James Taylor's Decision Management

My buddy Joe had a great post this week - Give businesspeople a reason to care about SOA; give them BPM. Like Joe I think business people need something business-oriented to get their attention and that describing the benefits of SOA must use business terms and business problems. Interestingly I spent the week at ILOG's DIALOG conference this week (see my posts live from DIALOG here) and lots of the customers I met there were using business rules and SOA together having found that decision services, built with business rules, offered their business users a compelling business value. Not only were rules-based decision services a great way to deliver business agility - services a business user could actually change for themselves - they were also an effective first service as they acted as a bridge between the legacy applications and the SOA-based composite applications being developed. After all it is typically not the whole legacy application that is needed as a service but some core business decision buried within it. Exposing just this decision as a service while also making the service much easier to maintain using business rules is very effective. Combine this with BPM, as Daryl Plummer of Gartner did in his presentation and you are off to the races.