Business Rules Evangelist:
Controlling Rule Redundancy

Column published in DMReview.com January 27, 2005 By Malcolm Chisholm

.......
Rule redundancy is a fact of life. If it is to be controlled, the only viable approach is through meta data management. The risk of not controlling it is that transactions go awry, data quality gets degraded and decisions based on managed information become unreliable. The track record of meta data management, in terms of its usefulness to the enterprise, is mixed to put it politely. Let us hope that the business rules movement will provide practical pointers to improving this aspect of management of rules data.

for full article..

.......................
The Business Rules Community's
Business Rules Journal (BRJ) Update
January, 2005 Vol 6 No. 1
.......................

IN THE NEWS...

This month, two important submissions for standardization will be submitted to the OMG:

* Business Semantics of Business Rules
* Business Motivation Model

To mark this important milestone at the very beginning of 2005, BRCommunity has compiled a special feature on the History of Business Rules. This feature overviews both submissions, and places them in the larger context in which they came to exist.
Take a look at these important developments!

.......................

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

1. A Brief History of the Business Rule Approach, compiled by
the Editorial Staff of BRCommunity.com
2. Premise & Conclusion: Business Rules and Knowledge Workers ~
Getting to the 'Point of Knowledge', by Ronald G. Ross
3. Rule Observatory: Secret Rules, by Silvie Spreeuwenberg
4. OMG Reporter: OMG Business Modeling Pipeline, by Stan Hendryx
5. "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. A Brief History of the Business Rule Approach, compiled by the
Editorial Staff of BRCommunity.com
................................................................
This 'Brief History' examines events that have taken place specifically and selectively under the banner of 'business rules'. Our simple, pragmatic criteria in that regard are
fourfold: (1) The participants themselves described what they were doing (2) at the time they were doing it (3) as primarily of, for, and by 'business rules' (4) in a public, rather than a private, setting. We invite commentary and feedback on any or all parts of this history, which continues to unfold at an ever-accelerating pace. Of particular interest are the origins of specific ideas and techniques that have been incorporated into the business rule approach.

to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2005/b216.html


2. Premise & Conclusion: Business Rules and Knowledge Workers ~
Getting to the 'Point of Knowledge', by Ronald G. Ross ...............................................................
Point-of-Sale (POS) is a familiar notion in the world of commerce. Is there a similar customer/supplier event for knowledge workers? If so, how are business rules involved?
In this month's column, Ron Ross introduces the notion of Point-of-Knowledge (POK), and outlines critical success factors for its support.

to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2005/b217.html


3. Rule Observatory: Secret Rules, by Silvie Spreeuwenberg ...............................................................
In this month's issue of the 'Rule observatory' Silvie
Spreeuwenberg shares with you some observations on secret rules.

to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2005/b218.html


4. OMG Reporter: OMG Business Modeling Pipeline, by Stan Hendryx ...............................................................
In this month's column, Stan Hendryx reports on the major advancements made in the ongoing work of the Object Management Group (OMG). Stan reports on several significant advances from its Arlington, VA meeting. He also outlines some hot topics of 'future direction' for the OMG in the area of business modeling, and those interested are encouraged to consider participation.

to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2005/b219.html


5. "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...

"Business Rules as Customer Interface"
by Ronald G. Ross
from the March./April 1998 issue

to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a1998/a381.html



The Business Rules Journal (BRJ) Update is distributed electronically free-of-charge on a monthly basis by the Business Rules Community.
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 2005. www.BRSolutions.com. All rights reserved.

Relativity Launches Best Practice Guides for Application Modernization

Techniques Boost Productivity of Enterprise Application Modernization Initiatives

RALEIGH, N.C., Jan. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Relativity Technologies, Inc., the leading provider of Enterprise Application Modernization (EAM) solutions, today announced the availability of detailed guides that streamline the management and modernization of business critical systems. The Relativity Application Modernization Process (RAMP) guides help users rapidly employ the power of the Modernization Workbench(TM) platform to align their application portfolios with resource availability and business needs.

