Business Rules Forum: Mixing Rules and Process

I had fun with my presentation on mixing rules and process, and it was a good tweetup (meeting arranged via Twitter) opportunity: Mike Kavis sat in on the session, Miko Matsumura of Software AG caught up with me afterwards, and James Taylor even admitted to stepping in for the last few minutes.
 

I’ve removed most of the screen snapshots from the presentation since they don’t make any sense without the discussion; the text itself is pretty straightforward and, in the end, not all that representative of what I talked about. I guess you just had to be there.

Business Rules Forum: Ron Ross keynote

The good news is that it’s a lovely sunny, breezy and cool day: perfect fall weather for Toronto. The bad news is that I’m in Orlando, and was hoping to wear shorts more than sweaters this week. However, I’m here to attend — and speak at — the Business Rules Forum, not sit by the pool.

Ron Ross started the conference with a keynote called From Here to Agility; agility, of course, is one of the key reasons that you consider implementing business rules, whether in the context of BPM or other applications. It’s pretty well attended — probably 200 people here at the opening keynote, and likely a lot of vendors off setting up their booths for later today.

He started with a couple of case studies, both of companies that could really use rules due to the lack of agility in their legacy systems, and of companies that have successfully implemented rules and achieved their ROI on the first project. He then looked at what might be motivating people to attend this conference and what they can expect; a bit of an unnecessary sales pitch, considering that these people are already here.

He talked about the importance of decisioning, and how it’s a much better opportunity for business improvement than process; I’d have to agree that it’s a much greater contributor to agility, but not necessarily a better opportunity for improvement overall. I’ll have to think that through before my presentation this afternoon on mixing rules and process. He did have some convincing quotes from Tom Davenport’s “Competing on Analytics”, such as Davenport’s conclusion that automated decisioning will be the next competitive battleground for organizations.

The goals to creating business agility:

  • No artificial constraints in the representation of business products and your capacity to deliver them to customers — this is primarily a cultural issue, including a vocabulary to define your business practices, not a technical issue.
  • All operational business practices represented as rules.
  • All rules in a form such that they can be readily found, analyzed, modified and redeployed by qualified business people and product specialists.

Examples of operational business decisions:

  • How do we price our product for this transaction?
  • What credit do we give to this customer at this point in time?
  • What resource do we assign to this task right now?
  • Do we suspect fraud on this particular transaction?
  • What product configuration do we recommend for this request?
  • Can we confirm this reservation?

Note that these really are low-level, moderate complexity operational decisions, not strategic decisions: thousands or even millions of these decisions may be made every day in your business processes, and having agility in this type of decision can provide significant agility and competitive differentiation.

James Taylor and Neil Raden will be here later to talk about enterprise design management (EDM), but Ron gave us some of the basics: closed-loop decisioning that captures data about decisions, analyzing that data, then uses those results to make changes in a timely manner to the operational decisions. The “in a timely manner” part of that is where business rules come in, of course. That round-trip from analysis to deployment to execution to capture is key: we talk about it in BPM, but the analysis and deployment parts often require a great deal of an analyst’s time in order to determine the necessary improvements.

He went on to talk in more detail about why a focus on “business process” isn’t enough, since it doesn’t make the business adaptive, create consistent and reusable rules, or a number of other factors that are better served by business rules. To achieve business agility, then, he feels that you need:

  • Business-level rule management: having the business make changes to rules
  • Business-level change deployment: having the business in charge of the governance process for changing and rolling out changes to rules
  • Business-level organizational function to support the previous two activities

Looking at the problem decisions in existing legacy systems, look at the redundant, overlapping and conflicting rules; these could manifest as data quality problems, frequent change requests, or customer service problems. In many cases, these conflicting rules may be running on different platforms and address different channels. The key is to externalize these rules from the legacy systems into a decision service: a business rules management system that maintains the rules repository and is available to any application via a standard web services interface. This allows for a gradual transition from having these rules embedded within the legacy systems to centralizing them into a common repository that ensures consistent results regardless of channel or application. This provides consistency across channels, selective customer treatment and competitive time-to-market as well as rather painless compliance since your policies are embedded within the rules themselves and the rules management system can track what rules are executed at any given point in time.

