Hi all,
An interesting article in BPM.com - Rules: The Business Gateway
To BPM. Some parts I highlighted:
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In
today’s world, globalized business operates twenty-four
hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year; it talks to
customers and partners over a host of channels ranging from
point-of-sale to Web portal to call center; and it is audited and
monitored in support of a wealth of new compliance regulations.
In this new environment the demands upon a company’s
computing ecosystem are immense, and they are growing, seemingly
exponentially. Success in this hypercompetitive world requires
responding to changing market conditions in real time, with as
little friction – and cost – as possible.
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Many
customers report success in automating complex business processes
such as supply chain management, health care forms processing,
electronic funds transfer, and numerous other areas. However,
they often add that changing these processes is expensive, laborious,
and requires negotiation between multiple groups (usually, the
business organization and the IT team).
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Certainly,
business rules engines have existed for some time, and a number
of vendors sell standalone engines. However, the true value of
business rules appear when the rules engine is integrated as a
fundamental building block of the business process.
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the
analyst is building a rule using the vocabulary phrase
“platinum-customer” – and may not even be aware
that this in fact dynamically refers to data in a system of
record elsewhere in the computing ecosystem.
That point is worth reiterating: the IT developer sees databases
and rows and queries and objects and messages; the business
analyst sees a vocabulary (of business objects) rich in business
semantics.
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Especially the third highlight seems highly relevant: SAF
can act as the integration manager for rules-engines, CEP subsystems, bridge
together subsystems across domains, etc.
The last point seems relevant to our Protocol template we
were discussing for the profile (and mentioned in CMWG last week): a Protocol
as an action template will contain e.g. an API operation plus the parameters
needed to satisfy the rule. For example, the API operation may simply allow increasing
resource capacity. But the action will have more than this: how much increase?
Which resource? For how long? This makes a complete Protocol template, and is
usually filled in by the consumer while the provider has to do the
"translation" to his own terms, e.g. 30% increase in Storage
instances capacity = 2TB more on instances A, B, C which belong to that
specific customer.
Anyway, throwing ideas around...
Cheers,
Stavros
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