....
This initial release of RAMP guides includes methods that address code analysis, complexity reduction, and business rule management. Additional guides will be released throughout 2005. For more information, please visit: www.relativity.com .
....
for more details

New ILOG JRules 5.0 Enhances Business and IT Collaboration

Release Includes First-ever Support for Mission-critical Production Environments

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and PARIS, Jan. 26 -- ILOG(R) (Nasdaq: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364) today announced the first business rule management system (BRMS) to make it practical for business and IT professionals to collaborate in managing business policies across the enterprise. With ILOG JRules(TM) 5.0, ILOG has taken the lead in providing a collaboration platform for all the stakeholders in the policy management process -- IT professionals, business people and systems administrators.

All too often there is an awkward relationship between business executives and IT professionals within an organization as both groups balance a need for business staff to control business policies and IT staff to control complicated and sometimes fragile IT systems. A BRMS is part of an important trend aimed at bringing business people closer to the systems that control their business by giving them an active role in maintaining software, specifically, automating essential business policies and regulations. Industry analysts have indicated the potential for technologies, like a BRMS, to enhance collaboration between these two groups that can be misaligned at best.

"The need for time-to-market response to business change is overwhelming, and it is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on businesses, including increased regulatory change. These pressures will require that business people become more active participants in the IT process," said James G. Sinur, Gartner vice president and research fellow. "Enabling business users to change a few critical business rules with a change cycle that bypasses the lengthy software change cycle certainly helps businesses react faster. Meanwhile, diligent collaboration will be required between business and the IS organization for rule definition and management, calling for better tools and methods to enable this collaboration."

BRMS are becoming essential elements of IT projects for businesses worldwide, particularly redesign and re-architecting initiatives, because they address the challenges created by faster business cycles and change and aging software architectures that can't accommodate change quickly enough. By allowing business users -- and not just IT staff -- to make changes to the IT infrastructure in real-time, as business conditions and strategies change, these tools are becoming critical for achieving business agility across the enterprise.

.....for more details......

Survey in Western Europe Confirms Business Rule Management Systems Deployment Trend

Conducted By IT Research Firm IDC, Survey Warns of Significant Hidden Costs of Non-Deployment

PARIS, Jan. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IT decision-makers in Western Europe confirmed the need for Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) to reduce costs, error rates and time to implement policies when weighing the importance of process-related challenges, according to an IDC survey released today. Commissioned by ILOG(R) (Nasdaq: ILOG; Euronext; ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364), the BRMS market leader, and conducted by IT research firm IDC, this survey of around 100 IT executives highlighted the importance of increased automation, flexibility and enhanced control of their organizations' policies. The survey also demonstrates that business rule solutions can produce a significant return on investment (ROI), with 64 percent of respondents reporting a greater than or as expected ROI from use of a business rule solution.
A pan-European study into the use of and business requirements for BRMS, the survey underscored the growing need for this technology. "The demand for the automation of decisions within applications and processes is very high, with the need to accommodate new legislation; to reduce the errors occurring in processes; and to reduce the time to implement policy changes among the reasons identified," wrote IDC Director, European Service Oriented Architecture and Application Platforms, Rob Hailstone. The survey revealed that for 76 percent of the organisations, increasing the efficiency of business processes was of high importance. Hailstone said that this trend confirmed that "the dependence on process automation will place an increasing emphasis on the need to manage the analysis, design and implementation of business rules."
The issues of cost reduction, error prevention and detection, and the ability to reduce the implementation time for policy and process changes stood out as a major challenge faced by IT departments.
When asked how well business rule solutions helped meet these challenges, respondents clearly pointed to BRMS's demonstrated ability to increase efficiency and automation. This point was emphasized in two other IDC surveys published in 2004, which have shown the switch in focus by IT departments from optimising point activities to increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of end-to-end, multi-step processes. IDC expects this to remain true for several years.
The survey also revealed that the top three ways that organizations are currently implementing business rules are to embed them within software packages, databases and legacy applications. However, as stated by Hailstone "where the rules are hard-coded within applications then the effort, delay, and danger of inconsistency of applying the rules can become a substantial threat to the business." This highlights the significant potential for using commercial BRMS solutions that provide flexibility by externalizing the management and maintenance of policies from the applications.
The survey also revealed the growing need to have a BRMS solution to allow frequent changes to business policies. More than half of the respondents that had not deployed a business rule solution would make policy changes more frequently if the deployment were simpler and/or cheaper. Rob Hailstone commented that "This puts the automation of business rules into a new light -- the lack of an effective means of automating business rules is proving a constraint on business change in half of the organizations we surveyed where a solution has not been implemented."
Hailstone concluded: "There is clearly growing recognition among organisations that they have to be able to respond to change rapidly, cost-effectively and without losing control or consistency. We can therefore confidently predict that the deployment of Business Rule Management Systems will increase in coming years. Indeed, organisations should consider the hidden costs of not deploying a BRMS solution. Organisations must be realistic about the number of policy changes that need to be managed, the cost of managing them using current methods, and the cost to the business of delaying their deployment."
A copy of the full survey results and analysis is available upon request.

