Building Flexible, Easy to Change, and Rock-Solid Applications with BRFplus Decision Services

Editor's Notes

1. Big systems implementations tend to be “electronic concrete”. In particular you can’t easily change the logic in those systems. You can add process management across and within them, but many business processes are actually pretty stable – it is the decisions within them that are constantly changing. For instance, your order to cash process does not change but your pricing decision does. Identifying the decisions in your applications and processes explicitly and then automating them using business rules allows you to develop a system that is both robust and flexible.IT systems are notorious for lasting longer than expected. They rapidly evolve from “temporary solutions” to permanent ones. Those who think business rules are overkill often tell me that “this code isn’t going to change” and “it will always be easy for someone to change this code” despite decades of evidence that this is not the case. Instead of assuming it won’t change or that making changes will be easy, companies would do better assuming that they will need to change the logic in their systems more often than they think and that the people making the changes won’t be those who wrote it originally. The ease with which business rules can be changed and re-deployed and the greater clarity of business rules syntax make this work. Assuming that your systems will be permanent, and making sure that critical flex points in the system are easy to change (because they are externalized as rules-based decision services) will ensure that your have permanence with flexibility.
2. Decisions involve choices, selecting from alternatives and are critical to how we run our organizationsBetter decisions means making more effective, more profitable choices from those available – choices that improve what will happen in the future
3. much of a typical mainframe system is static, works fine and needs no maintenance. Often only a small portion of the system is responsible for much of the maintenance work. My suggestion would be to find the COBOL that represents business decisions such as a pricing engine (what price is this product for this customer), eligibility logic (is this customer eligible for this offer or service), approval rules (can this claim be auto-approved) and replace those parts of the application with Decision Services.
4. Lack of centralization (difficult reuse) + customers avoid updates (because of applicability for complete server with application stack -> retests) -> stuck in older technology
5. So making decisions correctly will be hard unless we can pull all these rules together.Given this is how rules often look to start with, this is clearly going to be hard.But rules also change…Because your business policies doBecause your competitors doBecause the law doesBecause stock levels doBecause your services and products doBecause your customers doBecause your customers’ needs doSo we need something that will let us collect, manage and update the business rules that drive our decisions
6. Increased business value is the largest and most compelling business benefit that can be realized from the use of a business rules management system such as BRFplus. These benefits are driven by improved effectiveness and efficiency in decision-making and by improved responsiveness as BRFplus frees business users from the tyranny of the IT work queue for changes. One company developed a BRFplus based system to determine appropriate carriers for 25,000 shipments per hour, replacing the emailing and management of large numbers of Excel spreadsheets.
7. Find the decisions that matter to your business and understand themDon’t start with your data, start with the decisions you need to improveStart with the definition of decision services - purpose and service interface (facts required)-> needssupportfrom IT (wheretoputtheservicecall)
8. Discover and Model DecisionsDesign and Implement Decision ServicesMonitor and Improve Decisions