BRDP Business Rules - Latest and Greatest News

TenFold Announces EnterpriseTenFold MarketForce, Opens New Era for Enterprise Software Development
Thursday December 30, 5:51 pm ET

MarketForce Dramatically Changes the Economics of Custom Applications

SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- TenFold® Corporation (OTC Bulletin Board: TENF - News), provider of the EnterpriseTenFold(TM) platform for building and implementing enterprise applications, today announced the release of a much enhanced version of its EnterpriseTenFold flagship product, named EnterpriseTenFold MarketForce.

.....

BusinessRules -- Use BusinessRules transactions to create and tie

       complex business rules to applications transactions.  BusinessRules

       vastly enhances TenFold's already-unique PowerScoring technology.



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CMS to apply business rules engines to claims processing

By Mary Mosquera
GCN Staff
12/29/04

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has requested information on how to integrate business rules engines and business process management software to modernize Medicare’s fee-for-service claims processing system.

The technologies have the potential to revolutionize the way health care claims are settled, CMS said in its request for information posted at FedBizOpps yesterday. CMS, an agency of the Health and Human Services Department, expects to redesign the claims processing systems in about five years. The agency will employ business rules engines, business process models and data dimensioning to advance Medicare claims processing systems.

Business rules engines capture the business aspects of the system from the mainstream program code so nontechnical analysts can more quickly introduce business rule changes. The process allows legislative changes to Medicare policy to be implemented quicker and more reliably.

Leading Provider of Product Lifecycle Management Solutions Selects Epicor(R)

Formation Systems to Leverage Epicor for Service Enterprises to Manage Service Engagements and Streamline Financial Operations

Distribution Source : PRNewswire

Date : Monday - December 27, 2004

IRVINE, Calif., Dec. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Epicor Software Corporation , a leading provider of integrated enterprise software solutions for the midmarket, today announced that Formation Systems, a leading provider of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, has chosen Epicor for Services Enterprises to streamline accounting processes, maximize resource utilization, and effectively manage service engagements. .....Leveraging a service-oriented architecture (SOA), Epicor for Service Enterprises allows business rules to be modeled and changed on demand, capturing more revenue opportunities while maintaining the value of technology investments. .....

Column published in DMReview.com

December 22, 2004 Malcolm Chisholm

I can remember a few years back when I first heard about XML at a DAMA-I conference. The speaker introduced the topic, predicted that it would be something big and encouraged everyone in the audience to try to get on an XML project. Actually, his point was that as data professionals we should try to influence XML projects before programmers dominated them. Fast forwarding to the present, it seems to me the results from XML are rather mixed at best, at least when it comes to business rules.

Building the Legacy Systems of Tomorrow
"Do you know one of the great things about XML?," a lead programmer almost whispered to me a year or so back. "Tell me," I said. "Well," he continued, "You can embed XML in existing character columns in databases, so you can carry a lot more information in the database without ever having to add any new columns. Think of all the time and effort you can save doing that!" The enthusiastic, almost wild, gleam in his eye told me that he was not going to listen to any sermons on normalization. Perhaps DBAs and IT departments could do a better job of allowing changes to database structures, but nothing can justify using XML to circumvent these controls. Unfortunately, this is not the only abuse of XML. Indeed, XML seems to put temptation in the way of programmers because it lends itself to two things that many, if not most, programmers love: hierarchies and parsing strings.