January 17, 2005 10:00 AM US Eastern Timezone

Resolution Introduces Market's First Embeddable Interactive Rules Engine

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 17, 2005--

Engine's Small Footprint Gives Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) First Opportunity to Provide Branded Interactive Solutions

Resolution EBS, the provider of the only business rules engine built from the ground up for highly interactive processes, today announced the availability of an embeddable version of its ground-breaking Resolution Interactive Rules Engine, the Resolution Interactive Rules (iR) Platform 3.0. Its extremely small, 150K size makes it the ideal rules engine for ISVs looking to add interactive capabilities to their offerings, without adding a heavy infrastructure requiring massive maintenance, cost and support.

read more

.......................
CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS
Business Rule Forum Conference 2005
www.BusinessRulesForum.com
The 8th International Business Rules Forum will be held November 6-10, 2005 at the Hilton in the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, FL.
Have you got a business rules success story to tell? Have you successfully implemented a business-rule driven application or made significant progress in managing your company's business rules? Companies from diverse industries have shared their successes at prior Business Rules Forums. Share your experiences at the 2005 Conference.
We Invite Your Presentation on Business Rules for this Year's Conference.
Join us and share how business rules have helped put your organization on the "Fast Track to Business Agility". This timely Conference brings together the leading practitioners and vendors in the field to talk about what works and provide attendees with a host of practical ideas they can put to use in their companies.
Complete the Abstract Submission Form at the end of this message or available at the Forum’s website www.BusinessRulesForum.com.
**Please feel free to forward this e-mail to qualified colleagues!**
Thank you. See you at the Forum!
Conference Co-Chairs ...
Ronald G. Ross, Business Rule Solutions, LLC Terry Moriarty, Inastrol

FMG Offers Health Plans Big Savings, Increased Efficiency and Enhanced Quality with Portico(TM) 5.0 Release
PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- FMG Technologies (FMG), a leading software and business solutions firm focused exclusively on improving the efficiency of health plan Provider Network Operations, is pleased to announce the release of Portico(TM) 5.0, its proprietary provider information management system. Portico(TM) 5.0 is the only enterprise-wide software platform designed specifically to address the data integrity, management and accessibility challenges associated with health plan Provider Network Operations. Many leading regional and national health plans throughout North America are already realizing immediate efficiencies, significant savings and enhanced provider and member relations from Portico's robust capabilities.

A web-based application, Portico(TM) 5.0 maintains enterprise-wide provider information in a central repository. Accessible by any secure user, Portico(TM) 5.0 improves interdepartmental workflows by integrating disparate provider systems with a secure, single source of truth for provider information. A robust business rules engine enforces data integrity and allows users to build, automate and track business processes specific to their plan.
The tool tracks and stores multiple, complex provider relationships, contracting and pricing information needed to properly adjudicate and pay claims, as well as supports automated credentialing, provider maintenance and provider site visit workflows. Portico's flexible user interface enables ease of configuration and responsiveness to the ever changing healthcare environment. Robust reporting capabilities provide visibility upon which key strategic decisions are based.
....

