- 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.

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