Now, think of your BPMS as your legacy system in the context of the above paragraph…

Logistics: no wifi (there is wifi in the conference area but BRF didn’t spring for the password), requiring a trip to the lobby or my room in order to post — obviously, that will delay things somewhat. No power at the tables, which is not a big deal since I don’t use a lot of power with the wifi off. My blogging will be a bit light today until after my presentation this afternoon.

The fall schedule

I have my fall schedule mostly sorted out, and here’s my confirmed lineup so far:

  • OMG BPM Think Tank, October 6-7, Chicago. I’m on the program committee, and will be leading a roundtable on achieving collaboration between business and IT in BPM on the first day.
  • PegaWorld, the Pegasystems user conference, October 19-21, Washington DC. I’m just there as an observer and analyst/blogger.
  • Ultimus user conference, October 22-24, San Antonio. I’ll be giving a keynote on the afternoon of the first day. And yes, I know that you can’t get from DC to San Antonio.
  • Business Rules Forum, October 26-30, Orlando. I’ll be giving a presentation on mixing rules and process on the 28th.
  • SAP BPM, November 17-19, Las Vegas. I’m giving a Jumpstart pre-conference session, an introduction to BPM, on the 16th.

Look me up if you’re at any of these events.

Disclosure: with the exception of the OMG event, my travel expenses are paid for by the conference organizers; in the case of the SAP conference, I’m also being paid to deliver this half-day training session.

Upcoming conferences

I’ve been sticking close to home for the summer, but my fall lineup is about to begin. So far, I’m definitely attending the following:

  • Business Objects Influencer Summit and SAP SME Day, August 12-13, Boston. This is an analyst/press event, not a public conference, but I’ll be blogging from there.
  • International Conference on BPM, September 1-4, Milan. I’m very excited to be attending this conference since it represents a lot of the academic research going on in BPM, not just what the vendors and analysts have to show. There are some great workshops lined up, such as BPM and social software; interesting sessions; and demos from some of the universities and research labs. You can find last year’s proceedings here.
  • The Appian user conference, September 8-10, Washington DC. This is the first time that I’ve attended an Appian conference, and I’m looking forward to seeing what all those new marketing dollars are buying.
  • The Gartner BPM summit, September 10-12, Washington DC. I’ve been to enough of these lately that I don’t need to attend the whole summit, but since I’m in DC that week for Appian’s conference, I’m adding one more day for Gartner. I think that it’s pretty clever for Appian to schedule like this: it should drive up attendance at their conference, since Appian customers/partners flying in for Gartner will figure that it’s only a couple of extra days to do both.
  • OMG BPM Think Tank, October 6-7, Chicago. I’m on the program committee, and will be leading a roundtable on achieving collaboration between business and IT in BPM on the first day.
  • Business Rules Forum, October 26-30, Orlando. I’ll be giving a presentation on mixing rules and process.
  • SAP BPM, November 17-19, Las Vegas. I’m giving a Jumpstart pre-conference session, an introduction to BPM, on the 16th.

Given that I fly everywhere on Star Alliance, this will bump me over the 35,000 miles for the year that gives me Aeroplan Elite status for 2009, without which I really don’t want to fly.

From a disclosure standpoint, my expenses are being paid for the Appian conference, the Business Rules Forum, and two SAP events; for the latter SAP event, I’m also being paid to deliver the half-day training session.

Business Rules Forum

The Business Rules Forum is coming up on October 26-30 in Orlando, and I’ll be back there again this year to speak. You can find my coverage of last year’s event here, and my presentation on BPM, BR and BI is available here. I found last year’s event definitely worthwhile, although I was left with the feeling that we still had a long way to go in terms of creating the necessary about of synergy between BPM and BR. A lot has happened in a year, and this year I’m speaking on mixing rules and process:

There are many techniques for combining rules or decisioning capability with business process management (BPM), ranging from using simple expression engines embedded within a BPM system to a full integration between separate BRM and BPM systems.

