James Taylor's Decision Management

Interesting post by Ronan over on his blog - Governments and SOA. One quote in particular caught my eye - "It's about ensuring that our organisations can change to be able to deliver change".

There is a growing interest in using business rules, often in an SOA environment, amongst government agencies for precisely this reason. One example with which I am familiar is the California Department of Motor Vehicles - desribed in more detail here on my other blog - but there are many others such as a European tax authority using rules to process returns, border agencies automating screening rules, benefit eligibility portals, permit validation and so on. What these government examples have in common is not just being adaptive to change but also that one of the drivers of change is regulation.

Business rules are a particularly effective tool when automating regulated decisions. Not only do business rules management systems make it easier to develop and evolve the business rules concerned, they make it much easier to demonstrate compliance with those rules. Every transaction fires (or does not fire) a very explicit set of rules. This can be logged and used to track exactly why each transaction was decided in a particular way. It is easy for lawyers and other experts, who don't have programming skills necessarily, to review and even write the business rules. Most moden rules environments allow the rules to be packaged and deployed to a variety of platforms, including SOA-based ones, and to be integrated with ESBs. This service packaging gives one level of reuse but rules and rulesets can be reused across services also, adding to the reusability delivered by business rules. The automatic deployment capability of leading platforms also means that rules can be changed once, often by a business user, checked for compliance by non programmers and then deployed to potentially many services or platforms to ensure that all systems now use the new rules.

Government agencies are learning what regulated industries like banking and insurance have known for a while - business rules prepares you for "change time" better than anything especially when the changes can come from legislators and courts.