James Taylor's Decision Management

Robert Blasum wrote an article "Business Rules and Business Intelligence" in April issue of DM Review (link added 4/13). It is a good summary of why and how business rules can be useful in Business Intelligence and Performance Management. Robert is mostly focused on the role of business rules in complex reporting and tracking and clearly this is something you can do with business rules. As part of this he recommends keeping the business rules separate and not buried in, for instance, ETL tools - a sentiment I share. He also notes that rules change all the time and that reuse and management across an enterprise add a lot of value. Like me he suggests that this means you should use a business rules management system (a superset of a business rules engine) to do this.

While I agree with the article, I think there is another way that "BI" and business rules come together. If you think about the business decisions that you wish to automate, often in the context of a business process, then you can use business rules to automate these decisions and embed "BI" in them by applying analytic techniques to the data and embedding the results in the rules (as I discussed here). This let's you use your data not just collect it. Using business rules to manage decisions has some of the same value propositions that Robert discusses but allows you to take your business processes to the next level.

If the subject of BI and business rules interests you, check out this article by David Straus. You can find more about Robert's company at www.business-code.de