This session takes a close look at what rules functionality that the BPM systems offer, and the key characteristics that identify which rules and decisions should remain in the domain of the BPM system, and which should be entrusted to a full-strength business rules management system. What you will will learn:

  • The current state of BPM and BRM
  • How BPM and BRM interact
  • Where your rules belong

You can find the conference brochure/schedule here, and online registration here. The organizers have offered my readers 10% off the conference registration if you use the promotional code 8SPSK when you register, and you can also get an early bird discount if you register by September 19th. I don’t get a referral fee from this, it’s just there as a courtesy for any of you who are interested in attending, although in the spirit of full disclosure, my travel expenses to attend are covered by the conference since I’m a speaker.

Business Rules Webinar Q&A

It was a busy week last week at TUCON and I completely forgot about the questions from the Business Rules Forum Q&A from the webinar that I did on the 24th. I’m not sure if the replay is available yet, I’ll post a link when I hear about it.

Here’s my answers to the questions that came up during the presentation, although I responded to some of these at the end. Where the question wasn’t clear, I took a stab at an interpretation; if I missed the point, please add a comment to this post with your clarification and I’ll follow up.

Explain the relationship between business models and BPM.

Not sure of the exact intent, but I think that this is asking about the relationship between business (process?) modeling and BPM. Business models of various sorts, including business process models, are often created by an organization to provide a high-level, business-oriented view of their operation. From an enterprise architecture standpoint, these are the models in the highest level of the architecture that may be created by, and are always understandable by, a non-technical business analyst. In the case of business process models, these are created to model the flow of a business process, usually in a flow-chart or swimlane type of diagram. In many cases, these are created in a standalone modeling tool — either a simple desktop application like Microsoft Visio, or a more comprehensive tool such as IDS Scheer’s ARIS — but may also be modeled directly in the process modeling environment of a BPM suite (BPMS). In this latter case, a process model can be directly translated to an executable process.

Is there any benefit to implementing a BRM without a BPM?

Yes, there are many cases of using a BRMS separately from BPMS: the rules/decisions may be accessed directly as part of a manual process, where a user enters in the required parameters and is given a decision back in return, or they may be called from other applications such as a CRM.

Please mention vendors or products by name, even if caveats apply.

and

Can you name products that support what has been presented?

and

What are the methods & technology tools used for BRM & BPM?

I can’t recall if we were talking about BPMS or BRMS vendors here, so I’ll try to cover both. To hit the major vendors, take a look at which ones are included in the reports by the big analysts. Gartner includes the following BPMS vendors in its Magic Quadrant for BPMS, published in December 2007: Adobe, Appian, Ascentn, AuraPortal, BEA, Captaris, EMC, Fujitsu, Global 360, IBM, Intalio, Lombardi, Metastorm, Microgen, Oracle, Pegasystems, Savvion, Singularity, Software AG, SunGard, TIBCO and Ultimus. Forrester splits up the market into four categories with several vendors in each, which I’ve listed in a previous post.

On the BRMS side, Forrester recently issued a report on BRMS vendors in which they evaluated CA, Corticon Technologies, Experian, Fair Isaac, Haley Limited, ILOG, Innovations Software Technology, InRule Technology, Intelligent Results, Pegasystems, and SAP.

There are other vendors of both types, but this covers the major players. Also notice that Pegasystems plays in both markets — and in fact is a leader in both — since its BPMS is based on a rules engine.

Who are some of the vendors with tight integration between BPM and BRM?

Pegasystems is the obvious starting point, since they use a rules engine as an underlying platform for their BPMS. Many BPMS vendors don’t want to talk about a tight integration with a third-party BRM since that implies a weakness in their own rules capabilities. All BPMS vendors, through their support for invoking web services, can integrate loosely with BRM.

In your opinion, have any BRMS suites achieved robust BPM capabilities?

Only Pegasystems, to my knowledge. It’s more likely that a BPMS will achieve BRM capabilities rather than the other way around, in my opinion.

How could you change a business rule and have it only affect new BPM processes and not in flight process instances?

There are two ways to do this. First, if all parameters that drive the rules are known at the beginning of the process, the process instance could invoke the rules immediately after it is created, and store the decision results until they are required; since the rules are executed at the time that the process instance is created, the instance will not be affected by any changes to rules while it is in progress. Second, a process can call a specific version of a rule, assuming that the BRMS supports rules versioning. That way, any process instances created from a specific version of a process definition can call a specific version of a rule, even if the rule has changed since then. Newer process definitions could be changed to call a later version of the rule.

