Business Rules Not Ruling Business Rules will play growing role in business processes, analysts say
By Jennifer deJong
May 15, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 2)
It’s not quite mainstream, but business rules management technology is moving away from the margins.
Software that separates rules from the applications they govern is no longer just for rules-centric companies, such as those that issue insurance policies and process claims. It also plays an increasingly important role in any organization that wants to automate decisions within business processes, analysts said.
“Business rules are becoming part of the DNA of application development,” said Steve Hendrick, an analyst for IDC. “Business rules are effective for automating decisions within processes,” added Forrester Research analyst John Rymer, in a report published in January titled “The Forrester Wave: Business Rules Platforms.” According to Rymer, “They make it possible to change the business rules without breaking the application (or applications) that call it.”
Business rules spell out policies, such as which customers a bank will approve mortgages for, at what interest rate; or which drivers an auto insurance firm will underwrite, at what price. Instead of encoding such policies using a conventional programming technique, a business rules management system (BRMS) stores rules in a repository and executes them in an engine separate from the applications to which they apply. That enables developers and business users to revise or replace rules without having to alter an application’s source code.
“Rules aren’t embedded in the platform,” said James Taylor, a vice president of product management for Minneapolis-based Fair Isaac, which sells the BRMS Blaze Advisor, among other offerings. Centralized management means rules can work with multiple applications, much the same way a database does, he said.
“You can manage rules the same way you manage data,” added Jean-Francois Abramatic, chief product officer for Mountain View, Calif.-based ILOG, which sells JRules and other BRMS offerings.
BRMS makers like the database analogy. But if their offerings are to become as ubiquitous as database software, they have a long way to go. A survey conducted by IDC in 2005, which asked developers about various underlying technologies for building applications, found that less than 9 percent of those surveyed use rules-based management systems, said Hendrick. That number is expected to double over the next three years, he said. Forrester has yet to measure BRMS adoption rates formally, but it, too, sees a growing trend.
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