The EBRC08 is knocking on the doors

The European Business Rules Conference is there soon. I had already made a post about it and had given my own selection of the talks I would love to be at. The EBRC is going to take place from the 16th to the 18th of June in Munich. You'll get 14 sessions on 3 tracks. The track that has got to be very appealing to me is the know-how track : "Rules & Business processes". keynotes are going to be given by Ronald G. Ross and Marc Kerremans. If you register before April the 30th, you get to profit from a special offer.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Agile BPM

I found this post in a Dialog blog. Dialog conference series are organized by ILOG, of course tackle everything around Business Rule Management Systems. The post is about making BPM agile. The answer is: BPM, BRMS, SOA, Events Management. How? Well, Daryl Plummer, Vice President and Chief Gartner Fellow gave a talk about just that at Dialog08. I found the following points very interesting. A more dynamic BPM will have an effect on the following points:

• Business agility
• Decision making
• Revenue opportunities
• Customer satisfaction
• Regulatory compliance

I find the second and last extremely interesting since hey form the core of my work at the IDS and my topic of research. It is true that managing decision making independently from where it is used, but also being able to modify and deploy it into business processes where the business is realized brings agility to the enterprise. Regulatory compliance is also a bog concern at companies currently, and even late adopters are now starting to explore ways of achieving that because they have to comply to laws and regulations in order to avoid judiciary pursuits or trials.
A second interesting though was that SOA is IT driven and BPM business-led. It is not about aligning IT to business, it is about integrating both, make sure they work together. So there is a need for a process-centric layer between both. This is what tools like ARIS are all about. Providing a comprehensive framework for managing business processes, while helping the implementation of these business processes.

The third idea was about events and services. Apart from the fact that consuming services is the natural way humans handle things. Nobody is interested in how a service is realized. A service is just the abstract interface to an value-adding functionality. Now the things is that services are made to be executed upon occuring events. Events and services just fit well. A services architecture integrated with an event management framework is another component in achieving flexibility. I have usually always heard of CEPs, Complex Event Processing frameworks, and how well they would work with business rules. There are vendors for CEPs and looking at what it may bring to a enterprise in terms of flexibility is certainly worth it. Now any process modelling notations such as EPC and BPMN handle events. So there is already event information that can ba managed by the business. so just like business rules, events are present at the different layers of an enterprise's business.

So three ideas about BPM agility out of a post at a BRMS conference. BPM, Services, events and business rules can all work together. We just have to show that in rea world use cases and complex scenarios, I would be very happy to write apost about someone who goves a presentation about such a thing.

Anyways, I have been reading some of the posts at DIALOG08 and many are very interesting. I'll keep on reviewing whatever has to do with BRMS, BPM, SOA and compliance.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Business Rule Management and Processes

I have noticed the increase in amount of talks and webcasts on the net treating and evangelizing the alliance of Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) and Business Process Management. I have heard some when I had time to, because I work on the topic and I am passionated by the possibilities that BRMS allow for. I am not going to list all the reasons why avery BPM project, design and requirement gathering method, as well as implementation should have Business Rules as one of its core components or concerns.

I want to put attention on two talks:

1. The first one has been held at gartner's Business Process Managemebt summit in Las Vegas this year (4-7 february 2008). Marc Kerremans gived a talk entitled "Business Rule Management: State of the Art" where he gave an introduction to BRM and tackled the question: "What added value does BRM bring to BPM?"
2. The talks that are to be held at the Business Rules Conference, this year from June 16-18 at the Marriott Hotel, Munich, Gemany. A key note presentation is to be given by Ronald G. Ross at the opening. The talk by Ralph Nijpels (KLM): "Interaction between
   datamodels, rules and processes", by Prof. Stef Joosten (CS dept. Open University): "Can business rules make process models obsolete?" and the talk by Jan Dietz (TU Delft, Netherlands): "About the nature of Business Rules - Some basic answers from the Perspective of Enterprise Ontology" are the ones that immediately caught my eye. The first two tackle the question of how to bring BR and BPM and the thirs one askes questions about semantics and Business Rules.

This was just a small entry to signal the fact that many talks are held to make the case for Business Rules and Business Rules and Business Process Management in particular. I foresee even more of these and related industrial conferences as the matter gets atention from the industry. As for the Business Rules Conference in June I will write a dedicated entry to tell about the talks that seem most interesting to me (at least from the name of them).

Marwane El Kharbili.