Business Rules and Business Process in 2007

David Kelly had a nice article on the BPM Market in 2007 that made me think about how the business rules and business process markets might co-evolve this year.

"Many organizations that purchased BPM solutions over the past few years are starting to ramp up and broaden out their deployment of new processes. Numerous BPM vendors I've spoken with have cited customer bases that are moving from departmentally-focused solutions to company-wide or division-oriented process deployments."

This is also true of the business rules market - more, broader use. I think this will mean more joint BPMS/BRMS projects and success stories. They are thin on the ground right now because the processes that get picked for BPMS tend to be processes with a lot of change and a lack of definition while the decision services built with rules tend to support the bread-and-butter transactions at the core of the business that are more stable - different kinds of agility. As both expand they will come into more contact making for some interesting projects.

" putting the business owners in charge of the business processes"

This is a critical trend for both BPMS and BRMS but there are some secrets of business user rule maintenance you should remember and you should also note that these are relevant to BPMS too - check out Bruce Silver's comment about the relevance of this experience to BPM vendors. Real agility, the purpose of business owner control, requires both BPMS and BRMS to my mind.

We'll also see the continued importance of using BPM solutions to meet compliance requirements.

I think compliance takes more than BPMS, it takes rules too in many cases and increasingly even analytics (something for which decision technologies provide a great platform in a process)

"many companies find success from choosing a fairly complex process to automate"

This was a fascinating comment and to some extent it's true with rules also - the problem has to be hard enough to justify the effort of a new approach.

Like David I think SOA has some long-term potential to impact both Business Rules and Business Process - for instance, many of the reasons to service-orientate are also good reasons to automate decisions and business rules and SOA are very compatible.

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