Jim Sinur

I had the pleasure to speak at the Business Rules Forum in Orlando this week and I spoke on Increasing the IQ of Processes for Profitability. Due to the increased interest in cost reduction and revenue generation, this topic seemed appropriate for the times. With organizations looking for good ROI with low investment, the combination of BPM and rules combines some impressive paybacks. Gartner has been advising it’s clients to “double down” on process improvement. I also participated in a Q&A panel that took the majority of questions from the audience. The conference was well blogged by Sandy Kemsley at Column 2 and James Taylor at Smart enough systems.

I was rather disappointed in the mix of the crowd. There were significant numbers of technicians and/or the BRF brain trust crew. The best names in rules, process, decisioning and semantics were there (Ron Ross, John Hall, Keri Andersen-Healy, Don Baisley, James Taylor, Gladys S.W. Lam, Roger Burlton, John Reymer and Neil Raden) and the content was rich and deep for the 80% of the crowd that were technically inclined. There were a few business types and quite a few consultants giving case studies even though there were a few last minute speaker cancellations. While the overall number was down from last year, there rumored to be 300+ there on the peak day. I only observed about 100, but it was the last day where folks were headed home.

I was particularly attracted the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) sessions which focused on vocabulary concepts and standards (a must to attain if we want to get closer to natural language rule representation). The sessions were very informative and well thought out, though they did drag into some very deep examples that required deep concentration to follow. Few vendors are really delivering on pure SBVR, but it is early.

Now that the power vendors of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are invested in rules with recent acquisitions of rules companies and/or personnel, it will be interesting if an uptake occurs. None of these power vendors were represented as sponsors. I found rather curious. We all know the business rule engine market has commoditized and the BRF is moving heavily towards decision management. The next BRF will be a true indictor of the health of this event long term, but the content is solid.