The hierarchical nature of XML is strangely reminiscent of the now almost forgotten days of hierarchical databases such as IMS. Program logic tends to work in hierarchies, with one routine calling another, stacks and heaps, call traces and so on. But just because programmers organize logic in hierarchies does not mean that hierarchies are good for everything. Indeed business rules are atomic pieces of logic that typically have dependencies that resemble networks more than hierarchies. Trying to fit business rules into XML structures, which I have seen attempted, may satisfy the artistic purity of many programmers but is unlikely to achieve anything practical.
The love of parsing strings is another bad habit that XML enables. Rather than pass individual parameters to subroutines or functions, huge payloads of XML are exchanged that then have to be carefully unraveled to extract relevant parameters. Prior to XML, it took discipline to have individual parameters each with a specific ordinal position (or name) and data type. This has suddenly been replaced by single parameters of ever-growing and changing character strings of XML that can make spaghetti code look appealing by comparison. Trying to figure out what is being passed between routines is now a quantum leap more difficult. It is true that there are aids that help in doing this, but they are more than offset by the poor design that XML enables.
Included in this is the "need" for serialization and deserialization of XML as it is exchanged. Knowing how to perform this clever trick seems to be presented as something that separates novice programmers from the cognoscenti of the craft and is rarely discussed as a flaw that reduces performance, adds to unnecessary maintenance and provides a breeding ground for bugs.
One of my chief worries with building business rule engine functionality is performance. Users dislike poor performance, even if they are being provided with great functionality. Navigating the hierarchies of XML, parsing XML and doing data type conversion can potentially degrade performance. If I have to use XML, I will, but I want to make it as lean as possible.

Meta Data without Meaning
One of the great promises of XML was that it made data "self-describing" because the meta data that accompanied the data would describe what it meant. Unfortunately, this has not been the case on the many projects I have seen. I constantly run up against XML that is like:
XXX
Basically, the meta data is treated like surrogate key values. It is something cooked up by a programmer to uniquely identify a piece of data, but it is next to impossible to find out what business reality (if any) it corresponds to. The same data can be represented by different meta data in different XML, because the meta data is simply being treated as a way of differentiating pieces of data being passed between two points in an application.
When it comes to business rules, I have found that different classes of rules have different kinds of meta data that apply to them. I prefer to see these different kinds of meta data represented as tables and columns in a repository. Yet I have also seen them represented as XML embedded in rule definitions. This hides the properties of the meta data needed for the rules and cements them in inflexible XML hierarchies. Having the meta data exposed for general use in a relational database (a repository) is a much better approach.
Of course, I have to recognize that a lot of tools and techniques have now been built around XML, and the original arguments in favor of XML are still valid. There is no doubt that XML can be used successfully, and indeed we may be obliged to use XML in certain tools. However, it seems to take greater discipline to achieve success, and some issues with XML, such as bandwidth consumption, may never go away. Perhaps the greatest lesson is not to use XML in business rules projects just for the sake of XML and to understand that it does not eliminate the need for careful analysis and design.

LivePerson's Timpani Raises Average Order Size and Conversion Rates

                   for Leading Online Discount Retailer



  NEW YORK, Dec. 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- LivePerson, Inc. (Nasdaq:

LPSN), a leading provider of communications solutions for online sales,

marketing and customer service, announced today that Overstock.com(R)

(Nasdaq: OSTK), the popular online discount retailer, has adopted Timpani

Sales and Marketing to enhance web-based interactions with customers.  Early

results have been promising.  Using Timpani's proactive, permission-based chat

technology, Overstock.com has experienced increases in average order size and

conversion rates through this channel.

  Leveraging Timpani's real-time analytics and intelligent business rules

engine, Overstock.com proactively engages website visitors, initiates online

interactions and supplies live assistance at critical stages during a

shopper's browsing and buying process.  Exit survey data revealed customers

are pleased with the added level of service the technology provides; of the

88% of respondents who rated their chat experience as "good to excellent,"

nearly 60% chose "excellent."  As one user wrote, "I am so glad you have this

service.  I would have been unable to purchase today without the help I

received."



read more

In this issue of your periodic Business Rules Journal Update...

