Tom Debevoise has a nice little video he has made with some introductory comments on business rules, business processes and decisions. You can check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qq07af6PY8.
Like Tom I think that you can dramatically simplify business processes if you find the decisions within them and externalize them so that they can be managed separately. If you embed decisions within your processes you not only complicate your process, you also force the decision and the process to be updated at the same time (something that reduces agility). Clear decision points also make it easier to identify where analytics can be applied to your process. There's a fair bit on this topic on the blog - check out these items:

• Achieving Agility - some notes after Gartner
• Introducing business decision management
• Business rules, routing rules, event rules
• Decision Services
• Decision technology as a platform for analytics in a process,
• Some thoughts on intelligent business processes
• How to combine BI and BPM
• Decision management and dynamic business applications
• Business rules and process coupling

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is not uncommon to hear some disagreements among advocates of Business Rules, Complex Event Processing or CEP, Business Process Management as to exactly what the overlap between these products might be. Tim Bass fired the latest broadside with CEP is Not BPM, BAM, BRE, BRMS or SOA.
Tim goes through some examples, arguing one is simply BPM while the other is really CEP and, while I agree with the thrust of his argument, I do need to take issue a little. Part of the problem comes from the very utility of "business rules". Clearly business rules are valuable in BPM for specifying order routing. Equally clearly, as the folk at Tibco's CEP blog have been discussing, business rules are an important part of CEP, a way of specifying how events are correlated and processed. Trying to compare two things (BPM and CEP) that should use business rules to business rules themselves is a little tricky and, I think, causes more problems than it is worth.
This is why I talk more and more about decision management not about business rules. in the first example, order routing, we either make a true business decision or we do not. If we don't - if the routing is tightly coupled to the process - then this is an example of rules-based routing in a process. If a complex decision that has nothing to do with the process (such as the availability of credit or the profitability of a customer) then the rules-based routing is relying on a managed decision . Similarly, in Fraud, there is a decision to be made (is this a fraudulent transaction) that is independent of the system/process/event that is asking. This decision might use rules as well as analytics but it is still a decision that should be managed. If I want to do this in an event-based way, rather than a batch way, then this decision becomes part of and must be integrated with my event processing environment. Complex Event Decisioning, if you like.
As Tim says, event correlation and analysis is what makes something CEP and CEP is intensely complementary to decision management. Business rules are good for both (and indeed for much more) and should be part of how you address both.
Here are some other posts on this topic:

• Business rules, events and processes
• Business rules, routing rules, event rules
• Decision Services
• Decision management is critical to event driven architecture
• More on rules and event processing

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics • SOA | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Insurance and Technology had a great set of posts on fraud detection and analytics - Emerging Technologies Fight Claims Fraud. In particular I liked the fact that they covered both the use of data mining and analytics to support investigation and the use of predictive analytics in individual transactions. While I tend to focus on the use of analytics in the context of transactions, there are many ways to use analytics in fraud detection:

• Helping a human investigator understand what the data they have is trying to tell them
• Helping a business owner understand cut-offs and thresholds that should be embedded in their business rules to route potentially fraudulent claims to investigators
• Showing the impact of changes to the way claims are handled to avoid unexpected outcomes - like too many referrals for review
• Calculating the probability that a specific transaction is fraudulent so that it can be dealt with appropriately

Posted by jtaylor in Predictive Analytics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)