David McCoy

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A Business Rule Management Tutorial: Call for Input

October 20th, 2008 · 3 Comments

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 and the technologies/practices that make it work.  We always know what we would say… but, we want more.

What would you add to a BRM tutorial?  What are some of the things that vex you or your clients?  What topics or concepts need clarification?  We might reserve a few slides to address these concerns, or we may create a list of “watch out!” topics based on your input.  Here is your chance to speak up.

Leave comments here, or email me at david.mccoy [at sign] gartner.com.  Note, email address harvesting forces me to write my email in pictograms.  We look forward to your input.

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Tags: Business Process Management (BPM)

3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Laurent Pacalin // Oct 27, 2008 at 6:18 pm

    David, Jim and Marc:

    A Business Rules Management tutorial is an excellent idea! And while we, too, have an opinion as to what should go into such a tutorial I’d like to encourage you to ask the question directly to Blaze Advisor’s users at dmtools.fairisaac.com.

    We recently launched this on-line community where both users and prospects have the freedom to voice their opinion about the usage of Business Rules Management engines.

    Thanks again for a great initiative.
    Regards,

    Laurent Pacalin
    CMO
    Fair Isaac

  • 2 Andrei Palskoi // Nov 6, 2008 at 12:19 pm

    Here are some of things I found to be important during my BRM career:

    - clear understanding of what business rules are and a difference between business (”what”) and application rules (”how”). Good BRMS system should give business people simple and unambiguous way of defining “what” and hide the technical complexity of “how”, leaving it to application developers. That includes proper rules mining and requirements definition.

    - top-down or bottom-up approach. Do we want to start with building a global business model (notions/ontology, decision types) and then project it on specific applications, or do we want to start small, building specific rule applications and then gradually expand BRMS usage to cover more and more application areas?

    - governance. How do we give business users the agility promised by the BRMS approach without sacrficing other important aspects such as security, accountability and proper validation of changes? How to ensure that business users understand the impact of their changes and are authorized to make them?

    - integration. Do we embed rules engine in each application or do we deploy it as a standalone enterprise rule service? How granular decision services should be – lots of calls for small decisions or few big calls? What about cross-platform deployments?

    - cost of data retrieval. Rules are only as good as the data they have access to, and in many cases their power is limited by inability to bring all data that is required to make a decision within a reasonable cost/time.

  • 3 The Business Rule Management Tutorial: Thanks for your Input! // Jan 13, 2009 at 7:17 pm

    [...] an earlier post, I ask for the topics that you would like to see in a Business Rule Management tutorial.  Jim [...]

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