BRDP Business Rules - Latest and Greatest News

World Wide Web Consortium Holds Rule Languages Workshop; First Gathering of Industry Leaders in Business Rules and Semantic Web applications: "World Wide Web Consortium Holds Rule Languages Workshop; First Gathering of Industry Leaders in Business Rules and Semantic Web applications

http://www.w3.org/--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 27, 2005--W3C has brought together over sixty industry and research organizations in a Washington, DC workshop geared at the development of a uniform Rule language - the next layer in the Semantic Web development stack. Hosted by ILOG, SA and supported by DARPA, the W3C Rule Language Workshop (http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/) is bringing together the leaders in Business Rules development, customers, and Semantic Web developers in an effort to identify requirements for a common rule language.


'After years of industry and research work in rules languages, we're approaching convergence,' explained Sandro Hawke, W3C Semantic Web Team developer and workshop co-chair. 'The combination of user companies, rule language designers and semantic web developers coming together at this workshop allows each constituency to contribute to a shared solution for Rule languages on the Web.'
Hawke shares workshop co-chairing duties with Christian de Sainte Marie of ILOG and Said Tabet of RuleML.org.

Rule Technologies Are Key to Successful Software Applications

Rules are everywhere. They are found in many domains, disciplines, and industries. Business policies, laws and regulations, guidelines and best practices, definitions and axioms, database schema translations, workflow branching and technical constraints, all require a declarative and modular approach to their implementation.
There is a thriving commercial market in several families of rule technologies, including production rules, event-condition-action rules, Prolog, relational database systems, and others. However, practical interoperability between these systems, especially across the different families, is currently quite limited.

Web Applications Need a Standard Rule Language

Rules are also a key element of the Semantic Web vision, allowing integration, derivation, and transformation of data from multiple sources in a distributed, transparent, and scalable manner. Rules can themselves be treated as data, published on the web, and when URIs (or QNames) are used as symbol-constants in a rule language, they can form useful links between knowledge bases. In a Web services environment, rules offer the opportunity to enable the automation of the enforcement and composition of policies governing the delivery of information, the access to services, or the execution of processes.

This workshop is a step along the path to establishing a standard language framework to support rule system interoperability on the Web. It aims at gathering vendors, technologists, application developers and users to discuss and provide recommendations to the W3C regarding what is the best approach to the specification of a standard or family of standards for the public representation and exchange of rules on the Web, in terms of avoiding redundant efforts, of optimizing the potential for wide adoption, and of promoting consistency and interoperability between different applications or layers, while preserving their specific requirements.

Diverse Participants include Leaders in Software, Manufacturing and Financial Industries, Life Sciences Researchers, Semantic Web Engineers

Sixty-eight papers have been accepted to the workshop in response to the Call for Participation (http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/cfp). The accepted papers can be loosely grouped into three categories: use cases from various industries, candidate technologies, and Rule Language-Semantic Web convergence. The program (http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/program) includes sessions that address these topics, and to evaluating the range of rule languages currently in use, to determine if they share any common traits, and consider next steps.

The workshop is expected to result in the following deliverables:

-- Use Cases (ideally with Test Cases) and Potential Requirements

-- Candidate Technologies

-- Workshop position papers

-- Workshop presentations

-- Workshop minutes

-- Recommendations regarding future work

Many of these are already published on the workshop home page. Future directions may include the creation of a W3C Working Group to focus on Rule Languages.

The Business Rules Approach�a Zero-Sum Game?- ADTmag.com: "The Business Rules Approach�a Zero-Sum Game?
4/26/2005
By Stephen Swoyer"

Proponents stress that the business rules approach isn’t a zero-sum proposition for developers, and to the extent that few companies today embrace business rules without also involving IT, this is true.

“The programmers actually become converts to it. It gets you out of that situation where business departments are saying, ‘How come you can never get the system implemented?’” says James Taylor, director of product marketing for business rules specialist Fair Isaac Corp. “Instead, IT can say, ‘We’ve looked at the problem, here’s a structure for the kinds of rules in your business, and we’re going to let you decide what the requirements are. I build the sort of template for the kinds of rules you want, I don’t have to worry about the nit-picking details.’”

That’s the business rules approach in the here-and-now. The long-term prognosis, on the other hand, looks increasingly zero-sum.

Click here for full article

Stephen Swoyer is a technology writer based in Athens, Ga. He can be reached at daedalus@percipient-analytics.com.

Business Rules: Tips, Traps and Other Pratfalls- ADTmag.com: "Business Rules: Tips, Traps and Other Pratfalls
4/26/2005
By Stephen Swoyer



As you might expect with any emerging technology, business rules, even when implemented in tandem with a high-performance business rules management system (BRMS), are anything but turnkey.
In fact, most adopters report encountering a pratfall or two along the way to business rules bliss. Take Michael Koscielny, director of regional underwriting operations with automotive insurer and BRMS adopter AAA Michigan.
...........

