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Business Rules Management Overview
A business rule management system (BRMS) enables organizational policies – and the operational decisions associated with those policies – to be defined, deployed, monitored and maintained separately from core application code. By externalizing business rules and providing tools to manage them, a BRMS allows business experts to define and maintain the decisions that guide systems behavior, reducing the amount of time and effort required to update production systems, and increasing the organization’s ability to respond to changes in the business environment.
Where Business Rules are Found
Is business rules management right for your organization?
If your organization is experiencing any of the following situations, you have an opportunity to benefit by implementing a BRMS.
1. Frequent changes to business systems that require immediate attention and response. Such changes might include:
- Evolving business conditions, such as changes by competitors or in the economic environment.
- New regulations, procedures and/or policies.
- New organizational priorities and market opportunities.
2. Highly variable decisions that need to be automated in order to support your organization’s business model and product/service offerings. Such variability might include:
- Locality-specific decisions, such as eligibility verification or pricing.
- Customer-specific decisions, such as sales authorization, priority assignment or contract-related provisions.
- Product-specific decisions, such as configuration and availability.
- Process-specific decisions, such as workflow routing, approvals and straight-through processing.
Read IDC research paper: The Business Value of Business Rules Management Systems
Why Use IBM Operational Decision Management?
Managers responsible for policy making in decision-rich enterprises have benefited enormously from information technology. But as the pace of change has increased, and the reach of automation has been extended, traditional software applications have been unable to deliver the flexibility and agility required by most businesses.
IBM Operational Decision Manager adds flexibility and performance to your business systems, whatever the challenge. This offering is the evolution of the market-leading WebSphere ILOG BRMS, and it includes the functionality to support business rule and business event definitions, deployment, maintenance and retirement, with specific environments for technical and non-technical users who participate in managing automated decisions.
IBM Operational Decision Manager treats rule-based decision logic as a corporate asset by enabling effective and efficient management of rules through their lifecycle.
Key benefits:
- Take rule editing into your own hands
With IBM Operational Decision Manager, policies and practices are expressed as natural language-based rules instead of computer code. Developers, analysts, managers and administrators use powerful editing tools to manage, track and change rules.
- Build consistency into your systems
IBM Operational Decision Manager stores rules in a central repository. The same rules can be accessed across the enterprise, across touch points and applications. Teams employ consistent regulations and practices, ensuring that systems follow compliance requirements.
- Automate precise, highly variable decisions
In many transactions, the best decision is specific to the context of the geography, customer, product or process (or to a combination of these factors). Making the right decision may also depend on understanding a series of interactions taking place over time. IBM Operational Decision Manager allows decision logic to be defined in a variety of text and graphical formats, and for inter-related rules to be combined together to define complex and variable decisions. This ensures that automation can be increased and that the decisions made by business systems are more precise and personalized than can be implemented through traditional programming approaches.
- Easy, safe and predictable rule management
With IBM Operational Decision Manager, you get comprehensive capabilities for managing rule changes, including role-based management authority, testing and simulation, configurable queries and reports. This ensures your rules are updated more quickly and accurately – business analysts and experts can change decision logic themselves, relieving overworked IT departments. At the same time, this offering provides tools and environments that allow IT and Operations to manage the deployment and monitoring of rules into the production environment.
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