction
• Regulatory compliance

It’s a misnomer to talk about alignment between business and IT. It’s more a case of fusion. Another misunderstanding is to talk about SOA integration - it’s about interoperability. It’s about letting systems communicate with each other - not merging or integrating them.

So what exactly is a service? Something that abstracts the work. It lets us ask something and receive a result without having to worry about how the result was arrived at. Daryl claims that people are service-driven, using the example of how we use electricity. Once we find the socket, we just plug in our appliance and get on with it. We don’t care how the electricity is generated or which generator gives us the power.

SOA allows us to control how the services are used. Daryl uses the example of the travel plug that allows us to use a US hairdryer in the UK. This interface is the equivalent of an SOA.

There has been an evolution in the way applications are written. In the past the whole application was developed as a single unit. Now, we separate out the different parts. User interfaces are in portal or on the web. Databases have been pulled out into separate applications. Decision points have been pulled out and put in rules engines. The processes have been pulled out so business people can alter the process themselves, without having to try to communicate changes to the IT team. When it comes to the web, SOAP and WSDL allow us to link services together.

In order to make your business process-centric, you need to:

• Make sure you have a list of all critical processes
• Have a named owner for every process

Daryl went on to explain the link between events and services. The service should be constructed to respond to an event. An event is a change in the system or the state. When an event happens, I’ll do something. I’ll design in a more declarative fashion. That fits the SOA model. I can handle information that’s coming from anywhere and continue to add processes to the sytem to evolve it.

Daryl added a note of caution when pulling everything together. SOA is IT-driven. BPM is business-led. You need a process-centric stack in the middle that will tie the two together, rather than assuming that this will naturally happen.

Where will this all lead? The final stage is the agile business structure where the structure of the business can lead to innovation.

For more information and links, check out James Taylor’s commentary on this session.

Moderator:
Tony Baer (TB), principal, onStrategies; formerly an analyst with Datamonitor/Computerwire

Panelists:
Barry Vandevier (BV), CTO, Travelocity
Sandeep Gupta (SG), Vice President, Strategic Software Development, Equifax
Chris French (CF), Partner, Deloitte Consulting
Sam Paper (SP), Senior Vice President, Client Management and Credit Technology, Strategy and Service Orientation, Bank of America

TB: What is your strategy on .NET?

SP: We’re pleased with the responsiveness of ILOG in bringing .NET products to market. Particularly the Microsoft integration. We look forward to seeing this in JRules.

TB: How is the economic environment effecting your product development?

BV: We’re currently assessing our view of spend. But we do need to continue to innovate. We’re still focussed on our strategy on services. Our global development team is also important to us. Whether or not there’s a recession we still have to do our core business.
SG: We are proceeding with caution. We’re seeing some strain in the retail sector. From an innovation point of view you need to be in the right place if the recession does hit. We will still need to meet our customer’s requirements tomorrow, hence we need to continue planning and spending.
CF: We still expect to grow over the next year, although we have seen a slowdown in the FSI industry.
SP: From the IT side, paradoxically there is more opportunity for IT investment to help streamline operations and make processes more efficient.

TB: On a related note, the dollar is not as strong as it has been. How has this affected your global picture?

BV: We find talent across the globe - albeit India or Argentina. Development and marketing in a global realm makes a lot of sense for us.
SG: On the supply side, we have not seen any major drop as a result of the change in exchange rate.
SP: We have a global model - even the work we’re doing with ILOG is coming out of Shanghai. You need to have flexibility from where you deliver your solutions.
SP: All of our BRMS development is here in the US. This has not had a major effect on us.

TB: There has always been a gap between the C* suite and IT. How do you deal with this?

SG: The divide is growing wider. It’s becoming more difficult for the C* suite to understand the strategic level: an example being which technologies will survive the current proliferation. IT wants to be oblivious to what the business imperatives are. Technical teams need to make sure they do take on the needs of the C* suite.
BV: IT is always pushed to develop faster. BRMS is a key element to help us achieve this. If we get to the points where we need to quickly change suppliers, we can do so with a BRMS. Better, faster, cheaper.
SP: A BRMS capability gives the business more transparency, flexibility.

TB: As a profession, are we getting too infatuated with open source?

BV: We’re big fans of open source but we do use commercial applications as well. It depends on the application -it’s a balance. We are also intersted in standards and make sure that we don’t just jump on the latest technologies.
SG: What has happened with open source is a phenomenon. But it does depend on the business use. Open source particularly benefits the new entrants into the market.
CF: This area is more driven by our clients needs.
SP: It’s a balance - we have to look at each case closely.

TB: Can we overdo process?

BV: If you’re not careful, you can go overboard. Particularly if you over-adopt SOX. You have to make sure you have a happy medium.
SG: As far as the BRMS is concerned, it depends where you are. Eg. government needs due diligence. If the process is heavier, you need more people. If you are leaner, you can get greater ROI from your workforce. Google is a great case in point. We need to make sure we have the right balance.
CF: One problem we have is how we rationalise and limit the redundancy where many systems are concerned. You have to make sure you don’t just layer on top of legacy systems as this will lead to problems in the future.

TB: How do you avoid the technical/political tug of war with the adoption of a BRMS?

CF: We had to look at what a rule was and where we should apply them. Rules are everywhere but you need to concentrate on the core rules. What is actually impacted? You need to get into the science of what rules are about and where they should be applied.
SP: We need to focus on our core applications to redeploy a BPM/SOA. We haven’t talked about our packaged applications.

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.