James Taylor's Decision Management

Tower Group's Jerry Silva recently published on ".NET vs. J2EE: Does the Future of Service-Orientation Hang on Myth and Misconception" He has some great data on platform preferences in various industries, especially banking, and about how people perceive the two platforms.

The key message to me though was that about 50% of those surveyed either had no preference or expected to use both platforms. Additionally, of the 50% committed to one platform or the other, more and more companies seem to be assessing the platforms more coherently and are showing a willingness to consider either for a given project or department. As Jerry says 'the reality will have to be not".NET vs. J2EE" but ".NET and J2EE" in the coming years'.

So where does this leave developers when it comes to decision management? Well one of the key benefits of managing decisions as a corporate asset is the ability to deploy the same decision across all your channels and touchpoints - consistency is the touchstone. Partly this means focusing on business decisions as separate entities from proceses, websites, systems etc. Partly it means externalizing the definition of how you make a decision into a business rules management system or similar. However, to really get the benefits you need to be able to push the decisions out to all the platforms you are using.

You can do this by using the ability of Java to run on virtually everything, by using a service-oriented approach and defining your decisions as services or by using one of the new breed of business rules products that support deployment of the same rules to multiple platforms.

What you should probably not do, however, is let your first project drive too much. The platform of the first application for which you are automating decisions or the BPMS you are going to use to automate the first process that needs automated decisioning cannot embed the rules you are going to use - you need to be able to manage them across all your platforms, systems, processes if you are to get the maximum value out of automating them. Sandy had a great post on this as it relates to BPM and rules back in February.