A student of Information Systems for Business Performance at University College Cork, Ireland is investigating how SOA can influence the IT capability of a firm and to what extent this strategy can become a major initiative for changing the underlying business approach of an organization. I offered to post the survey which should take no longer [...]

A reader asked me last week about how I saw business rules engines fitting in with UML, SOA and Microsoft. The article discusses whether Microsoft’s Oslo strategy for SOA will be based on UML or merely offer support for it among many standards.
First, let me say that I think it is increasingly clear that application [...]

I got a briefing last week from IBM as part of my researching of the IBM/ILOG acquisition (I blogged about this here). Back when I was at IMPACT it became clear that IBM was getting focused on events, rules and policies - they talked about Points of Agility, points in a business where variability is [...]

I got a briefing this week from my friends at Tibco about their Service Performance Manager product released a couple of months ago. The product is a big step along the road to what some call “autonomic computing” in that it provides dynamic and automated monitoring and correction of service levels in a service-oriented world.
The [...]

Well it seems that IBM believes in business rules too. I was reading SOMA: A method for developing service-oriented solutions which I found thanks to Eric Roch’s post on IBM’s SOA Methodology anda couple of things struck me:

Business rules get called out explicitly both in the meta model Eric shows and in the overall flow. [...]

Steve Cranford of PwC wrote an interesting piece called Bringing Order to Chaos (brought to my attention by Alan over at Tibco) that made me think. Steve’s focus is on the next software suite for enterprises (something he calls an Intelligent Business Performance Platform) consisting of business intelligence, business process and business rules. Reading this [...]

I got a chance to speak with ILOG today and do some thinking so it’s time to write more about the IBM and ILOG announcement. As it is an acquisition of one publicly traded company by another neither company can legally say very much. As a result I, like everyone else, have a bunch of [...]

My good friends Larry Goldberg and Barbara von Halle have just published an interesting article: The New Frontier: BPM, BDM and SOA. It’s worth a read as it makes some good points about the intersection of BPM and decision management - whether Business Decision Management or Enterprise Decision Management.

Neil and I are going to be speaking (on Applying Decision Management to Make Processes Smarter, Simpler and More Agile) at the Intalio User Conference on June 17th and the nice folks at Intalio have decided that everyone who attends deserves a copy of the book. While I am sure that all the attendees are [...]

Mike Gilpin and Noel Yuhanna gave a presentation on how informaton-as-a-service can help your projects and applications. Many SOA implementations were focused on transactional solutions but Forrester found that many used the same service infrastructure to expose information - e.g. a customer update service which exposes the current address also. Theme: Information-as-a-service (IaaS) offers to [...]