RE: [saf] SAF, Rules, and BPM

Agree – that 3^rd highlight is golden.

From: Stavros.Isaiadis@uk.fujitsu.com [mailto:Stavros.Isaiadis@uk.fujitsu.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2010 9:43 AM
To: saf@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [saf] SAF, Rules, and BPM

Hi all,

An interesting article in BPM.com - Rules: The Business Gateway To BPM. Some parts I highlighted:

SAF

BPM.com - Rules: The Business Gateway To BPM
http://www.bpm.com/rules-the-business-gateway-to-bpm.html

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.

	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).

	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.

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.

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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