David McCoy

What a surprise.  An email from my friends at Morris, Manning & Martin, LLP speaks the unspeakable:  certain controversial process patent scenarios may be on the way out.  Who knows how this will ultimately shake out, but my personal opinion sides with the Court of Appeals.  Watch this one closely, all my process-driven friends.  Thanks [...]

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Simple question.  Are you – vendor or user – writing your own BRE?  I think you are.  In fact, I’m sure you are. Limited standards-based routes, merely-competitive functionality expectations, shrinking independent BRE market, OEM overkill, specialized integration needs, specific vertical flavoring – all these factor in to the decision.
If you are willing to talk, let [...]

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Oracle is buying another Business Rule Engine vendor. Surprised?  If you’e a client of Gartner, you should have seen this coming.  Jim Sinur is at the Business Rules Forum tonight and he will be speaking tomorrow.  He’s working on the research angle which, of course, you will soon see on www.gartner.com.. I have to remind [...]

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I was in a cab on Friday morning and noticed that a dashboard warning indicator was blinking and chiming every 20 seconds or so.  After a few minutes of this, I asked the driver what was wrong with his car.  The cab was a really beat-up-looking old thing, so I expected he would tell me [...]

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We have great guests at our Rotary Club.  Today we had lunch with the Governor of Georgia, Sonny Perdue.  He is a second-term Republican and – as has been reported so often – “the first Republican governor since Reconstruction.”  
He said a lot today.  The one thing I want to focus on was his statement, “you [...]

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Should it be “business rule engine” or “business rules engine?”  Should “rule” be singular or plural?  “Should be” and “is” are two different concepts.  Take a look at the search results below.  The inconsistent use of both the plural and the singular abounds.  Why should “business rules management” (plural) dominate while “business rule management system” [...]

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Jim Sinur, Marc Kerremans and I are about to create a nice, new tutorial presentation on Business Rule Management (BRM).  This is being done for our London BPM conference next February 23 – 25.  We know what we think should go in a BRM tutorial – one that will cover both the concept of BRM [...]

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Yesterday, at the GTISC summit on emerging security threats, the panelists reminded us of just how bad it is out there.  Will my customers be vished?  Will the botnets infect my network?  Will some nation-state/criminal entity – ripe with script gurus – eat my lunch?  These kinds of threats continue to grow in number, sophistication, [...]

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I spent last night repairing dry rot above my garage door. I had to chip out a lot of bad wood and rebuild the structure with new wood, screws and wood-filler.  Sadly, I am quite adept at using wood-filler.  The repair job reminded me of how we deal with bad processes:

Not planning for decay – [...]

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In Q1 2008, Jim Sinur and I will release research on the different approaches to business rule representation. This is going to be a fun research effort – lots of theory, lots of hands-on testing.  This is also a misunderstood area.  For instance, some users think that a natural-language (NL) approach to rule representation is [...]

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