Introduction to SOA with Web Services

If all applications were to use a common programming interface and interoperability protocol, the job of IT would be much simpler, complexity would be reduced, and existing functionality could be more easily reused. This is the promise that service-oriented development brings to the IT world, and when deployed using a service-oriented architecture (SOA), services also become the foundation for more easily creating a variety of new strategic solutions.
.....
Automate previously manual business processes and enforce business rules.
.....

...

New Rules, Agile Government

January 1, 2005
When every change requires a pack of programmers, you can't be nimble. California DMV took a more flexible approach.

By Doug Henschen

Combine two ancient legacy systems, hundreds of thousands of daily transactions and demands for more responsive, open government, and you end up with one ugly, enormous problem. Such was the case at California's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), which collects some $4.1 billion in fees a year registering the nation's largest population of autos, trucks, motorcycles and watercraft.

One of the DMV's two legacy systems supports in-person registrations at 167 field offices, and it runs on RS 6000 computers in each office and in Sacramento. The second is a batch fee system that handles renewals sent in by mail, and it's deployed on mainframes at the agency's data center in Sacramento (see "Vehicle Registration Fees Rule Flow" below).

Of course, having two separate systems for the same process created redundancies and risks of data inconsistency. Whenever registration fees or policies changed-as determined by the state legislature-two distinct development efforts and two different analyst teams were required. To complicate matters, some of the computer programs had been in place for more than three decades, and thousands of updates and workarounds had been grafted into the code. Even minor changes required extensive analysis and testing.

By 2000, the DMV recognized it needed to move toward a modern architecture that would help meet a goal of embracing eGovernment and offering public access via the Internet. The data processing manager assigned to research the problem (see "Driving Force") soon settled on rules engine technology as a route to better responsiveness. A rules approach would remove the fee computation business logic from the legacy systems, eliminating the redundant development effort and giving business users and analysts a way to change fees and policies without the aid of programmers.

By the end of 2000, the project had been approved, and the agency had selected Blaze Advisor from Fair Isaac as the rules engine. Launched in 2001, the project's first phase involved vessel registrations, which number only 2,000 transactions per day and involve just 150 rules-a fraction of the vehicle volumes. A rule might dictate, for example, that nonresidents pay $37 or that state residents pay $9.

The project team first tried extracting the rules expressed in code in the legacy systems, but it proved too difficult. "Several of us went to the Business Rules Forum in November 2001, and we learned that we were taking the wrong approach," says senior programmer/consultant Alan Demmin. "We had to design the rules from scratch, and that meant we had to learn how to describe the business and organize the rules in English instead of code."

The team faced more delays in late 2001 when the agency's technical standards group mandated a centralized, service-oriented architecture. This meant the rules would have to run on an application server (in this case, IBM WebSphere) instead of local RS 6000s-the right way to go, says Demmin, but the change required a new approach and a feasibility study, resulting in a five-month postponement.

With a revised plan in place, work progressed throughout 2002, with much of the focus on writing new rules for automobiles and all other vehicle types.

"Good rules design dictates that you be as economical as possible," says Demmin. "As you gain experience, you learn to eliminate intermediate rules and get down to a core set that will be easier to maintain." Some projects involve tens of thousands of rules, but the DMV ended up with a concise set of 2,100.

As the rules writing wound down, testing got underway on the vessel registration project, which went into production in March 2003. The rules developed for watercraft became the guts of a fee computation service that is delivered over the network and used by both legacy systems. In an emergency project, the team then created a second service to handle an increase in penalties for late registrations. The legislature had passed the changes in early 2003, but there was no time to make changes in the legacy systems. In the meantime, employees were using time-consuming manual workarounds. The team wrote 20 rules for the new fees, and within one month, the 60,000 or more daily penalty calculations were automated.

The returns aren't in faster transactions, but in faster response times and savings on IT analysis, programming and testing each time fees and policies are changed by the legislature. What used to take months to do in custom modules developed by two different development teams now takes a matter of days or hours for a few business users and IT analysts.

