James Taylor's Decision Management« Business rules and connecting strategy with execution | Main | Concurrent Business Engineering with Business Rules »
April 24, 2006Brainstorm conference, BPM/SOA/BRM/PM/EA
I attended the recent Brainstorm Group conference in Chicago and was struck by what a great combination the conference covers:
- Business Process Management and Business Process Management Suites to automate and control business processes
- SOA as an architectural approach to enable this and make it possible to share services across processes and between managed processes and legacy systems
- Business Rules as a decision-making "glue", deployed as services, to ensure that the automated business processes are more agile and closer to true "straight through processing" by eliminating manual steps
- Performance Management to make sure you understand how all this is working
- Enterprise Architecture to make sure it hangs together coherently
Thinking of all these pieces made me try and imagine a world where all this might come together:
Walking into the office I receive a notification that a significant (and complex) event has occured and telling me that certain rules have been fired to take remedial action but that I should also review a specific report. Getting to my desk I bring up my dashboard, where the same alert is displayed, and review the report. As I drill into the report it becomes clear that far more customers with a particular request are being routed through the manual exception process than is expected - our automation rate has dropped. Using analytic tools I see that the root cause is my risk model, which has been overtaken by events and is now too paranoid. Fortunately I have a more relaxed scenario developed that can quickly be deployed to my decision service (as this has been implemented in a business rules management system) and my business process management system allows me to simulate the effect of this change on process routing to confirm I get what I want. I drill through my report into my rule maintenance environment, make the change and run the tests. Happy with the result I ping my IT counterpart who pushes it through regression and compliance checks and deploys it, changing the behavior of my process instances as she does so. Thanks to a well defined Enterprise Architecture and the use of Service Oriented approaches all of these various technologies are properly integrated and used to solve the problems for which they were designed.
Far fetched? I don't think so - all the technology exists and works, it just needs a leap of imagination to use it together.
If you want some more color, here are entries I blogged during and immediately after:
Live from Brainstorm: BPM/SOA/BRM/EA/OPM
Live from Brainstorm: Making the transition to services engineering
Live from Brainstorm: The Vision for Business Rules
Live from Brainstorm: Business Rules and Business Process - Perfect together or perfect apart?
Live from Brainstorm (almost): The Rules of Automated Underwriting
Live from Brainstorm (almost): The role of business rules in Enterprise Architecture
Live from Brainstorm (almost): Business Process Management, SOA, and Composite Applications
Posted by jtaylor in
Business Process Management
• Business Rules
• Decision Technologies
• SOA
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