An introduction to BRMS.

1. Business Rule Management
Enables Agile Applications
Daniel Selman
Product Manager
ILOG, JRules
0.8/030304

2. This presentation
 What are business rules?
 When do I need a Business Rule Management System
(BRMS)?
• BRMS is a concept, not a product!
 What is a BRMS?
 Standards update
 Architectural components
 Some BRMS requirements
 Conclusions
 Demo of ILOG JRules
 Q&A

3. Business rules
You have them… where are they?
 Business rules are everywhere!
 They define how you run your business:
• Compliance, enforcement, validation
 “No US citizen may transfer money to Cuba.”
 “All hire orders must be accompanied by a valid drivers license.”
 “No packaged shipped within the continental USA may exceed 25
KG.”
• Correlation
 “If the customer has ADSL with a speed of less than 512 and they
have an average usage of over 20 hours per week, offer the
customer 1024 ADSL with free installation.
• Computation
 “If the customer has had a bankruptcy in the past two years
decrease their credit score by 150.”
 “Offer a 10% discount on all widgets if the customer has spent
over $500 over the past 12 months.”

4. Business rules
“What Not How”
• Business rules are generally declarative, not procedural
• From a programmer’s perspective they are generally
individually trivial
Application independent
• Statements about how you run your business may last
longer than your current IT infrastructure
• Your policy managers may not understand the details of
your current IT infrastructure
• May need to be deployed to multiple applications
Application dependent
• To be executed business rules have to be mapped on to
your IT infrastructure

5. How do you deal with change?
 “Why do you want to change that? It will take 6 months
to change now!”
 I don’t need a rule engine…
• “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, in version 2.0…”
• “The command pattern, write plugins…”
• “I’ll load the values from a text/xml file…”
• “Javascript/Groovy/BSH/AOP will allow us to change the
policy quickly…”
• “It’s all in the database anyway. The values and the stored
procedures.”
• Coding is cheaper. It’s being written in
India/China/Vietnam.
 I’ll write my own rule engine.

6. Typical code sample…
Petstore:
OrderFulfillmentFacadeEJB
… that will be subject to change.

7. Java Rule Engines
ILOG JRules
Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor
 PegaRules
 QuickRules
 Haley
 OPS/J
 Jess
 Drools (Open Source)
 Mandrax (Open Source)
 40+ listed at http://www.javarules.org

8. Standards Update
 JSR-94 - “The Java Rule Engine API”
• Minor update 1.0.1
• Sample implementations:
 ILOG JRules
 Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor
 Yasutech QuickRules
 Jess
 Drools
 Computer Associates
• Spring integration
 OMG
• Production Rule Representation
 MOF2 metamodel for production rules
• Business Semantics of Business Rules
 Natural language, common graphics and tables
 W3C
• Workshop on rule languages, April (Washington DC)

9. When do I need a BRMS?
 Do you want/need to know what your business policy is?
 Do non-developers edit or view business rules?
 Are change cycles too short for traditional development?
 Do you struggle to communicate around business
requirements with business users?
 Is it hard to maintain the performance of your home-grown
system as the number of rules increases?
 Would you like to adapt business policy based on business
performance?
 Do you need to apply business policy based on temporal
attributes?
• How was your income tax calculated in 1996?

10. What is a BRMS?
A Business Rule Management System
(BRMS) is a set of tools and processes that
facilitate the communication, deployment
and execution of business policy within an IT
infrastructure.
A BRMS manages business rules as
enterprise assets and enables a rich
development lifecycle for business policy.

11. So, BRMS is…
A lot more than just a rule engine!
But, the rule engine is an important
component.

12. BRMS Persona
Developer
• Develops on the J2SE/J2EE/.NET platform.
Business Analyst, Modeler
• Working closely with developers, the bridge between
development and business people, gathers
requirement and business needs.
• Can be a “super-set” of the developer profile in some
cases.
• Familiar with UML-like modeling tools.
Policy Manager
• They understand the business drivers and domain,
from which they derive business rules.
• They are not comfortable using typical developer
tools.

13. Developers
 Do not like to deal with the messy word of business
policy very much…
 But, like to create frameworks for:
• Logging
• Security
• Wiring general hunks of code together
• Scripting
• UI aggregation
• ORM
• Webflow
 But almost nothing for business policy!
 Think of business rules as hunks of code
• …that unfortunately keep changing!

14. Policy Managers
Think “IT” is:
• Too slow
• Ignorant of the business requirements
• More interested in playing with technology X than
improving the bottom line…
• A bottleneck to innovation and putting more
pressure on the competition
Think of business rules as malleable
business assets
• …governing or influencing business behavior.
• A competitive tool.

15. Key pieces of the puzzle

16. BRMS implementations
 Developers build a framework (often an application
specific container)
• Logging, security, transactions, enterprise integration, object models,
static business rules etc.
• Hot deployment support for business rules
 Assist analysts/modelers in defining the business object
model/vocabulary
 Deploy/build rule editors for business users
 Help define and tool processes
• Merging rules between environments
• Moving rules from staging to production
• Testing and validating support for rules

17. Sample BRMS requirements
 Rich client editor for business rules
• IF-THEN-ELSE rules, decision tables, decision trees
 Web interface for editing business rules
 SCC integration for rules
 A central rule repository for business users
 Hot deployment of rules
 Rule debugger
 Rule engine
 Business reporting
 Runtime monitoring

18. Advanced BRMS requirements
Dynamic runtime reporting
Rule refactoring and impact analysis
Business simulation and testing framework
Collaboration features for large numbers of
policy managers: security, permissions,
locking
Dealing with concurrent streams of business
policy development (branch, merge)
…

19. When done well BRMS enables…
More effective communication between IT and
business owners
 Rapid deployment of changes in business
policy, with minimal IT involvement
Clearer separation of roles
• IT owns infrastructure code and processes
• Policy managers own business rules
Everyone is happier! ;-)

20. ILOG JRules
Demonstration

21. Q
www.javarules.org
A
&