Click here fo full article

Stephen Swoyer is a technology writer based in Athens, Ga. He can be reached at daedalus@percipient-analytics.com.

ILOG Reports Third Quarter Results: "ILOG Reports Third Quarter Results
Monday April 25, 1:00 am ET "

...

Press Release Source: ILOG


ILOG Reports Third Quarter Results
Monday April 25, 1:00 am ET


PARIS, April 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ILOG® (Nasdaq: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364) today announced results for its fiscal 2005 third quarter, ended March 31, 2005. For the quarter, the Company posted net income of $1.1 million, and earnings per share (EPS) of $0.06. Revenues for the quarter were $31.4 million, representing 11% growth year over year. These results compared with revenues of $28.3 million, net income of $1.1 million and EPS of $0.06 in the third quarter last year. ILOG's cash position almost reached $60 million.


"We achieved a reasonably good quarter in a difficult environment," said ILOG Chairman and CEO, Pierre Haren. "We had 7% lower Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) license sales this quarter because some customers delayed decisions about new technology investments. We feel that this represents the strategic nature of these decisions, as our pipeline of new deals remains strong. We believe that the better representation of our success in the BRMS market is the combined license plus maintenance revenues, which increased by 4% for the quarter, and 26% for the first nine months of our fiscal year.

We achieved good growth in our visualization and optimization product lines, enabling us to deliver another profitable quarter. As we begin the fourth quarter, we feel that our fiscal year performance will demonstrate that we are entering a new stage in our profitable growth."

Demand from the financial services market, traditionally the largest market for BRMS, was high, led by agreements with two major Wall Street investment firms and a leading U.S. West Coast bank. ILOG also achieved a record 38% growth in revenues from professional services, which is becoming a regular feature of ILOG's BRMS deals as companies capitalize on ILOG's methodologies and best practices to lower their risk and accelerate the deployment of their BRMS applications.

Consistent with the Company's BPM strategy, ILOG added new BPM partnerships, establishing a technology partnership with EMC Documentum, and strengthening its partnership with Oracle® to enable ILOG JRules(TM) to support Oracle's BPEL Process Manager.

......

Sapiens INSIGHT For Reinsurance Launched in The U.S.; New insurance solution integrates management of ceded and assumed reinsurance: "Sapiens INSIGHT For Reinsurance Launched in The U.S.; New insurance solution integrates management of ceded and assumed reinsurance

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 19, 2005--Sapiens International Corporation N.V. (NASDAQ: SPNS) and (TASE: SPNS), a leading global provider of insurance business solutions, announced today, at the 2005 Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS) conference being held in Philadelphia, the U.S. release of Sapiens INSIGHT(TM) for Reinsurance, a new component of the Sapiens INSIGHT(TM) suite of insurance solutions.


Sapiens INSIGHT(TM) for Reinsurance supports carriers and reinsurers in the management of ceded and assumed reinsurance including proportional and non-proportional treaties, facultative contracts, and finite risk agreements. Leveraging Sapiens' pioneering eMerge(TM) Business Rules Technology, Sapiens INSIGHT(TM) for Reinsurance is based on ACORD standards and XML technology. It is designed to support both multi-currency and multi-lingual processing, and accommodates multi-company corporate structures. The solution currently supports commercial and personal lines. Life product support is planned to be available in a year-end 2005 release. "
.......

Veterans' Affairs Health Administration Selects ILOG JRules to Streamline Healthcare Services Delivery: "Veterans' Affairs Health Administration Selects ILOG JRules to Streamline Healthcare Services Delivery
Wednesday April 13, 3:00 am ET
- New JRules-based System Enables Cross-Agency Collaboration
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ILOG� (Nasdaq: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364), today announced that the United States Department of Veterans Affairs -- Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Health Eligibility Center has selected ILOG JRules(TM), a key offering in ILOG's Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) product line, to support its Enrollment System Redesign initiative. This initiative is intended to streamline healthcare services enrollment for 25 million veterans and their families."

.......

Line56.com: The Power of Rules: "The Power of Rules
Once companies start thinking seriously about rules and processes, they can make today's more customized technology reusable, and therefore more valuable

by Demir Barlas, Line56

Tuesday, April 12, 2005


Last year Line56 took an extended look at Corticon, whose business rules engine proved to simplify many common problems in financial services and insurance, among other verticals.
This year one of the high-level e-business debates is about making processes, and the rules that constrain them, reusable. The immediate motivation is Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), which has companies spending a lot of compliance dollars and urgently looking for ways to leverage that investment. "
Just recently, a follow-up interview with Mark Allen, CEO of Corticon, provided another demonstration of the power of definition, control, and reuse, this time in the rules arena. The discussion also built on the trend of technology companies whose vastly improved customization functionality is helping customers to build bespoke solutions that, until recently, were possible only as expensive add-ons from suite vendors or as the result of custom consulting work.
......
click here for full article

© 2005 Line56 Media

Pegasystems Joins Eclipse Foundation: "Pegasystems Joins Eclipse Foundation

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 8, 2005--
Pegasystems broadens options for developers


Pegasystems Inc. (Nasdaq: PEGA), the leading provider of smart business process management (BPM) software, today announced its membership in the Eclipse Foundation, a community committed to the implementation of a universal development platform. Pegasystems has demonstrated its flagship PegaRULES Process Commander BPM product integrated with the Eclipse framework. "
.....

