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 an interesting series of questions from a reader that seemed to me to justify a longish post. The initial question was quite harmless looking:
Can you give a clue as to what software engineering approach you use/recommend for EDM, but especially business rules that non-IT staff can alter safely?
But the whole thing got more [...]

Earlier this week I posted Application Development 2.0 in which I addressed what I see as some of the issues with current development practices and tried to explain why I think a declarative, business rules approach is essential. This (and some blog posts around the blogosphere) made me think about the mismatch I see when [...]

My friend Steve has been using the ILOG Rules for .NET product (which you can now download for an extended trial as I discussed here) and has written a nice little review of it - Lab test: ILOG Rules for .Net meshes well with Microsoft. There’s a lot to like in the .Net version of [...]

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 [...]

Just heard that ILOG is going to be acquired by IBM! I don’t have any more detail yet but hopefully the folks at ILOG and IBM will brief me sometime soon…..

I am a firm believer in getting the technology for decision management into the hands of those who might use it - I often feel that people just don’t understand what’s possible. The folks over at ILOG have been offering a 6 month JRules trial since last fall. This full version has everything but the [...]

Wednesday begins with Antonio Paulo Conde from Citibank Brazil talking about an enterprise decision engine for originations in their retail bank.  Measuring and understanding the risk of new financial products is important and became more so as the sales teams gained more negotiation power. To address this Citibank used Blaze Advisor to build an originations [...]

Next up was Stuart Crawford, part of Fair Isaac’s extensive research staff, on new approaches to the creation, visualization and comparison of decision trees or, as Fair Isaac calls them, Strategies. Stuart has been working at Fair Isaac for many years and has a lot of background in analytics. This work is about how to [...]

A couple of weeks ago I got an update from the folks at InRule. InRule was founded in 2002 in Chicago and has 100+ customers. Their focus, like most business rules vendors, is on dynamic decisioning and process agility. They estimate that nearly half their prospective customers are also doing BPM not just rules. InRule [...]