DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Posts Tagged ‘Business Rules Engine’

If there’s one thing I have learnt in the world of IT sales, it’s this: Busy IT buyers have enough on their plate without all the waffle and three letter acronyms (TLA’s) that get banded around the IT industry.
In my experience, people appreciate it if you just get to the point and quickly. So without further a do, here’s 10 reasons why I choose to evangelise InRule Technology. See how much of this makes sense for your department / business.

1.) Write business logic code faster and more efficiently

InRule allows you to write business logic statements and create decision tables without the need to for code. As a rough guide 5000 lines in C# can be achieved in only 150 rules in InRule. Faster programming means quicker return on investment, a happy boss and more chance of getting your annual bonus.

2.) Write business logic statements that communicate directly with the business , not just your IT department.

Ask yourself what the average business person understands… a page full of code or a report or repository of business rules using familiar and domain specific language.You can even set your own vocabulary. Wouldn’t that make life easier?

3) Centralise and collaborate on your business logic.

Two minds are better than one,three minds are better than two and the story goes on. Remember the days when you could only make changes to a website via an HTML competent webmaster? Along came content management systems, changed all that and we have never looked back. This evolution in technology allowed us to make changes to content and fast track the change management process. Now, multiple staff members could work simultaneously on web content.

The development of a truly functional rules management system allows your business to enjoy the same benefits in your business logic. However, this evolution in rules management has a much larger consequence for the business.

Since rules exist in every part of the business, there is now an opportunity to catalyse every area of the business. Rules can now be placed in a centralised repository or catalogue and can be understood by non technical business users.

When everyone has visibility of business rules, you can start to collaborate, and that’s powerful!

4) Easy integration with minimal coding or SOA connectivity

InRule can be bound to your business logic layer with only a few lines of code in .NET. If you’re using another flavour of code or you have mixed architecture they have thought of that too. InRule has SOA functionality out of the box making connectivity a doddle.

5) Complement the connectivity of BizTalk with the rules functionality of InRule for a killer package

InRule for SOA comes with irAdapter for Biztalk server. This means that InRule and Biztalk can function harmoniously and make your life easier.

6) Inline ruling of not –it’s your decision

Put your rules in single long line or organise them in branches. Create rule on rules, time trigger them, lock them down, print them off, verify them…. the list goes on. Well there’s a reason it’s called business rules management

7) Killer performance

What use would a knock-out Business Rules Management Application be if it wasn’t backed up with a highly optimised, low foot print rules engine to execute them. Let’s just say that InRule doesn’t disappoint us here.

8)It’s not going to break your budget

It’s free to try and pretty darn reasonably price to buy. Given the impact that Rules management can have on a business, I struggle to think of a singular piece of technology that provides more business value.

9) You’ve never met a bunch of people more willing to help

They were great with us when we were a customer of InRule and we’ve since met plenty of other customers that sing their praises. Just let them know what you’re trying to achieve and they’ll do their best to help you achieve it.

10) Business Decision Management Works

When a Top 5 Bank in the US moved from hard-coded logic to automating business logic with InRule for use in Risk Rating scorecards for various forms of lending, they enabled risk analysts to “configure new scorecards and revise existing ones, taking 68% of programming out of the cycle time and significantly enhancing the Speed to Market.”

To find out more about how managing the rules can make your life easier and your business more effective visit http://www.inrule.com/
Or visit http://www.inrule.com/products/productEvaluation.aspx to start your free trial

Many software companies have targeted the insurance industry with a software product offering in the last few years. These software products are able to be taken off the shelf and seemingly dropped into production.

The apparent speed of deployment can be appealing to a business that is striving to get things done and kick goals in the shortest time frame possible. The lure of such a solution can be all the more appealing when the other option is a custom software project which (as reputation would lead you to belief) can take several months to design build and then test. Although the custom software approach would inevitably lead to a better fit for the business, efficiency is sacrificed for the sake of apparent speed of deployment.

This view of insurance industry software is to my mind far too simplistic and fails to take into account a best of both worlds approach which has been developed and refined in recent years.

