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.

With just two days to go before DIALOG 08, I’m pleased to welcome ILOG Web Marketing Manager Daryl Pereira to the DIABLOG team.

This means that, together, we’ll be able to provide broader event coverage and bring you even more in-depth news and feedback direct from the conference floor in Palm Springs. As they say, two heads are better than one!

While we’re on the subject of broader event coverage, I just got confirmation today of the audiovisual arrangements for DIALOG 08. ILOG has hired multimedia company BrainSonic to provide extensive onsite video coverage. All conference keynotes and track sessions will be recorded, and the aim is to have the videos edited, packaged and made available online as soon as possible after the conference.

In addition, Julie Jordan, ILOG Senior Marketing Communications Manager, will be conducting on-site video interviews all day Monday with several of ILOG’s financial services customers and partners. In light of the ongoing challenges facing the financial services sector, who better to explain how ILOG solutions are helping to optimize strategies and operations and enabling organizations to adapt to volatile market conditions?

Even if you’re not able to make it to DIALOG in person, the extensive and in-depth video coverage of the event means that you will still be able follow the conversation. So stay tuned and, rest assured, the discussion is set to continue for a long time after DIALOG!