Whitespace Consulting of Boston, Ma. has released survey results on Business Rules market adoption in the US. The survey discovered many companies in the F500 were performing due-diligence or piloting applications utilizing a business rules approach. Level 0 (Unaware), 1 (Adhoc) or 2 (Repeatable) on the KPI’s Business Rule Maturity Model scale. The Financial Services industry, specifically the Insurance sector, appeared to be the farthest along in their experimentation, many institutions with systems already in production. Most of the early adopters reported better than expected success with their business rules approaches reporting plans for expanded utilization of the application development approach. Insurance eligibility and underwriting applications appeared most prevalent. Priority application areas tended to have some similarities including:
• Need for decision consistency
• Business change was above average due to external market factors, including government regulation
• Transaction volumes were high – for example, financial instruments or insurance offerings for consumers
• Functional areas where the costs of human capital were high
The survey also found US adoption rates for the Business Rules development approach has been slowed by the recent economy and lack of investment by the major IT players in the market, like IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. Business Process Management (BPM) vendors have appeared to start a re-newed interest in the approach with their positioning efforts developing upstream business modeling tools maximizing employee productivity.
