Nicolas Robbe, ILOG’s VP Product Marketing, does a great job of positioning ILOG and BRMS in the SOA space in a recently published video interview by SYS-CON TV from the SOA World West 2007 conference in San Francisco.
JRules 6.7 builds on the industry-leading JRules 6 BRMS. There’s more control and flexibility for business users, and expanded support for IT platform infrastructure.
This recorded presentation covers what’s new in JRules 6.7:
Find out why JRules 6.7 is the best solution for managing decision change, complexity, and compliance in your mission-critical business systems.
More JRules information:
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.
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):
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?
What are the benefits?
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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
This guest post was written by Luciano Graffi, Database Administrator, Application Architecture and Operations Management for Swiss Medical in Argentina. Don’t miss the session “Next Generation Enterprise Rule Management: The Swiss Medical Story” (Tuesday Feb 26, 3:30 pm - 4:15 pm).
I am really looking forward to my trip to Palm Springs. Conferences like DIALOG are always extremely enriching - not just for the customers, exhibitors, and partners attending the event, but also for colleagues and project teams back at the office. There are so many takeaways from events such as this that everyone benefits.
Being in close contact with so many like-minded people and learning about other business applications and architectures related to your own projects is invaluable. Many of us share the same objectives and face the same challenges, so I’m really looking forward to the opportunity - whether in lectures and meetings, during breaks, over lunch, or on the golf course - to swap knowledge and learn more about other people’s business realities. I certainly hope to pick up some tips that I can take back to the office and put into practice in the near future.
I’m particularly interested in exchanging experience with anyone who is using a BRMS solution to allow end-users to manage their business rules and create simulations to assess the impact of new or changed rules, so look out for me at DIALOG, and let’s talk! Also, don’t miss The Swiss Medical Story session on Tuesday 3:30 pm - 4:15 pm to find out more about my team’s own enterprise rule management application.
Of course, in addition to all this, I am also very eager to witness one of the top golf resorts in the US. After all, there’s nothing wrong with combining business with a bit of pleasure, right?
If you’re a policy manager in a Fortune 1000 company, chances are that your company continues to maintain real-time business applications written in COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language).
If the challenge of making your existing mainframe COBOL applications more agile without disrupting your mission-critical systems brings you out in a cold sweat, or you simply don’t have the budget or the time to redevelop all your existing COBOL applications, then you should definitely attend DIALOG 08 to hear more about ILOG Rules for COBOL.
Now, I’ll be honest and say that, other than the hoo-ha around the whole Y2K issue, I don’t actually know a great deal about COBOL. Fortunately, Wikipedia is my friend, and ILOG’s BRMS Product Marketing team have been kind enough to bring me up to speed about why this new add-on for ILOG JRules is so significant (about 80% of the world’s top businesses do rely on COBOL to keep running, after all). Following yesterday’s official product announcement, James Taylor was also quick to provide some interesting commentary in his blog about the new add-on.
In a nutshell, ILOG Rules for COBOL brings the advantages of ILOG’s leading business rule management system (BRMS) to existing COBOL applications. The key lies in gradually moving the rules from your COBOL applications to a central repository, where they can be externally managed, and yet still executed in COBOL code.
Like it or not, COBOL isn’t going away any time soon, but with ILOG Rules for COBOL, you finally have a way to access the business logic that’s locked within your large mainframe applications. With JRules BRMS and Rules for COBOL, you can manage change in legacy applications NOW. But don’t just take my word for it: stop by the BRMS booth in the Solutions Hall at DIALOG 08 and be among the first to see demos of the new COBOL add-on and talk directly to the people who developed it.
