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
Showing posts with label Business Rule Management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Business Rule Management. Show all posts
May 19, 2008
What does iLOG do?
In this article by Simon holloway (Senior Analyst, Bloor research) on iLOG. I am not going to copy paste the post or try to analyze it, since there is nothing to analyze. Simon Holloway gives an overview on the activities of iLOG, which simply answers the question: "What is really the business of iLOG"? iLOG is a french company with headquarters in both France and the USA. iLOG is mostly known for their business rules management product JRules.
I appreciated the structured description of the various business iLOG is at the front of: operations research optimization, constraints programming, business rules management (with three tools, one for Java, one for C++ and one for .NET), and the one I didn't know about, which are visualization products. after the recent acquisition of another company, iLOG now have a set of supply chain management products. Simon Holloway notes that with such a line of products, iLOG have now a solution and not just a set of products as until now. Last point are the many industrial partnerships iLOG has, among others with Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle. So iLOG with their 800 employees are up on quite some fronts.
Marwane El Kharbili.
I appreciated the structured description of the various business iLOG is at the front of: operations research optimization, constraints programming, business rules management (with three tools, one for Java, one for C++ and one for .NET), and the one I didn't know about, which are visualization products. after the recent acquisition of another company, iLOG now have a set of supply chain management products. Simon Holloway notes that with such a line of products, iLOG have now a solution and not just a set of products as until now. Last point are the many industrial partnerships iLOG has, among others with Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle. So iLOG with their 800 employees are up on quite some fronts.
Marwane El Kharbili.
Apr 26, 2008
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.
Marwane El Kharbili.
Apr 11, 2008
Drools - Business Rules the JBOSS way
I have been hearing about drools for quite time now, at least since 2 years. At the JBOSS JBOSSWorld conference in the US in mid-february in Orlando. Drools is the business rule management system (BRMS) from JBOSS. The contained rules engine is an implementation of the RETE algortihm. I am curious to know what their approach to business rules is. This is why I got started a little bit with the documentation to understand their user interaction strategy.
All I know is that Drools is rather destined to outsource business rules from java code. This is a pretty targeted use of business rules. But this makes sense since drools works on J2EE application servers (rules can be pulled from drools directly into the application). Drools uses the Google Web Toolkit and is free to download under the Apache license. My view on business rules is the following: rules exist on very different layers of the enterprise. Rules are inherently pervasive. for example, business rules can be modeled to describe business decision making patterns for a company routing electricity over a network of cable spanning the whole country. But rules can also be used to contain the parametrization logic of the application implementing this routing, potentially written in a target programing language. so both sets of business rules are needed. business rules have got to be modeled in both cases. The first set of business rules should be destiined to contain implementation-independent logic, and can capture rules on a business lelel. This is why I call these business rules. the other set of rules are implementation specific, and are destined to be modeled and integrated by the programmer, This is why i think they should be simply called rules. Now I am curious about what the components of drools are and what it would allow to do.
I am going to write some future posts about that as I will be discovering more about that. Hopefully some interesting ideas will come out of that.
Marwane El Kharbili.
All I know is that Drools is rather destined to outsource business rules from java code. This is a pretty targeted use of business rules. But this makes sense since drools works on J2EE application servers (rules can be pulled from drools directly into the application). Drools uses the Google Web Toolkit and is free to download under the Apache license. My view on business rules is the following: rules exist on very different layers of the enterprise. Rules are inherently pervasive. for example, business rules can be modeled to describe business decision making patterns for a company routing electricity over a network of cable spanning the whole country. But rules can also be used to contain the parametrization logic of the application implementing this routing, potentially written in a target programing language. so both sets of business rules are needed. business rules have got to be modeled in both cases. The first set of business rules should be destiined to contain implementation-independent logic, and can capture rules on a business lelel. This is why I call these business rules. the other set of rules are implementation specific, and are destined to be modeled and integrated by the programmer, This is why i think they should be simply called rules. Now I am curious about what the components of drools are and what it would allow to do.
I am going to write some future posts about that as I will be discovering more about that. Hopefully some interesting ideas will come out of that.
Marwane El Kharbili.
Apr 8, 2008
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:
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 agility
- Decision making
- Revenue opportunities
- Customer satisfaction
- Regulatory compliance
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.
Apr 2, 2008
Business rules, COBOL and Mainframes
Ilog have announced their new Cobol Add-On for Jrules, on the 19.02.2008. I read 2 posts about this here and here too. It should simplify SOA governance for legacy systems. It is destined to be used with legacy systems and in particular mainframe systems upon which applications are coded in COBOL. No need to say that finding programmers which still have much experience in COBOL is no easy task, and maintaining these applications is getting harder. But for companies that have invested much in these mainframe systems, the question of leaving these systems behind doesn't even pose itself. using the COBOL add-on for JRules is a way of outsourcing the business Rules embedded in theses mainframes to manage them. This also allows an SOA integration of these systems by invoking COBOL code through the business rules. COBOL code can also be generated from business rules. So quite an interesting application of business rules to legacy systems. I had heard a webcast by the guys from Corticon about how to realize such a legacy modernization and they were tackling the same topic. So it looks like business rules management system providers see this field of legacy systems as a very important one to their expansion strategy.
Marwane El Kharbili.
Marwane El Kharbili.
Feb 14, 2008
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:
I want to put attention on two talks:
- 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?"
- 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.
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