Business rules and decision tables workshop

This event took place in Dortmund, at the university of applied sciences. I had an invited talk there with my IDS Scheer colleague Dr. Markus Fischer. We basically explained the ARIS approach in building business rule-enhanced applications by integrating business process management with business rule management. we motivated the use of business rules in BPM and showed conceptually how they allow increasing business flexibility and business agility. Another aspect is business control, by outsourcing decisions from business processes and modeling these in deicated ARIS business rule models. We also further explained how the ARIS Business Rules Designer (ABRD) tool shall fit into the ARIS BPM lifecycle and introduced in our talk how process monitoring techniques can be used to monitor business rule execution as a mean of controlling business and making it better.

we got a quite a few questions from the professionals in the attendency about how the alogorithms work underneath the GUI and how the engine optimizes and discovers inconsistencies in the decision tables. This is normal becaus ethe attendency were actually business rules and decision table specialists such as Prof. Horst Strunz. Prof. Strunz gave an enlightning talk about the beginnings of business rules and thnaks to this pioneer, I now understand a lot more about the histrory of a techniques for which international standards have been written already in the seventies.

the other interesting talks were among others, some application cases by students of the european master in project management directed by Pro. Reusch who has also more than ten years experience in the decision tables domain. Then came the talk by a colleague from LF-ET, a partner of Software AG, who presented their approach for decision tables and has shown what functionalities were integrated in theor tooling. He also talked about new directions of work by opening the use of LF-ET to other application systems than Software AG's. LF-ET have quite a big range of references in Germany. I have seen a couple of nice functionalities in the tool, which I think are nice for the user. Unfortunately I didn't come to discuss with the guy from LF-ET because I had some small talk with other attendees.

Through the workshop, I got to know about one tool, apparently very recent, called common knowledge studio, an australian company. Although I thought the only australian guys who kick it at a high level were Ruleburs, which was acquired by Haley Ltd. recently this year, common knowledge studion ahs a quite nice approach in many ways similar to the ABRD. Of course, the BPM aspects which are core to the ABRD are not present, and this is all that makes the real difference in the ABRD, besides from the model driven approach whch allows to think of any rule execution engine as a potential execution environment for ABRD rules. The guys from ILOG didn't show up because of some time management problems, which is a pity since these guys have a nice tool I think (although very IT oriented) and I had some targeted questions. But I hope I will get to asking them some time if I make it to meeting them at any other venue.

All in all, the workshop on friday was quite nice for me, we got to show what the very recent ABRD does, and also got me to enrich my mind with odeas from the other colleagues who each do a nice job I think. After summer holiday, I will thake some time on my own and rethink what we are curently doing in the business rules management community as a whole and look for interesting directions of practical research and enhancements. One aspect which I already find exciting is on the methodological level and is about some initiative for agile rule modeling which I was introduced to by the VP Methodology of ILOG. I am looking forward to that.

I'll keep you update with any new things that happen in the ARIS business rule management worls and from a more research perspective too.

Marwane El Kharbili