Managing Business Rules

So…maybe this post will sound like a rant, but why aren’t there any fully mature business rule management systems (BRMS) to be found anywhere?! I can’t even count the number of times clients ask me to recommend a system and I have to give them the bad news.

Naturally, each rule engine vendor will tell you that you can perform full rule lifecycle management within their authoring/development environment. Very quickly however you will discover that although it might be possible, the solution is generally about 80% skewed towards the vendor’s rule engine and the management aspects always take second place. Simply not good enough for business users!

Our clients’, you, more and more require a truly focused approach for large scale rule management. While managing and versioning Word/Excel documents in a code repository and providing change management via a defect/issue tracking system sometimes works, I think rules have become such a significant part of a system these days, that they really do need their own management environments. Similarly requirements systems, while a frequently used approach, still don’t provide adequate support for ensuring that rules conform to the fact model and that proper rule syntax/patter is being followed. Better for business users, but still not great.

There seem, however, to be some promising efforts under way! I am sure anyone who has actually spent some time looking has come across RuleArts' RuleExpress, and BRSolution’s RuleTrack. These two I believe have been around the longest.

Next, as a result of the new SBVR specification, Unisys is working on a business rule manage ment system that closely integrates with MS Word. You’ll have to dig deep on their site to find it however. Just give them a call-- they will happily show it to you.

Quite understandably the IRS has a massive rule management need and will share their experiences with BRMS systems at their BR Forum Conference presentation coming up in November in D.C. Bummer, the presentation is scheduled for the same day and time slot when I’ll be presenting Open Source Rules just next door.

So, I guess the question is…what is a “good enough” business rules management system? Artemis Alliance can certainly help you and your organization answer that question more precisely, but, as a brief blog entry, I have compiled the flowing preliminary wish list of features in no particular order. Please feel free to add in the comments section:

• Overall change and history tracking at the rule level
• Enforcement of the rule management process
• Role based security
• Rule authoring, storage, search and retrieval
• Terms Dictionary
• Fact modeling capabilities
• Rule language and pattern definition
• Natural language rule writing (yes…no…maybe?)
• Enforcement of fact model within the rule expression
• Rule syntax, grammar and spell checking
• Linking or matching of fact models from different departments/divisions
• Capability to document rules as decision tables/trees
• Easy access to rules by business people
• Ability to support both distributed and centralized rule management approach
• Import/Export capabilities of rules using available standards

This I believe represents a list of maybe the “obvious”. Note however, that at this time, I doubt you will fine any one solution that will offer all of the above features and be usable by your average business user. I naturally welcome any disagreements with this list and hope to hear from those who would wish for something different. Again, your exact needs will heavily depend on your organization, application and approach.