.......................
The Business Rules Community's
Business Rules Journal (BRJ) Update
April, 2005 Vol 6 No. 4
.......................


In this issue of your periodic Business Rules Journal Update...
1. BRForum 2004 Practitioners' Panel: The DOs and DON'Ts of
Business Rules
2. Premise & Conclusion: Can You Violate Structural Rules?
(part 3) ~ The Difference Between Breaking Rules and 'Breaking'
Knowledge, by Ronald G. Ross
3. Modeling Concepts: Verbalizing Business Rules (part 10),
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. BRForum 2004 Practitioners' Panel: The DOs and DON'Ts of
Business Rules
...............................................................
People who are starting a business rule project want to know how to "start smart!" They often ask what they should DO ... and what they DON'T want to do (what to watch out for). What has actually worked on 'real' projects? Is there any ROI (Return-On-Investment) data for the business rules approach? Six panelists at the 2004 Business Rules Forum conference answered these questions (and more) by sharing their projects experiences.
to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2005/b230.html

2. Premise & Conclusion: Can You Violate Structural Rules?
(part 3) ~ The Difference Between Breaking Rules and 'Breaking'
Knowledge, by Ronald G. Ross
...............................................................
What are the fundamental distinctions between structural rules and operative rules? How do those distinctions relate to business behaviour? How much does it matter? In this concluding part of a three-part series, Ron Ross re-examines these and related questions, and relates the answers to the all-important issue of business adaptability.
to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2005/b223.html

3. Modeling Concepts: Verbalizing Business Rules (part 10),
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 tenth 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 internal frequency constraints on single roles.
to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2005/b229.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...
"Push-Type Data Hub vs. Pull-Type Data Warehouse"
by Ronald G. Ross
from the Nov./Dec. 1998 issue
to read more, visit:
http://www.BRCommunity.com/a1998/a399.html


How to stay in touch with Business Rules ...
**ABOUT THE BUSINESS RULES JOURNAL UPDATE**
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.

Contact Center Today - CSR Management - New Rules for Better Customer Relationships: "CSR Management



New Rules for Better Customer Relationships

April 5, 2005 4:38PM

The bloodletting in call centers, CRM and Web-based customer self-service has shown that a CTO can't simply install a piece of software and expect it to start improving things; Web applications and call center automation will grow smart enough to improve a business' value proposition only when they work in concert. "

.....

Companies trying to improve customer relationships through Web-based self-service and other channels should consider business rules management technology as a means to resolving their technical issues. Newer technology such as Web services can help integrate numerous applications to give business managers control of customer- facing information technology (I.T.).

That control enables companies to respond nimbly to changing market demands. A layer of smart business rules can coordinate a customer self-service Web application with call center customer relationship management (CRM) applications and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to present a coherent face to customers and business partners.

These abilities make business rules an intriguing possibility for improving customer service systems on the Web and within the enterprise.

What Are Business Rules?

Business rules are the practices, processes and procedures that define how a company does business. In many ways, rules are the essence of an organization and define its true value proposition. They could be best practices, procedures, policies, or even physical limitations.

For example, a typical business rule is "our company will accept a product return and will refund the purchase price within seven days of the purchase."

Process rules are business rules in action. Process rules or policies define how businesses execute rules, and in which order. For example, a business rule might be that customers have the ability to interact directly through the Web application to update a systemwide shipping address.

A smart business practice rule might be something a little more complex: "If a customer is a valuable customer or engaged in an order fulfillment process using the Web application, then leverage the more expensive interactive address change; otherwise leverage the batch transaction."

This rule can be reused by the call center, ERP, order-processing fulfillment, shipping and other applications. All these systems have to do is call the address change process made available by the smart integration software and the appropriate back-office transaction is executed.

Advanced environments can delegate these practices, policies and decisions to business owners outside of I.T. These environments enable the change, validation and deployment of these rules to enterprise systems in Internet time, not I.T. time.
Why Current Systems Need Help

The bloodletting in call centers, CRM and Web-based customer self-service has shown that a CTO can't simply install a piece of software and expect it to start improving things; Web applications, call center automation, etc., will grow smart enough to improve a business' value proposition only when they work in concert by accessing business rules backed by intelligence, in order to make nuanced decisions.

