Jim Sinur

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

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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BPM and Business Rules: It’s not Just About Agility

by Jim Sinur  |  January 6, 2010  |  5 Comments

Don’t get me wrong; I believe that business rules are one of the key enablers for agility for BPM going forward. Folks that are practicing BPM are starting to get momentum around the power of business rules and business rules management. This will certainly continue and gain momentum. Even though the rules engines vendors are getting snapped up at a high rate by application and platform vendors, replacements are cropping up in the open source and commercial world. This is where I dreamed things would be back in 1994-5 when I traded the hype cycle for the rules sector with Jackie Fenn, here at Gartner. She has done well with hype cycle :) .We have a challenge with business rules that is just now appearing. We are living in challenging conditions and have to learn to live with and manage uncertainty.

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With all this progress with business rules, it’s not good enough. Business rule management will be a key for making enabling process policies, boundaries and constraints. As we move into the unstructured collaborative age for BPM, business rules and business rules management will be the way to stay properly governed, visible and compliant while dynamically keeping processes on track with changing and complex desired outcomes, goals and KPIs.. You can see it’s also about running processes in uncertainty. Uncertainty in the flow of unstructured processes and uncertainty in the environments in which a process runs will be the challenge of the next decade for BPM. This will raise the ante for setting the rules properly to manage BPM and it’s growing agility, There will be a premium on managing uncertainty and making better decision to set those business rules. This, in turn, will focus in on more simulation and optimization leveraging real time analysis and response.

5 Comments »

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

5 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Tweets that mention BPM and Business Rules: It’s not Just About Agility -- Topsy.com   January 6, 2010 at 12:55 pm

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by River Logic, Jim Sinur. Jim Sinur said: BPM and Uncertainty: The New Challenge http://bit.ly/7vskwl #BPM #entarch #gartner #CIO #IT [...]

  • 2 uberVU - social comments   January 6, 2010 at 2:39 pm

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by JimSinur: BPM and Uncertainty: The New Challenge http://bit.ly/7vskwl #BPM #entarch #gartner #CIO #IT…

  • 3 Mark Norton   January 6, 2010 at 4:52 pm

    Great post Jim – rules are the key to automating responses to uncertain conditions.

  • 4 Carole-Ann Matignon   January 11, 2010 at 9:21 am

    Jim, you are spot on. Gartner keeps saying “change is a constant”. With theories such as the Black Swan, managing uncertainty, the fabled “unknown unknown”, will become a key part of the seek / model / adapt cycle. It will make the difference between those that make it and those that do not. Techniques for managing or handling uncertainty will emerge as standard practices and tooling should come from the BRMS or decision management vendors. I am looking for more posts on this topic I am passionate about as you know!

  • 5 Lessons learned in 2009 – Dealing with uncertainty « Only Decision Management, Technically Speaking   January 12, 2010 at 3:56 pm

    [...] Sinur at Gartner is spot on in his blog post about business agility.  Agility is what we all know is required in our systems but it is not [...]