EbizQ’s Joe McKendrick published an interview this month with the authors of “Smart Enough Systems” - Neil Raden and James Taylor (specialists in BI and decision management respectively) - titled “Decision Management technology enters the mainstream”. Joe writes:

Enter decision management systems, which not only are capable of analyzing the value of data to an organization, but then engage rules engines to automate the decision outcome.

James mentions event-driven systems in his comments about the types of solutions in the decision management space:

The decision management systems market - products that support automated decisioning in some fashion - consists of platform and application technologies. Platform products are things like business rules management systems, optimization engines and predictive analytic workbenches.  … In addition, there are pre-configured decision management systems that provide a decision engine -real-time offer management system or a fraud detection system for instance. These typically embed some rules and analytics technology as well as actual rules and models and handle a small group of related decisions. These are mostly in consumer risk, which includes underwriting, loan origination, and retail credit; fraud detection, which includes claims, credit card, and medical; and marketing, which includes next-best offers and retention. Of course, some CRM or marketing systems include these capabilities, just as some BPM or event-processing platforms include business rules and analytic capabilities.

James is quite correct there: indeed event-driven decision management seems to be the increasingly popular overlap between CEP and decision management. CEP technologies like the TIBCO BusinessEvents platform provide both such event-driven rule / decision automation (and management).

Gartner’s David McCoy recently posted on his frustrations with the idea of “business rules” - or at least some prevalent ambivalency towards the management of rules:

<<I’m beginning to think that most people DO NOT CARE about business rules… So, is it any reason we haven’t seen more uptake of Business Rule Management? No. I think the story is clear. BRM isn’t sexy. It’s not even something that people want. It’s a necessary evil in too many eyes. … >>

He adds some exceptions, though:

<<We’ll just let those of us who know the power of rule-driven behavior benefit from BRM …. Those of us who know, know things like this:

Rules + events = real-time reaction
Rules + scenario analysis = policy-driven agility
Rules + process = mutable processes that stay within bounds
Rules + applications = rapid adaption to new opportunities>>

Of course, different people have different understandings of rules. The “business rule gurus” talk about rules that to many are more like policy or regulations - i.e. constraints on the business like “A Driver of a Vehicle must have a valid Driver’s License”. While documenting and communicating such rules allow good governance, as well as providing useful input as requirements to an IT project, you can see why such efforts could be construed as “not something people want” per Gartner.

On the other hand, decision rules - determining either facts or actions - are what drives businesses (e.g. the sorts of rules one usually associates with “real-time reaction” and so forth).

Therefore it was interesting to read from John Hall on the EU Ontorule research project when he posted about a Decision Oriented Business Applications workshop to take place this year; I’d understood that Ontorule had been about mapping SBVR vocabularies and (policy-like) rules to production rules executed in a rules engine.

<<One change that has occurred since the [Ontorule] project [researching operationalising rules and ontologies] started is the growth of decision management and modelling…>>

So when analysts complain about the lack of take-up of “business rules”, I suspect they are really talking about SBVR-type rule repositories (which remain useful for governance, but are not yet used to support many IT projects today). “Decision rules” as used in Business Processes, and the management of said decisions, remain a hot topic and bridges the business vocabulary world with the IT execution world. And event-based decisions provide the real-time reactions that businesses are increasingly concerned about…

I enjoyed the latest YouTube IBM Smarter Planet advert, linking “smarter information to smarter decisions”. Of course, it has long been recognised that you need to combine smart event processing (complex event detection for real-time information handling) with smart, managed decisions (decision and/or rule, management and processing).

Unfortunately there is still only a very short list of commercially available CEP products that augment event processing with integrated decision processing (i.e. CEP embedding BRMS, for technology pundits).

Maybe this will change in 2010. Or maybe TIBCO’s CEP marketing tagline needs to change to match IBM’s shiny TV ads: “smarter ways to find smarter information leading to smarter decisions”. Ho hum!

SOAInstitute has posted an article penned by Decision Management consultant Claye Green on “Decisions and Complex Event Processing”, making the case for Decision Management alongside Complex Event Processing. I guess the synergy between these would have been clearer if David Luckham had used the phrase “Event Management” rather than CEP - event management and processing go alongside decision management and processing… but anyways, this helps explain why tools like TIBCO BusinessEvents provide both CEP and Decision Management in the same modeling and execution environment.

[Disclosure: Claye is an ex-colleague... ]

… was one made at the recent webinar promoting an OASIS standard for system event processing. Odd though, as of the 3 (non-TIBCO) vendors involved, one has acquired a Business Rule Management System provider, and one used to be a big provider of Business Rule Engines…

Now “rule maintenance” (/management) is a specialized type of content management, and related to other types of business model management (including business process management). Typically it’s just decision rules that are managed formally by business users (as opposed to, say, data relationship rules which are usually “baked in” to IT databases too much to be easily modified) [*1].

So, being generous, perhaps the OASIS speaker was referring to the lack of capability to easily manage and maintain all possible types of business rules in an application… although cynics might argue it was just a comment to justify not tieing SAF too closely to rules execution and rules engines…

Notes:

[1] TIBCO’s offering in rule management - TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager - covers decision services and agents for use within BusinessEvents applications to be applied to business events as they are detected.