In the last phase of the project, now nearing completion, a rules-based service will take over all other vehicle-type fee computations. The service has been tested to handle up to 400,000 transactions per day, and it's expected to go into production in January.

To automate as many as 475,000 vehicle registrations a day, the California DMV designed this streamlined process for calculating fees. Flexible, easily changed business rules for the red boxes and blue vehicle types are delivered through Fair Isaac's Blaze Rules Engine. The project eliminated time- and labor-intensive development in two separate legacy systems.

VEHICLE REGISTRATION FEES RULE FLOW

DRIVING FORCE

The Lesson: Too Little Time for Two Big Changes

Project leaders at The California DMV knew they were crossing a new frontier when they chose rules technology to eliminate legacy system programming delays, but in fact they were approaching two new frontiers. "One major lesson we learned is to allow more time in the schedule," says data processing manager Jerrianne Seitz. "The project was underscoped." The move to a rules-based approach was challenging enough because it required a new way of thinking. Extracting rules from code buried in two legacy systems proved impossible, so the agency had to create a business rules discovery process. "We brought in businesspeople, who ended up writing the rules from scratch," Seitz says. "IT then did the analysis and design." The core project team includes two developers, an analyst, a senior programmer/consultant and Seitz on the IT side, and three analysts from DMV's Registration Operations Division on the business side. Although the original feasibility study addressed only business application issues, the project crossed a second frontier when, in late 2001, the DMV changed architectural requirements and specified a centralized, service-based approach. This introduced the complexities of infrastructure deployment, in this case an IBM WebSphere J2EE application server, on top of the business application efforts. In hindsight, the infrastructure change could have been handled as a separate project, Seitz says, but the double effort is now paying off in two ways. First, business managers and analysts can change rules quickly to make state-mandated policy and fee changes. Complex, time-consuming programming in the legacy systems is a thing of the past. Second, the centralized, service-based approach brings the DMV that much closer to modern systems that will ease public access via the Internet. (In fact, the DMV has implemented online registration through a separate project that took advantage of the application server.) "We now have a fee computation service that can be called in many different ways," says senior programmer/consultant Alan Demmin. "In the future, we may implement pieces of the legacy systems in a Web-based architecture, and these services will plug right into that." —D.H.

Bringing Intelligence to the Claims Process

January 1, 2005
By Doug Henschen
Processing health insurance claims is a tedious task, fraught with detail. When Medicare and Medicaid are involved, the Department of Health and Human Services mandates that most claims be settled within 28 days. What's more, a small fraction of claims involving everything from minor claim violations to out-and-out fraud invariably muck up the process by introducing bad transactions and data.

To keep the claims process humming, data capture vendors Captiva Software and the Dakota division of WebMD are turning to business rules and analytic techniques to filter out the bad claims before they enter the system. Capture is the onramp for data-intensive processes that start with paper documents (though the software also handles EDI and XML data streams). Capture software uses recognition technologies such as OCR and barcode reading to extract data from images, and it then applies database lookups and various validations and formatting rules to ensure quality data.

Captiva's FirstPass Software adds rules-based analysis that checks for claim violations such as inappropriate or unnecessary services, rebundling (billing for two separate treatments that insurers would cover as a single procedure) and unbundling (billing a minor treatment as a larger procedure). Dakota's Transform Accura Server applies scoring and predictive analysis techniques to spot the same types of infractions, and it's working on a data warehouse module that will spot patterns of abuse and fraud.

......

Oracle Puts Integration At Its Core
By Yvonne L. Lee

January 1, 2005 — SAN FRANCISCO — At the Oracle Open World conference in December, Oracle announced Oracle 10g Release 2, a set of updates that will enable its products to build applications that integrate with other applications
.......
The BPEL server, which Oracle acquired from Collaxa, is now integrated more tightly with the application server, according to Schultz. Other imported technologies integrated into the Oracle 10g Application Server suite include an event server from iSpheres, a business activity monitoring dashboard from Outlooksoft, Phaos identity management software, and a rules engine from Sandia Labs.

......