James Taylor's Decision Management

An interesting article on ebizQ today by Tae W. Oh - The Missing Link in SOA. A couple of quotes in particular struck me

"ever changing technology, customer demands, policies and governance, mergers and acquisitions, and economic pressures, business survivability requires an enterprise that is flexible, responsive, and above all, adaptive" (my emphasis)

Now the point of the article is to identify integration, especially integration and re-use without custom coding, as a "missing link" for successful SOA. And so it is. But the challenge of changing customer demands, policies and governance (regulation) involve not just integrating and assembling services but also changing their behavior. Thus if I have a service that uses my underwriting policies to return decision about pricing of a new policy for use in various processes I want to be sure that I can re-use it in new processes but also that I can rapidly change the logic used in the service when my policies change. I need to be able to take the business rules within a service and make them as easy to change and re-deploy as possible. An SOA approach makes this possible by encapsulating the logic into a service and by ensuring it has a well defined interface. These are necessary. They are not, however, sufficient. I must also have a way to manage the business rules implemented by the service.

Decision Services, such as the example above, are often ones for which integration and re-use are key issues. They are also ones that tend to have large number of business rules to apply, rules that change often, complex rules or rules that should be maintained by someone who understands the business. Unless the technology used to build these services allows for effective collaboration around business rules, the services will not be sufficiently agile.

The article goes on to say:

Enhancing Business Agility: consistently changing demands and business strategy require business agility or you risk being taken over by your competition. The need for business agility is no new paradigm, but with the acceleration of technology and business cycles, along with the expectation of IT to accommodate this faster pace, agility is becoming extremely important for businesses to remain viable

And with this I could not agree more. You may need SOA and BPM to deliver agility, you need integration to be easy and automatic to handle any kind of complexity, but you need business rules if you are really going to deliver business agility in terms of changing the way your company responds and makes critical decisions.