Articles

Is RETE Necessary for Business Rules – Why you should care

Author(s):

Tom DeBevoise

Co-Author of The Microguide to Process Modeling in BPMN 2.0, www.tomdebevoise.com

Many BRMS vendors, especially the leaders Fair Isaac and ILOG, consider their implementation of the RETE algorithm a critical part of their product offering. Yet you might not understand what RETE is and why it can be either useful or unnecessary, depending on the rules problem domain. So what is RETE?

The RETE algorithm was developed to improve evaluation performance with large knowledge or fact sets. For example, a diagnostic expert system might describe many signs and symptoms for the diagnosis of a condition. Because of the diagnosis, an action may be taken.

Analysis: Isn’t that for smart people?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

“Analysis is the difficult part of a business improvement project”. “Analysts are really smart people that are hyper intelligent” and “analysis can not be trained”. Those are some of the preconceptions project teams have to fear the analysis work that needs to be done on a process improvement project.

None of these are true. First of all many people confuse analysis with all those complex statistical tools that, for example, six sigma makes you believe you should apply.

Are All Rules Business Rules?

Author(s):

Neal McWhorter

President, Strategic Value Partners

The Business Rules movement has begun the transition from being a niche approach to entering the mainstream of organizations’ project techniques. Where once organizations saw only business processes and requirements, they now also see business rules. In fact, it’s tempting to see everything as business rules. In the midst of the movement’s first encounter with fame and fortune, it’s a good time to ask what the real value proposition is for business rules and whether everything that is potentially a rule should be treated as a business rule.

Is Your Business Process Model Earning Its Keep?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Sandra Lusk has over 20 years experience in systems design and development working with utility, transportation, logistics, insurance and banking organizations in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Wales. She is also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and is currently President of the Association for Business Process Management Professionals for the Portland Chapter.

Lusk says a process model is a vehicle for understanding how things work.

SOA’s New Rules

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Remember the “eight second” rule. Back when Internet transactions were new, consumers attempting to purchase goods and services online were stymied by poor website performance. Service outages and brownouts occurred seemingly at random with no connection to the high availability of the underlying systems. Business managers lived in fear of service outages becoming news stories and crashing high-flying stock prices.

The issue was lack of visibility. Management systems only monitored specific parts of the infrastructure making up the tiered web applications.

Asking and Answering the Right Questions About Certification

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

“Most certification today is pure ‘credentialism.’ It must begin to reflect our demand for excellence, not our appreciation of parchment.”

-William John Bennet

As president of ABPMP, I am often asked for my opinion about “certification” programs.

Case Study: Service Based Process Architecture

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Linda Gurgone is the Lead Business Process Architect in Motorola’s Enterprise Architecture team.

The Role of SOA in Business / IT Architecture Alignment

Author(s):

William Ulrich

President, TSG, Inc.

Organizations have two universes in constant flux; business architectures and IT architectures. Now a third factor has entered the mix – services oriented architecture (SOA). As organizations seek to align business and IT architectures, SOA can play a key role in streamlining this process. This article discusses how SOA helps align business and IT architectures to deliver more effective, more efficient responses to ongoing business demands – on a transitional basis and over the long-term.

The Ins and Outs of Business Rules

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

In the previous article, Who, What and How of a Business analyst, we examined the role and responsibilities of an IT Business Analyst. In this article, we shall focus on the basic concepts of business rules. In the upcoming articles, we shall investigate what business rules mean to a Business Analyst and how they lead to the transformation into a Business Rules Analyst. A lot of research has been pursued by eminent experts in the field. In this article, we shall learn the basic principles of business rules.

BPMS Watch: BPM and SOA: Are the Communities Starting to Merge?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Last fall in a column called “BPM and SOA: One Technology, Two Communities” I said that the big middleware vendors pushing the BPEL standard seemed to understand orchestration as a critical piece of the SOA story but had no clue what business process management is all about.