Every insurance company is different. By their nature, they need to be different in order to gain competitive advantage over their competitors. The way risk is calculated, premiums and pricing are calculated are all highly specialised and are often updated and refined on a frequent basis.

BA’s, Risk Managers and Actuary’s need to be able to make changes to such calculations without having to add to the work load of IT managers. Long and convoluted change management processes simply become an unnecessary stumbling block for a department focused on getting things done. By the same token, the IT team can be hesitant to give untrained personnel access to business logic in a business critical system.

The solution lies in using a Business Rules Management System (BRMS) to seperate out the business logic and make it accessible to the people that need it. Rules or sets of rules can be locked down using role based security to prevent unauthorised changes to business logic. As well as speeding up the change request process, a collaborative approach to business logic can then harnessed allowing the business to catapult into a new realm of business agility.

In addition to all this, the software development cycle is significantly reduced, allowing insurance businesses to reap the benefits of their investment sooner.

A BRMS approach to insurance industry software allows you to enjoy the benefits of off the shelf software (rapid deployment, stable code base,) with all the benefits of custom software. (efficiency, fit, usability, performance)

To find out more about how BRMS can work for you, register for our forthcoming the webinar at

http://www.solentive.com/software-events.html

Earmarked for the 6th March, our online event takes insurance industry IT management through some of the concepts of using Business Rules Management Systems.

By separating some of the business logic into a rules engine, Insurance companies can take greater control of their IT and fast track the process of change management and save money along the way.

The insurance industry is also able to make use of the theory of Complex event processing, which we also hope to cover off.

Registration is free but limited to

1) Business Analysts
2) Senior IT Management
3) Risk Managers
4) Actuarys
5) Finances

To register, visit

http://www.solentive.com/software-events.html

So the news is not good. Apart from the obvious feelings of a new beginning (President Obama’s inaugoration) that is being projected by our US friends, the rest of the world seems a little less hopeful at least for the short term. Australia gained around 10,000 new people on the unemployment figures yesterday as BHP and Rio Tinto announced their various reforms and a global technology giant announced global redundancies in their thousands. To state the bledding obvious, everyones chief concern is about survival at the moment.

It’s a time to be focused on our objectives, make few mistakes and get results as quickly as we can. When it comes to IT projects, it’s important not only to get a return on investment but to get that return quickly. Its maybe for this reason that my company seems to be bucking the trend and doing steady business whilst other vendors seems to be slowing down. Our accelerated approach to custom software is able to play a vital role in the survival of businesses across Australia as budgets get tightened, and we are expected to do more with less.

So if you are unfamiliar with our approach, I’ll take you through the highlights.

Before I describe what it is. I’ll tell you what its not.

So what is it then?

Solentive have developed an ‘ultra accelerator’ that allows us to deliver reliable, innovative solutions in a fraction of the time that other developers can. The ultra accelerator can be used on practically any workflow oriented application and comes with native connectivity technology (BUS) to facilitate the integration with other systems.

The approach ‘displaces’ a mountain of engineering effort by using the ultra accelerator, where other companies would normally be piecing code together or writing code from scratch. Further customization can then be performed to tailor the solution to your specific requirements.

Further to all this, our customers benefit from a very stable code base, user acceptance testing is minimised and the system is fast tracked to production.

Business processes can be automated or largely automated meaning with rules engine technology and workflow design tools so the potential for a huge return on investment is also available. For the price of a standard approach to your project, we are able to include reporting and SLA monitoring tools to ensure that your workforce is always on task and you are able to identify leakage in your productivity. Do more with less! No really!

We have enjoyed some great implementations for our customers so I thought it may be interesting to share our approach.

If a jobs worth doing its worth doing well and its worth doing now!

Do you have project? A question about software development? Are you lonely or bored and just fancy a chat ?

The door is always open as they say.

Create and Edit Business Logic in Plain ENGLISH

Just a quick note of thanks to all those that joined us online for the webinar earlier in the week. It’s been great to see the level of response and interest around BRMS.

If you missed the session or if you would like to go through it again you can view it at

http://www.solentive.com/webinar-create-details.html