Jim Sinur

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Jim Sinur
Research VP
2 years at Gartner
42 years IT industry

Jim Sinur is a vice president in Gartner Research after a short stint with a BPM vendor. Prior to that, Mr. Sinur was with Gartner 15 years and helped establish the BPI/BPM areas at Gartner and is considered a thought leader. His research and areas… Read Full Bio

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The Business Rule Dispersion is Upon Us

by Jim Sinur  |  February 2, 2009  |  1 Comment

For nearly all technology classes, there is phase of what I call “breathing in” and a phase of “breathing out”. These phases can repeat and alternate multiple times. Technologies disperse and re-centralize and the cycle repeats multiple times as technologies travel through the hype cycle initially and in an echo fashion

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For a number of decades the business rule based solutions tended to be centralized on one or maybe two rule engines Business rules were in the “breathing in” phase. The business rules arena is into the “breathing out” phase and is rapidly dispersing because of the demand for more responsive and customizable responses from business processes, technology infrastructure, business applications and technology interfaces. This means that the use of explicit rules (governing rules made accessible and easy to change) is growing rapidly. This has driven the business rules engines (BRE) into a period of rapid expansion. The number of cheap and easy rule engines is multiplying and the existing BRE market is being bought up by applications and technology platform vendors.

In addition, It seems like there is a resurgence in the need for embedded intelligence in many processes, applications and platforms. Even the much aligned Artificial Intelligence (A/I) market is being sparked to new and positive growth levels. The regeneration of this subset of the business rules market seems to be driven more than the need for intelligence than just agility alone. The levels of complexity that will be generated by complex events, unstructured process, values chain interactions in the context of a highly linked world economy Managing these trends will require local intelligence, ergo the great rule dispersion.

Over time this local intelligence will need to be guided by policies and/or constraints. This is why I am predicting that the Business Rules Management systems will take off in the coming years to help guide the local intelligence. The BRMS will be part of a higher form optimization and Intelligence Decision Management(IDM) that we see today. New forms of optimization applied to decisions will have the ability to learn and transform the decision making process. This promises to be an exciting time driven by the need for lower costs decision making around processes and applications supporting those processes.

1 Comment »

Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Optimization     Tags: , , ,

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Carlos Serrano-Morales   February 7, 2009 at 10:04 pm

    Jim

    An interesting post, as usual. I do agree that what we are seeing right now is a combination of rapid adoption, consolidation of established players, and opportunities created for new players focusing on business problems the evolving ecosystems and applications make solvable.

    One key consequence I see of the renewed effervescence is the increased need for the “management” aspects of BRMS, both in terms of operations and in terms of decision performance monitoring and ultimately improvement.

    The need I see is for both lower cost of management, and higher quality of monitoring. Combined with what you call the “dispersion” of rules, this promises interesting challenges.