David McCoy

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

David W. McCoy
Managing VP
15 years at Gartner
29 years IT industry

David W. McCoy is a managing vice president and Gartner Fellow emeritus. He currently leads the Business Process Management group as team manager and researches business process management (BPM), business rule management (BRM) and cost optimization. Read Full Bio

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Business Rule Management Standards and Specifications

by David McCoy  |  September 17, 2008  |  1 Comment

JSR 94, RuleML, SBVR… there sure are a lot of business-rule-related standards and specifications out there.  One specification (JSR 94) is fairly-well supported, but does it matter? And what about the others?  Aren’t they a bit lonely and feeling neglected?  Now consider that Gartner research has been warning of consolidation of the independent business rules market since late 2005, when RulesPower was gobbled up by rules giant, Fair Isaac (sidebar: sometimes the big rule vendors buy, and sometimes they are bought).  With the independent rules market eroding, do rule standards and specifications matter more or less?  Will they ever matter at all?  Which ones do you think are worth more than the paper they are written on?  Give me your lists, and be expansive.  You can include closely-related items if you like (e.g., OWL), but try to avoid the kitchen sink (e.g, no one should offer up ODBC, JMS or SOAP). Think “rules-related” and fire away!

1 Comment »

Category: Business Rule Management (BRM) Uncategorized     Tags: , ,

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Carlos Serrano-Morales   November 14, 2008 at 11:36 pm

    Well, the lack of comments so far may be indicative of what matters and what does not…
    The more mature standards are not relevant beyond the marketing check-list and are rarely, if ever, exercised (JSR-94 support for example).
    There is a large set of other standardization efforts going on, but they do seem to suffer from a lack of relevance to real business drivers. Some of these standards are striving to solve semantic issues (important, but, regardless of how we feel about their ultimate relevance, remote for most of the immediate market), or representation issues (and in that case, they tend to be single approach which does not seem to offer a huge compelling value to the market).
    But a large part of the value around business rules does not come from the BRE and its rule representation power. It comes from the BRMS story: the management part.
    What value does a standard really bring if it misses the major value brought by the approach?
    Carole-Ann touches on that in her blog on the BRF vendor panel discussion (http://edmblog.com) and some of the comments in there)
    It would be great to read what your view is.

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