You said that a BPMS will call a BRMS (typical scenarios). How would the BRMS know the scope of what needs to be checked? For example, if you have the rule "some applicant of each loan application must have a credit score of 600". When the business process for loan applications calls the BRMS, how does it determine the set of applicants that need to checked?

I think that the question is about where the BRMS gets its information that is used as parameters for the decisions. This would typically be passed to the BRMS from the calling application, in this case, the BPMS. The BPMS may need to make calls to other systems in order to get this information, then forward it to the BRMS: remember that part of the role of the BPMS is to orchestrate multiple systems and pass data along between them, including the BRMS.

Do you normally see that the same business users are maintaining both the processes and rules or are they normally different business users?

If you’re talking about the business analysts that would be designing the processes or rules, it is best if they are the same — so that they can decide what happens in a process versus what happens in a rule — but often are different people due to the training requirements. If these are separate roles, then the process analysts need to learn enough about rules to know when to request that a rule set be created for them to call from their processes.

How would you define the relationship between BPM, BRM and RBA (Run Book Automation)?

I’m not that familiar with RBA, but it is focused on IT and systems processes, not business processes. At TUCON last week, however, one of the presentations was on how they used TIBCO products for IT processes, although he didn’t refer to it as RBA.

Do you agree that BRM and BPM have to be married with the SME from the business side and the SME from the IT side to be successful?

I’m unclear on what this question means. "SME from the business side" means, to me, someone who is an expert on the business being performed; I’m not sure what "SME from the IT side" means. Both BRM and BPM are most successful when there is collaboration between business and IT: the business analysts doing the high-level modeling of the rules and processes to ensure that they meet the business requirements, and IT making sure that the technical underpinnings (such as calls to web services) are in place.

Do you have a list of feature set for BRM and BPM for product evaluation?

and

Could we get a list of recommended BPMS and Rules Management systems and why they are recommended?

Gartner and Forrester both publish comparative reports on BPMS and BRMS, I suggest that you start there.

What is the difference between BRM and procedures / governing document / policies? Give examples of BRM.

Policies, procedures and governing documents are the "rules" by which the business operates, but may not be automated in any way: many organizations just have people refer to a policies and procedures guide to tell them what to do in a manual process. BRM allows you to codify those policies and procedures so that they can be automated, and are executed the same way every time.

What about open source offerings? Have you worked or reviewed any of those?

Drools (from jboss) and NxBRE are two open source BRMS offerings. jBPM (also from jboss) and Intalio are both open source BPMS offerings. I recently did a review of Intalio but haven’t yet published what I saw; I haven’t worked with any of the other products. Many open source offerings don’t have the full functionality of their commercial counterparts so may not be included in the analysts’ comparative reports; the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for BPMS is the first one in which Intalio has been included, for example.

Can you provide a simple example of how BPM and BRM are applied in practice?

A typical example that I’ve seen is in claims processing. There are many specific policies and procedures that must be followed to process a claim, and many BPM implementations just leave the decisions based on those policies to a person who is participating in the process: for example, give the work step to a person and have them decide the type of the claim and what region should be processing it. By adding BRM, these decisions can be automated based on data that is already known

Do you feel BPM can be used as a tool to integrate compliance management systems? e.g. OSH, Environment, Quality etc.

I’m not a compliance specialist, but I see many organizations using both BPM and BRM to help with their compliance efforts, since both can help to standardize processes and allow for easy auditing of what was actually done. As for integration with compliance management systems, that would depend on those systems and whether they provide a web services interface or other API.

What are some of the software packages you can purchase for extracting business rules?

The major BRMS products typically include tools for mining business rules from existing systems; you’ll need to check their functionality against the particular systems and platforms from which you want to extract rules to see if they’ll work for you.

How are the BRMS incorporated with any testing tools?

Many of the BRMS vendors have simulation and testing tools as part of their suite, specifically to test if the rules are complete and non-contradictory.

