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Paul Vincent
Fair Issac
Blaze Meeting Review (prepared by Gail
Burke)
1. Standards in Business Rules
Paul Vincent presented the
state of Business Rules Standards, focusing on the Object Management Group (OMG),
but noting competing models.
OMG is one of
several competing standards groups along with OASIS, W3C, ISO etc. OMG's
Business Rules working group started in 2002 and now is part of Business
Enterprise Integration. The Business Rules Group comprises Business
Semantics, Production Rule Representation, and Rule Management. The
standards encompass Model Driven Architecture, technologies (UML2) and
domains such as Healthcare and defense. Model driven architecture's model is split into computation independence
(business)- CIM, Platform independence (UML)-PIM
and platform specific (J2EE)-PSM.
The semantics
(CIM) defines business terms and rules using the business terms. It is the
furthest along, nearly complete. The CIM standards will be passed for vote
in September 2005. Production Rules Representation (PIM) is in progress
with a mid-2006 due date. The Business Rules Management (PSM) group is in
its infancy.
Both CIM and PIM have their own issues. CIM
struggles with:
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Where is the market
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Who will do the transformation to executable rules
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Will the messages use formal statements
A standard rules
interface is needed between production rules and business semantics rules
statements.
Paul Vincent is
Chairman of the Production Rule Representation (PRR) group. Of the
competing standards and vendors, Fair Isaac, ILOG, IBM, Pegasystems,
Fujitsu, and the RuleML group support PRR. PRR
defines formal modeling representation as metamodel
and XMI schema. It is procedural and has forward chaining inference rules.
PRR transforms the business model into the platform specific model using
XMI. Paul presented a proposed rule model and known issues for PRR.
Paul commented
that the industry needs to align the business rules approach with the
object-oriented UML software best practices and supporting technologies.
Further competing models were presented with comments.
See the slide presentation for more detail.
2. Fair Isaac Blaze
Advisor: update on Version 6 and Smart Forms
Blaze Advisor is a Business
Rules Management System. This system allows one rule to be present across
multiple platform architectures and is extended to include a user interface
with Xforms based Blaze Advisor SmartForms.
An Enterprise
Decision Management tool is needed with the increasing business decision
complexity through globalization, regulation, competition and accelerating
business changes. Decision Management automates and improves
decisions across the enterprise to deliver consistent, targeted, adaptable
decisions. This tool can reduce cost, and improve the speed for analytics,
modeling, rule management and deployment.
Blaze Advisor 6.0
is a solution for Enterprise Rule Management. It is a rules repository that
allows users to modify policies without IT. It is a single tool for simple
and complex rule service. After January 2005, Advisor 6.0 will be
implementing Repository Queries. It purports to be a tool for any type of
rules project to assist in managing a large number of rules and rules
deployment throughout the entire rules life cycle using Java, .net and
COBOL.
SmartForm is an extension of Blaze Advisor with a common repository and IDE.
It manages rules for user interactions by dynamically asking questions. It
also orchestrates back office and front office processing.
Further detail can be found on the accompanying slides.
The presenter is Paul Vincent, who
has held positions in Fair Isaac and its predecessors for over 10 years,
including 6 years based in the San
Jose headquarters of the rules group working with
a variety of US customers. He is currently responsible for the .Net and
COBOL variants of Blaze Advisor, and in particular provides Product
Management to the European users of Blaze Advisor. In addition he
represents Fair Isaac on the standards bodies of OMG and BPMI, and has
recently been involved with the W3C. He also occasionally presents to
intelligent audiences in the US
and Europe, and is delighted to be invited
to speak to the COOUG business rule meeting!
Raffle prizes , courtesy of Fair Issac
Blaze
Pizza, courtesy of Lambert Technical Services - Business Rules Development
Practice
Meeting site: courtesy of UCONN Health Center.
Thanks to Jeff Jorczak and Andrew Warren for arranging for the site!
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