1. The Motorcycle Approach to Enterprise Vocabulary, by Mark Myers
2. Premise & Conclusion: Can a Definition be Violated? ~ Definitions
and Business Rules, by Ronald G. Ross
3. Modeling Concepts: Verbalizing Business Rules (part 9), by Terry Halpin
4. "Oldies-but-Goodies" posting, by Ronald G. Ross

If you'd like to read all our articles on the web, visit:
http://www.brcommunity.com


1. The Motorcycle Approach to Enterprise Vocabulary, by Mark Myers ...............................................................
One of the least understood aspects of motorcycle riding is steering.
The actual physics of what is going on to make the bike turn is not intuitive to new riders. In essence, to turn the bike you must move the wheels out from underneath it. In the same manner, when building an Enterprise Vocabulary many experienced business people find themselves a novice in the vocabulary business. To make vocabulary work, old habits must often give way to new principles, and often you find yourself in a position of having to 'move the wheels out' from under the organization.
In this month's feature, Mark Myers shares his insights on first 'steering a course' and then 'getting traction' so that your journey to Enterprise Vocabulary' will yield a great ride.

to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2004/b213.html


2. Premise & Conclusion: Can a Definition be Violated? ~ Definitions
and Business Rules, by Ronald G. Ross ...............................................................
Is a definition a business rule? Can it be violated? If so, exactly what is being violated? In this month's column, Ron Ross takes a look at these and related questions, including exactly how the 'rule-ness'
of definitions comes about.

to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2004/b214.html


3. Modeling Concepts: Verbalizing Business Rules (part 9), by Terry Halpin ...............................................................
Business rules should be validated by business domain experts, and hence specified using concepts and languages easily understood by business people.
This is the ninth in a series of articles on expressing business rules formally in a high-level, textual language. In this month's column, Terry Halpin discusses
the verbalization of exclusion constraints.

to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2004/b215.html


4. "Oldies-but-Goodies" Collection
..................................................................
BRS is releasing hidden treasures from past print issues of the Data Base Newsletter and DataToKnowledge Newsletter. This month's contribution to our "Oldies-but-Goodies" collection is...

"Components and Business Rules: Do They Connect?"
by Ronald G. Ross
from the Jan./Feb. 1998 issue

to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a1998/a377.html


The Business Rules Journal (BRJ) Update is distributed electronically free-of-charge on a monthly basis by the Business Rules Community. http://www.brcommunity.com

Gladys S. W. Lam, Publisher
Ronald G. Ross, Executive Editor
Keri Anderson Healy, Editor
John Hall, Technology Editor
Silvie Spreeuwenberg, European Section Editor

BRCommunity.com is sponsored by Business Rule Solutions, LLC, the world leader in business rule techniques.

Copyright 2004. www.BRSolutions.com. All rights reserved.

Integic and Corticon Team on Business Process Requirements

12/13/2004

Integic Corporation, a provider of business process management solutions and Corticon(TM) Technologies, a provider of business rules management systems, today announced an alliance to offer an integrated solution to customers' business process requirements. According to the companies, customers seeking enterprise solutions will now be able to take advantage of Integic's e.POWER product to manage documents, records, and processes while utilizing Corticon's product to manage complex business rules for key portions of the process. e.POWER "Intelligent Agents" will provide just-in-time integration for key business users, allowing them to automatically access and apply business rules.

read more

athenahealth, Inc., Expands Ohio Provider Base 45% in 2004; Online revenue cycle management company signs Max Sports Medicine Institute and Buckeye Sports and Orthopedic Specialists
WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 13, 2004--athenahealth, inc., the premier provider of revenue cycle optimization services to medical group practices, has experienced a 45% increase in the number of its Ohio provider customers from 2003, adding 71 new providers onto its Web-based platform since January 2004. The Massachusetts-based company now bills $1 million in Ohio provider claims daily, making Ohio the first state in which athenahealth reached this benchmark. athenahealth's services provide physicians and their staff with a solution that puts procedure and insurance information at their fingertips, while the patient is still in the office.
.....
The company's Web-based platform consists of comprehensive workflow technology, central billing and reimbursement services. The company built an extensive rules engine with thousands of payer-specific rules, and when staff learns of new payer requirements the company adds more rules to prevent the errors from happening in the future. In this way, the system learns from its users and becomes more efficient at sending out clean claims.

