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Whitespace
Consulting Meeting
Review
In a presentation based on market research, Mike Peters from Whitepace Consulting spoke to 35 attendees at the
inaugural meeting of the COOUG Business Rules Special Interest Group. Mike
shared his findings from a survey he conducted of 30 individuals within 16
business entities about their adoption of Business Rule approaches and
Business Rules Engines. Aggregated participant data was plotted on KPI's Business
Rule Maturity Model™ scale, where the respondents were in companies
which rated from level 0 (unaware) through level 3(defined), and where most
of the respondents were at level 1 (ad hoc).
Mike was kind enough to provide his key findings prior to the meeting:
1 .
Many Fortune 500 companies are piloting applications using a BR approach,
some without the use of a business rule engine
2 .
Vendors need to catch-up to the demand for products assisting with BR
approaches (tools, training, and consulting)
3 .
Understand your business culture, and your expected ROI, as well as the
maturity of the BR tools and support available before you proceed
4 .
BR development priorities appear to be in areas where:
· decision consistency is critical
· business change (application volatility) is above average
· transaction volume is high (i.e. loan eligibility, insurance underwriting)
5 .
Solution quality and time-to-market business drivers alone can justify a BR
approach, in addition to any potential technology cost savings.
Mike Peter's white papers can be accessed at:
http://www.lambert-tech.com/brarticleswp.htm
Click here to view or download presentation (PPS file)
"Top 10" Survey Results
For those who were not able to attend the meeting, here is a "top-10" list of ideas and observations which were exchanged at the
meeting:
10 - The primary
industry where rules approaches and engines have been adopted is the
financial services industry, to leverage the relatively high-cost of their
intellectual resources in risk scoring as well as eligibilty
models. .
9 - Many businesses
still have business rules which are "buried" in legacy code. The
business decision-makers who defined the rules have retired long ago and now
the individuals who hard-coded the rules are retiring as well. So, another
driver of the adoption of business rule approaches is the need to identify
what rules are enforced by the legacy code, as well as where those rules are
located. In some businesses, extracting rules is more important than working
with new rules, even though there is discomfort with rule mining tools.
8 - Collaboration
between the business and IT areas is essential to creating an atmosphere in
which the cultural changes needed for adoption of rule approaches can occur.
7 -A trend is
emerging where business staff are interested in rule
capture but prefer to delegate rule implementation and its associated testing
to IT areas. However, that may not be the end state for business rule
implementations in the long term.
6 - The role of
Rule Analyst should be separate role from Systems Analyst/Tester. It involves
a different skillset/mindset as well as different
tools, only some of which have been automated (by only some of the vendors).
5 - The ability to
auto-test rules for rule conflicts as well as for accuracy of result prior to
implementation is high on businesses'
wish lists.
4 - Rule
traceability to both requirements and rule implementation is critical for
good rule management.
3 - There is a need
for a standard Business Rule metadata format to allow interchange of rules
between tools. There are groups already working on such a format, such as the
W3C. (ed note: please
check www.omg.org for information on the work of the W3C in the context of
the other business rule initiatives such as those of the OMG's Business Rule Working Group).
2 - Business would
like to avoid dual maintenance of rules in a source repository and an
implementation engine, but that is not always possible at this time; the
tools which do the best job of rule management are not always the tools which
can support a robust rule implementation, and vice versa.
1 - Component-based
software engineering is a best practice for moving towards implementing a
business rule approach.
Book raffle, courtesy of ILOG
Pizza, courtesy of Lambert Technical Services - Business Rules Development
Practice
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Business Rules SIG Being Formed
A short Business Rules SIG organizational meeting was
held following Mike Peter's
presentation. Several people volunteered to help in organizing the BR SIG
and future meetings. There was also a volunteer to create a BR SIG website.
An attendee of the COOUG meeting volunteered to do a presentation in the
future. There are also other potential speakers who are under
consideration. One idea was to get an industry analyst on Business Rules to
present to the BR SIG sometime in the fall/winter timeframe.
Joe Garrity will be pursuing a meeting place and then
future schedules can be determined. Lee Lambert of Lambert Technical
Services has offered to provide pizza for future meetings. Several other
vendors, ILOG, Fair Issac Blaze, Knowledge
Partners, Inc (KPI), have recently expressed their offer of assistance with
the BR SIG. An advisory board for the BR SIG is being formed.
Thirty-four (34) people signed up for the BR SIG
email list. These names will be added to the existing list.
Next Meeting
A potential next meeting is Thursday, June 23,
2005 as there is a speaker who has offered to present while he is in the New England area. More details to follow.
Co-Chairpersons, BR SIG
Joe Garrity joe.garrity@thehartford.com
Ladd Bethune lbethune_brdp@lambert-tech.com
BR SIG EMAIL LIST Instructions:
To subscribe
to the BR SIG mailing list, simply
send a message with the word 'subscribe' in the message body to
bus-rules-sig-announce-request@cooug.org
To cancel subscription for the BR SIG mailing list, simply send a
message with the word 'unsubscribe' in the message body to
bus-rules-sig-announce-request@cooug.org
To send an e-mail to the BR SIG mailing list, write to the
following
address:
bus-rules-sig-announce@cooug.org
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Whitespace Consulting, based in Boston, Mass is a Sales and Marketing
Consultancy focused on the high-technology industry sectors of software,
consulting, and computer hardware services. Whitespace is also available for
other industry projects if there is a high-technology component within the
business issue being addressed. Mike Peters, Whitespace principal and
founder, has over 20 years experience in the industry. Mike's sales background creates Whitespace Consulting's
focus on differentiated product/service messages and guerilla marketing in
support of sales.
Whitespace services include sales and marketing strategies, sales
effectiveness, organizational design, product and service pricing,
positioning and differentiation, strategic product direction, and M&A
technology assessments.
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