« Intelligent, Analytic Processes | Main | COBIT, SOX, compliance and business rules »

I was talking with an analyst about possible uses of business rules and other decisioning technology and an example came up where a customer was using ETL (Extract Transform Load) technology and business rules. The particular customer is using an ETL product to data cleanse all incoming transactions from over 50 supplying systems and is then applying a business rules engine as a ‘routing engine’ for transactions. The complexity of the business rules goes way beyond what the ETL tool could offer on data transformation, hence the mixed ETL-BRE implementation. A particularly important aspect was the manageability of the rules as they expect to implement up to 150,000 accounting rules! The ETL handles the standardization of the data and the mapping into a Generic Object to which the rules are applied. The resulting object(s) are then picked up by the ETL tool and loaded in the General Ledger and data warehouse.

So when might you want to combine ETL technology with decisioning technology:

• When you have a very large number of transformation rules such that rule management, not transformation, is the biggest issue
• When you want to have the same rules run in transformation processes and other business processes
• When you want to have business experts not technical ones maintain some of the rules
• When you want to use analytics, especially predictive analytics, as part of your transformation process

ETL tools do a great job of transformation most of the time. When they run out of steam, think about business rules.

Sorry for the low rate of posting - been a quiet week in terms of things to blog about.

Posted by jtaylor in Business Rules • Decision Technologies |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ebizq.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/551