PRESS RELEASE: Knowledge Partners to Bring Business Rules Expertise to BrainStorm's Business Process Management Conference Series

BrainStorm Group announced today that Barbara von Halle, founder of Knowledge Partners, Inc. will chair a dedicated Business Rules Track for BrainStorm's 2005 Business Process Management Conference Series.

Business Rules Track to be Led by KPI's Barbara von Halle

Northboro, MA (PRWEB) December 12, 2004 -- BrainStorm Group announced today that Barbara von Halle, founder of Knowledge Partners, Inc. will chair a dedicated Business Rules Track for BrainStorm's 2005 Business Process Management Conference Series. Now entering its 7th year, the Business Process Management Conference Series is the leading forum for BPM Professionals and is the only conference dedicated to Strategies & Architectures for Process Innovation.
The 2005 Series will be held in:
April 12-13, 2005 - Chicago
June 28-29, 2005 - San Francisco
Sept. 20-21, 2005 - Washington, DC
Nov. 2-3, 2005 - New York

According to BrainStorm president and founder Gregg Rock, "We are thrilled to announce an expanded focus on Business Rules for 2005 – in cooperation with Barbara and Knowledge Partners Inc. We continue to see a tremendous amount of interest in Business Rules and BP + BPM, and would like to thank KPI for agreeing to lend their insight and expertise to the Business Process Management Conference Series."

Barbara von Halle, founder of KPI said "Our recent surveys across a large number of enterprises indicate a significant growth in the adoption of a Business Rules Approach and Business Rule Technology. This growth arises from the need for Enterprise Agility and Enterprise Compliance with a new generation of regulations. We have also been particularly impressed with the level of professional attention provided to attendees and sponsors by the Brainstorm Group. By strengthening the Business Rules Track of the BPM Conference Series, the Series addresses the two most important mandates facing enterprises today."

Business Rules, OK - Computer Business Review: "Business Rules, OK

Business rules technology is not new, so why has it recently won a seat at IT's top table? Jason Stamper reports.

It is strange to think that the last 15 years have probably been the most dynamic ever in terms of enterprise technology developments. After all, Tim Berners-Lee only announced the birth of the World Wide Web in 1991, and the Netscape browser was not launched until 1993.

Ten years ago, email was a luxury, no-one used Windows as a serious server operating system (remember Windows NT Advanced Server?), Linux was little more than a twinkle in Linus Torvalds' eye, 'mobile' phones were not truly mobile, and simultaneous company-wide ERP roll-outs were thought to be a good idea. How much has changed.

The trouble is, if you consider almost all of these fairly radical shifts in enterprise IT architectures, few of them meant the replacement of existing systems. In nearly all cases, new technologies were simply thrown into the IT melting pot.

The result has been that IT architectures have become more and more complex, with even the most modern IT systems having to co-exist with legacy systems that are often older than the CIO or IT director that oversees them. At the same time, business users have been demanding more and more from the IT department.

From business re-engineering projects of the 1980s, to widescale ERP initiatives of the 1990s, IT has had to respond to demands for increased business efficiency and agility. But again, in nearly every case the new technologies have been lacking in flexibility and ease-of-use, and so have had to remain firmly under the auspices of the IT department. If a business person wants a change to an application, system or even one of their own business processes, then the chances are that they will need to ask the IT department to help them make that change.

Increasingly, both business leaders and the IT department themselves are trying to break this cycle by putting business change back in the hands of the business users. Business users want this because they do not have time to wait for IT to respond to the constant change requests, and even where they do, they want more control of their business processes. The IT department wants this just as much – or if it does not it should do – because tackling constant business change requests is diverting IT's attention from what should be its primary role, optimising the IT backbone.

see rest of article for more.....

