SOA, BPO and business rules - James Taylor's Decision Management

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October 23, 2006
SOA, BPO and business rules

I was reading a piece called "Creating an SOA-Enabled BPO Platform" by William Martorelli of Forrester this weekend and much as I liked the piece, he seemed to me to be missing a key component for an SOA-platform for Business Process Outsourcing - decision automation. He says

Faced with these challenges — and forced to achieve one-to-many customer leverage in order to make money — BPO (business process outsourcing) providers are adopting layered service delivery architecture capable of isolating them from complexity.

I completely agree that a decent software infrastructure, and one based on SOA, is going to be critical for BPOs in the future. However, while William's discussion of business rules, and the need for a business rules engine external to the applications executing the process steps that can be rapidly updated, is spot on I think he misses a couple of key points:

The rules must be exposed in a way that allows the customer of the BPO provider to manage the rules.
The critical capability is that the customer can continue to control the rules, even while the BPO runs the process
The rules must be layered
While some of the rules will be provided by the BPO as part of its expertise and thus standard across multiple customers, those being edited by a customer must be different for each customer. To build a scalable platform this means one service taking a decision but taking a decision in a customer-specific way. Some rules engines support this approach, others do not. If you have to build a rules-based decision service for each customer, it is not going to work.
Many decisions involve both business rules and analytics - knowledge/expertise embodied in the rules and data analysis embodied in the analytics.
Only focusing on the value of analytics in terms of process analytics is not enough. The BPO will need to allow customers to build models from data and inject these analytics into the decisions also. Smart BPOs may realize that anonymized aggregated data gives them the power to build analytic models also and use these to differentiate the service they offer, especially to customers that do not have enough data of their own.

William also talks about an SOA-based approach enabling multi-vendor BPO solutions. Here I agree with him and think we will see a growth in what Fair Isaac has started to call "Decision Service Providers" who provide automated decisions for use in other processes. Clearly a company suitable for efficient management of a process may not be the one suitable for making a complex decision involving risk-tradeoffs and complex analytics or one that is heavily regulated. Using a Decision Service Provider for this would allow the injection of critical expertise (in marketing, underwriting, retention) into an outsourced process, or indeed one being executed by the company itself.

I have blogged about the value of business rules in a BPO architecture before on my other blog and written about the value of business rules in implementing a digital business architecture such as Forrester describes as well as on how business rules can enable business/IT collaboration or "concurrent business engineering.

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