James Taylor's Decision Management

A short list of characteristics of a dynamic application built, not to last, but to change:

• Everything is externalized and managed
• Business Data is in a database
• Business Process is in a BPMS
• Business Rules are in a BRMS
• User interaction is managed through a browser and is dynamic
• A dynamic application is a composite application
• Functionality is expressed in services
• Services have well defined interfaces and are loosely coupled
• Process and workflow definitions link services to deliver value
• Business users handle business problems
• When the business process changes, the business users can change it
• When the business rules change, the business users can change them
• If the business user does not like the interface they can change it
• If the business user wants to bring in external services they can "mash them up"
• IT handles technical problems
• When the application does not run fast enough, IT makes it run better
• When the application needs to be hooked up to something complicated, IT does that
• When the structure of the application changes, IT makes sure it still works
• IT makes sure all of the above is done in a sustainable, technically valid way

I am sure there's more but you get the drift. So why should you do this? Because this approach prepares you for "change time" and change time is almost the total of the life of a service because they have to operate in the real world, where nothing can be taken for granted and nothing is set in stone. Some services are going to change a lot and these will often be decision services.  Use a business rules management system to design these kinds of services and protect yourself from change by empowering the business users to take control of the rules in these services. Conventional software tools do a poor job of catering for the change-time phase of the development lifecycle even though it represents the entirely of the lifecycle except for the short time before a service is deployed. Often the highest change components of an architecture are those that make decisions - policies change all the time, regulations change all the time, competitive pressure changes all the time etc. Business rules management software lets IT focus on what kinds of rules are needed and on setting up an architecture to manage those rules while letting business users worry about the specific instances of those rules in place at any moment. This works LONG after the service is deployed.

Prompted originally by Connie Moore of Forrester