CBR Opinion

Rules engines, according to the analysts, hold great promise for automating business rules in a more manageable, reusable and intuitive fashion than is possible with proprietary application logic. ROI is proven and impressive. But there are a number of questions that remain: if business rules are as much a business enabler as an IT project, how can business rules roll-outs be funded, managed and sponsored?

What have been the experiences of companies that have used some of the latest business rules software, and do business rules engines really put power back in the hands of business users?
"

Integic and Corticon Ally on Business Process Management - ebizQ: "Integic and Corticon Ally on Business Process Management
12/09/2004


Integic Corporation, a provider of business process management solutions and Corticon(tm) Technologies, a provider of business rules management systems, today announced an alliance to offer an integrated solution to customer's business process requirements. The companies said that customers seeking enterprise solutions will now be able to take advantage of Integic's e.POWER product to manage documents, records, and processes while utilizing Corticon's product to manage complex business rules for key portions of the process. e.POWER 'Intelligent Agents' will provide just-in-time integration for key business users, allowing them to automatically access and apply business rules."

ILOG Named Leading Vendor in the Business Rules Management Systems Market: "ILOG Named Leading Vendor in the Business Rules Management Systems Market
Tuesday December 7, 3:00 am ET
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and PARIS, Dec. 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- New research from International Data Corporation (IDC) has named ILOG (Nasdaq: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364) the leading vendor for business rule management systems (BRMS) with 29.0 percent market share for calendar year 2003. The same report, 'Worldwide Model Driven Development and Business Rules Management Systems, 2004-2008 Forecast and 2003 Vendor Shares (IDC #32392) also named ILOG the third largest overall MDD vendor behind IBM and Computer Associates.

'With a market share of 29%, ILOG has shown to be the consistent market leader for the last two years, said Stephen D. Hendrick, Group Vice President for Application Development and Deployment Research at IDC. 'By centralizing pre-built business rules and enabling managers and non-technical workers to create rules using business language, ILOG makes rules easier for companies and developers to access and maintain thereby reducing overall application development and maintenance costs.'
The report marks the first time that IDC has recognized BRMS, which include business rule engines, as a separate market segment. IDC has begun coverage of BRMS and has added the category to their software taxonomy -- underscoring their importance to the IT infrastructure.
The IDC report indicated that the BRMS market was $115.9 million in 2003, driven by companies' requirements for an effective way to handle the management of policies and procedures governing the order of business rule execution in their organizations. BRMSs have the advantage of having a better intrinsic alignment with how organizations define business activities when compared with conventional declarative programming approaches due to their ability to provide a more effective environment for defining business logic through rules, decision trees, and decision tables."

Congratulations to the winners, finalists, and Merit Award winners in the 12th Annual Intelligent Enterprise RealWare Awards! This program recognizes outstanding customer IT applications that meet strategic business objectives and deliver return on investment (ROI).
Merit Award, Business Flexibility: California Dept. of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and Fair Isaac. The DMV's Vehicle Registration Application Development Unit worked with Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor to enable the organization to update processes swiftly when rules change or are interpreted differently by the state government.

Fair Isaac contests Ilog first claim - Computer Business Review: "Fair Isaac contests Ilog 'first' claim
Rival business rules software vendors Ilog SA and Fair Isaac Corp have become embroiled in a dispute over IBM mainframe certification.

2 Dec 2004, 09:45 GMT -
Paris, France-based Ilog has issued a press release claiming to be the first rules management platform to be certified for IBM Corp's zSeries mainframe platform. However, Fair Isaac quickly contacted CompterWire via email to dampen its rival's claims, calling Ilog's marketing 'misleading and untrue.'

'Obviously this is not true as Blaze Advisor has been certified on zSeries for a while,' said James Taylor, director of product marketing for Fair Isaac's enterprise decision management software and solutions.

