What is this blog about?

Since ILOG’s inception in 1987, ILOG consultants have been involved in thousands of projects, helping our customers making the best use of ILOG technology. All these projects share a key characteristic: they are all about decisioning or decision-support. Leveraging computers and smart software to help you, our customers, make better decisions, faster, while managing change and complexity. Not an easy task but we are proud of the unmatched success of our customers in this area, and have learnt a lot in the process, over the past 20 years. We have actually assembled more than 5,000 pages in our PS (Professional Services) methodology and you, ILOG customers, partners, prospects, have asked that we share some of it with you. So, here we are, opening Pandora’s box.

What is ISIS?

ISIS stands for ILOG Solution Implementation Standard. It is a repository of documents gathering and organizing best practices used by our consultants to deliver the best quality in all their engagements based on ILOG technology. It is our Consulting methodology, a process tailored to the implementation of ILOG-based decisioning systems. It is not the dead Egyptian goddess anymore but a very living organism, evolving on a daily basis. It spans from software engineering and program management to product-specific tips and vertical/domain knowledge. It reflects the broad range of decisioning systems that can be built with ILOG products. Technically, it is an extension of the Open Unified Process (OpenUP), but we will come back on this in future posts.

The open-source and Web 2.0 waves

In some way, we follow big trends with this blog, although it is not about source code here but know-how, ideas and concepts. We have actually already made a major step in this area earlier this year with a contribution to the Ecplise Process Framework (EPF) open-source project, in the form of an OpenUP plug-in called Agile Business Rules Development (ABRD). We do hope that the communication will work both ways and you will tell us what you think, share your own experience on a particular topic, what worked or did not work for you and some lessons learnt, useful to anyone implementing decisioning systems in general.

Where can you expect this blog to go?

We plan on navigating across various parts of ISIS and here are some topics which you can expect to be addressed over the coming weeks and months:

• More details on OpenUP and EPF and how we have leveraged them in our implementation process, and our ABRD contribution,
• Benefits of iterative development, the key foundation of ISIS,
• The specific challenges and opportunities in implementing optimization and rule-based decisioning systems,
• Rule governance, a strategic area addressed by BRMS,
• Project governance,
• Improved techniques to track project progress,
• The specific roles involed in the implementation of decisioning systems, on the supplier and customer sides,
• Best practices around testing decisioning systems (e.g. test plan, delta testing),
• Praxeme, an open enterprise modeling method,
• Tips to leverage the BRMS approach and benefits in implementing SOAs,
• Discussion around the right level of documentation to remain agile, how to properly document use cases,
• The benefits of risk analysis and management, and the associated discipline.

There will be more as we comment market news and trends and also as you rise questions and new ideas in your comments. We count on you to keep the communication loop closed and live!

Who are we?

Jean, Pierre, Jerome, Maurice, Julio, we are the team behind ISIS. Leveraging our combined 50 man-years with ILOG implementing decision-support systems based on our four product lines and with the help of 200 consultants on hundreds of engagements, we keep adding new tips and best practices to the ISIS repository, learning from the stimulating and challenging projects our customers come to us with. This is a team blog and you will see contributions from the 5 of us, covering some of the many facets of our methodology.

With this introduction, and in the midst of this Spring of 2008, let the discussion begin and flourish!

The ISIS team.