The first step in this process is to examine the business processes that govern internal and external interactions and to codify best practices. Best practices are the collective knowledge of a company's best managers. Manageable business rules can add this collective intelligence to business process management (BPM) so that the Web self-service system, along with CRM, ERP and supply chain automation, amounts to more than simply another way to connect existing processes.

Organizations need to reach beyond "simple" BPM and extract their policies as rules that will allow for smarter process automation and for a new level of control over the business processes themselves.

Recent rollouts of the Web self-service, ERP or CRM system may have made it easier to look at the data in the system; but when are these systems smart enough to go beyond guiding users through complicated tasks? When can they fully automate complex workflows between systems, enabling users to change them, if necessary, mid-stream?

Simple BPM systems are built to report the status of current processes and nothing more. Such systems will stretch only so far to accommodate rules without changing the Cobol or the ERP data model involved.

Automating and resolving work with a smart rules-based BPM system can eliminate up to 80 percent of the manual steps in existing CRM, ERP and supply chain management (SCM) or billing systems. This would allow managers not only to identify problems but also to change workflows mid-stream to accommodate changing market forces.

Integrating rules into a company's Web systems, as well into its I.T. architecture, makes all the systems smarter and more responsive. Rules-driven smart systems analyze facts in real time, understand if more information is needed, and drive processes consistent with management's direction.

Web services technologies, such as simple object access protocol (SOAP), are creating integrated portals and browser-based control that give a rules architecture consistency across an enterprise.

A browser-based interface that places management outside of I.T. creates centralized management and distributed access to the rules of a business. This extends best practices and common processes beyond the self-service application, throughout the coordinated enterprise.

Customer Service in Internet Time

In the zero-training environment of the Web, it is critical to guide the interactions of people and company processes. A rules- oriented approach gives this guidance on the Web and everywhere else.

Best practices embedded into a single, separate-rules layer extending across all channels, rather than in an individual application or database , enable a business to change dynamically and consistently based on the nature of the specific request, providing customers and staff with direction at the right time, all the time.

As previously mentioned, an enterprise might use Web services to extend address change transactions, depending on the circumstances. There are two methods for changing addresses: nightly batch operations and interactive transactions with an ERP system.

Each has different throughput and cost. General address changes can probably be handled batch, but if a toptier customer needs to make an immediate high-margin transaction using the new address, the company wants that transaction executed immediately. Here the business logic determines which method to use and when it must be coded in both applications.

Rules would give the systems the intelligence to pick one process over another. The company could expose both of these transactions across departments using Web services to tie together its call center and customer self-service Web applications.

A flexible rules engine will layer the business logic above the UDDI (universal description, discovery and integration) level, and afford business users the agility to change the engine's rules in Internet time.

Business rules and process management technologies enable the application to leverage new transactions, policies and best practices as they become available, without having to initiate a development cycle. Adding a decision rule for when to use a new transaction puts best practices to work immediately without the application knowing anything has changed.

Combining rich process, integration and business rules engines can enable the agile business to build Web-based customer self-service systems that support fluid business practices and high-quality customer interactions .

With the increased agility provided to the business users and the better efficiency awarded to I.T. organizations, enterprises can start reaping value on investment, as well as on their customer service, SCM and ERP applications' forecasted ROI.


© 2005 Customer Inter@ction Solutions.
© 2005 Contact Center Today.

IRS' CADE reaches the 1 million mark this tax season: "IRS' CADE reaches the 1 million mark this tax season
04/05/05
By Mary Mosquera
GCN Staff

The IRS' modern taxpayer database has processed more than 1 million simple tax returns so far this filing season, said Richard Spires, the tax agency's associate CIO for Business Systems Modernization.

The Customer Account Data Engine, launched last summer, handles 1040EZ forms for filers who owe no taxes. CADE will process about 1.3 million such returns this year and 3 million next filing season, Spires said today at the FOSE trade show in Washington. The relational database will replace the 1960s-era tape-based Master File.

Later this year, the IRS expects to begin layering in the business rules engine for use in 2006, ultimately encoding tens of thousands of business rules. Like an electronic accountant, the engine applies the appropriate business rules to each question on an electronic tax form, such as calculating tax or processing a refund.

This summer IRS will set its approach for implementing the business rules. 'IRS is prototyping the end-to-end process,' Spires, said, from harvesting business rules to storing those rules in a repository to actually implementing them in CADE.

The tax agency also is considering testing the business rules engine for its Tier 2 Unix server environment in addition to the mainframe environment. CADE runs on mainframes, and there is no plan to change that in the near term. But 'we want the flexibility,' Spires said. 'We have also built the architecture so that if in the future it makes sense to separate out the processing in CADE to various platform types, we could do that.' "