IDC Business Rules Management System (BRMS) Analyst Report
The need for businesses to become more competitive and agile through automated decision making and the concomitant trend toward business process management (BPM) and services-oriented architecture are driving companies to investigate business rules management systems (BRMSs). BRMSs' centralized business rules provide rapid, accurate changes to applications, reduce maintenance costs and time, improve business accessibility to the rules, and incorporate decision making in applications. The need to create and change rules can be triggered by competitive and regulatory factors, changes in economic conditions, and mergers/acquisitions, to name a few. Often, the ability to rapidly update business rules can translate to a competitive advantage. Enabling business analysts to create and change rules can significantly expedite the process. Some of the challenges organizations face in developing and modifying applications include:
- Managing and tracking the organizational business rules
- Locating and extracting key business rules entrenched in the original applications, which may resemble spaghetti code
- Creating business rules that are consistent across the organization
- Improving communications between IT and business departments
- Creating code for multiple operating environments
This IDC study profiles Haley Systems, which has established a track record in the BRMS market, in part due to its pioneering efforts in several aspects of artificial intelligence (AI). The pioneering work of the founder and the company's proximity to Carnegie Mellon help distinguish Haley Systems and partly explain the AI heritage of the products. The company claims its system eliminates two steps in the process of implementing business rules in an IT system, specifically those involving translating policy to rules and programming/implementing these rules. Haley claims the natural language aspect enables business analysts to:
- Start capturing business policies, regulations, rules, and other business logic in HaleyAuthority without having to wait for the object model or data model to be built. The company states that such a process improves the creation of the object and data models that can eventually be integrated with the rules at a later time
- Make changes to the rules without programming, without knowledge of implementation details, and without the potential of translation errors from the business logic to the rules code
The use of natural language processing, including the incremental clarification of statements made possible by nesting conditionals and variable referencing are notable features. Together, they permit business analysts to create fewer statements that more closely resemble clear English sentences. These features enable business analysts to create and change the business rules because they allow rule creation at the logic level instead of the implementation level. There is no need for the stilted, verbose if/then methodology employed by some other BRMSs. The speed of the rules engines and the ability to put a rules engine in handhelds are other differentiators. The support of .NET, Java, and C/C++ is important to companies with heterogeneous platforms.