BPM and business rules webinar

This fall, I’ll be back at the Business Rules Forum to make a presentation on business rules and BPM, but next week you can catch me online on a Business Rules Forum webinar speaking on the same subject:

Process improvement is a top priority for executives today, but business process management (BPM) alone doesn’t provide the whole answer. Although BPM does enable process improvement, it often doesn’t provide sufficient agility for today’s business processes.

To build for change, it is necessary to integrate business rules with BPM. This integration allows you to manage the decisions within your business processes, and easily modify those rules without recoding or changing the business processes.

In this webinar, you’ll learn about the business process management lifecycle, and how business rules can be integrated within it to greatly improve process agility. It also discusses how you can apply business rules consistently across multiple business processes and other applications.

Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of mixing business rules and BPM for maximum agility in your processes, and this webinar is an introduction to why you would want to do that, and how it works.

Meeting the bloggers at BRF

Last week at the Business Rules Forum gave me a chance to meet many people who I’ve never met face-to-face, but feel that I know from our exchanges of blog comments and emails: at one point, I was standing around talking to James Taylor, Rolando Hernandez and Scott Sehlhorst.

James was certainly the most prolific in blogging about the conference: he live-blogged the sessions that he attended (even mine), so you can compare with the posts on those sessions that I wrote. He has a wrap-up post with pointers to all of the blogs that he found with coverage of the event.

BRF Day 3: Good Business Rules in Process — Eliminate 65% of the Activities

I couldn’t quite drag myself out of bed for the 8am sessions, but I did want to hear Kathy Long of the Process Renewal Group talking about process and rules. She talked about how to derive rules from processes, and use them as guides to the process. There’s a number of process-related problems that can occur when the rules are not explicit: assumed policies, activities with experience as the only guide, and inconsistent (and therefore likely non-compliant) processes. The key things to consider when analyzing the guides for a process can be focussed around what happens at a given activity (are what knowledge is required, what decisions are required, what reports have to be generated) as well as a number of other factors; she presents a number of different questions to ask in order to drive out the rules and make them explicit.

She also made a distinction between policies and rules, where the key differentiator is that rules are actionable, whereas policies must be interpreted into more concreted business rules in order to take action. Within rules, there’s both structural rules (can’t be broken) and operative rules (which have a bit more wiggle room); this sounds a bit like the distinction between a fact and a rule that I heard in a session yesterday, which makes me unsure that there’s a really common vocabulary for some of these things.

Looking at some of their process analysis techniques, she presented categories of activities as real value-added (impact the customer’s requirements), business value-added (required to run business, such as regulations), and non value-added (that 65-85% of work that doesn’t contribute to either RVA or BVA). There’s a whole list of verbs — adjust, approve, expedite, inspect, verify and many others — that tend to indicate that activities are NVA and should be considered for elimination. Many of these are because something wasn’t done right the first time; a lot of the NVA activities can be cut if there’s ways to reduce the error rates in the RVA and BVA activities. This isn’t, of course, really about rules: it’s about process improvement. Sure, the appropriate addition of business rules can certainly lead to process improvement, but it’s also about the myriad other ways that we improve processes, such as establishing accountability and eliminating unneeded steps that are only there for historical reasons. Some thoughts that Long gave us to take away:

  • The greatest opportunity to improve a process is by changing the rules
  • Challenge all policies
  • Validate all compliance interpretations
  • Eliminate the use of assumed policies
  • Ensure that all rules are documented including the use of experience/knowledge
  • Create consistent rules across the enterprise
  • Structure rules so that they can be easily changed
  • Allow the business to design its own processes

I was surprised that she didn’t talk at all about some of the technology issues such as how BPM and BR can be used together to improve processes, but her focus was not at all on technology: her only case study was about improving a process based on a manual procedural change.

I have to head off for a mid-day flight home, so that was the end of my Business Rules Forum experience. I’ve actually learned a lot here, which has made my time here definitely worthwhile. However, I’m still left with the feeling that I mentioned on my first post back on Tuesday: we need to start having much more crossover between different technology areas such as BPM and BR. I’ve been writing since mid-2005 about the importance of looking at BPM and BR together, but in spite of the technology advances that have occurred since then to facilitate this, I’m not seeing much happening in the real world.