Taylor said that Fair Isaac has a long history of supporting IBM mainframes. 'We, unlike some rules vendors, can provide the names of many companies running our products on IBM mainframes,' he added.

Taylor also pointed out that as part of a global worldwide partner announcement signed with IBM in January this year 'we're obliged to certify our products on IBM platforms.'

Ilog however disagreed with Taylor's assertions, re-asserting that'[Ilog] is the first certified vendor supporting IBM zSeries' in an email sent to ComputeWire.

'There was a long certification process in IBM's Labs in Montpellier, France,' the email read. It added that, 'Fair Isaac's Blaze Advisor might be supporting the zSeries mainframes but it is not certified.'

Both Ilog and Fair Isaac have made a number of platform announcements over the past few weeks relating to both mainframe and .NET support.

In order to set the record straight, ComputerWire is still awaiting confirmation from the "horse's mouth" - i.e. IBM - as to its mainframe certifications. "

IDC - Document at a Glance: "Worldwide Model-Driven Development and Business Rules Management Systems 2004-2008 Forecast and 2003 Vendor Shares

Price $4,500.00

Dec 2004Doc #32392Market Analysis

Printed Page Length: 37 pages
Number of Tables: 5
Number of Figures: 9

by Stephen D. Hendrick
Group Vice President, Application Development and Deployment Research
Team: Integration
Team: Application Development and Deployment

Abstract
This IDC study provides vendor-specific revenue data, market shares, competitive analysis, and profiles of the leading model-driven development (MDD) vendors and business rules management systems (BRMS) vendors for the period from 2002 to 2003. This document provides an updated five-year forecast as of December 2004 for the MDD and BRMS submarkets for the 2004�2008 period. Forecasts by geographic region and operating environment are included. By leveraging a bottom-up approach based in market segmentation, IDC's forecast for this market has dramatically increased and is indicative that significant change in this market is occurring.
'All of the indications are present to suggest that the overall analysis, modeling, and design (AMD) market and its constituent parts are positioned for high growth,' said Stephen D. Hendrick, group vice president, Application Development and Deployment Research. 'High growth in the BRMS submarket indicates end-user validation of BRMS, as does the commitment now being made by the leading vendors to this technology. At the same time, new approaches to modeling combined with a more complete and integrated support of the software development life cycle will drive higher-than-anticipated growth in the model-driven development submarket.'"

Bringing .Net rules to light - Computerworld: "Bringing .Net rules to light

Product Review by James Owen

DECEMBER 01, 2004 (INFOWORLD) - Ideal for complex applications with frequently changing rules, business rule management systems give business people and programmers a shared language that helps them implement changes quickly. Two companies, Fair Isaac Corp. and ILog Inc., make enterprise-class rules management systems for Java applications. Both recently announced that they are bringing their premier products to .Net apps, and I've had a chance to see ILog's new Rules for .Net in action.
ILog's product combines a rules engine that runs on .Net, a shared rules repository accessible via Windows SharePoint Services, and sets of plug-ins for Visual Studio .Net and Microsoft Word. Programmers create rules in Visual Studio and export them as XML-based "RuleDocs," and business analysts edit them using Word. Giving business people the ability to maintain rules in Word (using ILog's English-like Business Action Language) is a big step forward, far preferable to using ILog's own GUI or spreadsheet-like Decision Tables. ILog says plug-ins for Excel and the ability to create rules for BizTalk Server are on the road map.
For developers, Rules for .Net provides total access to rules, objects and classes from Visual Studio .Net. As in JRules, developers can add virtual classes to extend the object model quickly and easily. Rules are contained in Visual Studio and Word documents, but Rules for .Net provides the same debugging capabilities as ILog's JRules and Rules for C/C++. The product supports a document-centric rules management process, but it lacks a true rules repository as found in JRules and Fair Isaac's Blaze Advisor. Nevertheless, Rules for .Net could be a clear winner for Microsoft shops needing a first-class business rule management system. "