David S. Read

The annual Business Rules Forum is right around the corner… starting on November 1.  For the third year Blue Slate has been invited to share our insights with the attendees.  I will have an opportunity to speak about the importance of viewing all data through the lens of  a company’s business rules.  The title of my talk is, ‘Business Rules in the Integration Tier: The System of Record‘.  It is scheduled for Wednesday, November 4 at 2pm (moved from 3:05pm).

I am excited and honored to be given another opportunity to speak at the preeminent conference for business rules.  Beyond sharing my thoughts I am looking forward to learning from the many practitioners that will be discussing their insights as well.  The variety of experts, topics and industries creates a valuable opportunity for anyone looking to begin or expand the use of rule-based approaches within his or her business.

In addition to the sessions, I highly recommend attending one or more of the “Fun Labs”.  They provide an opportunity to use the vendors’ products and get your questions answered.  The chance to explore these tools and see the entire process of creating, editing and running rules is powerful.

Read on for details about how this conference provides many great opportunities for learning about the techniques, tools and products that support effective application of rule-centric approaches.

About the Business Rules Forum Conference

**The only conference world-wide with all the vendors under one roof at one time!**

Have a look at this year’s program. Find out what the excitement is all about!

Download a copy of our new Conference Brochure featuring highlights of this year’s unparalleled event.

(more…)

For years the phrase “system of record” was used by the IT team to connote the master database for a set of data (e.g. HR, Orders, Finance, etc.).  Different databases might be the “system of record” for a subset of the company’s data.  The key was to know which one housed the master information for each type of data.  These days the concept needs to be expanded.  The “system of record” must include business rules since business rules give our data its meaning.

As enterprises have moved toward service oriented architectures, one of the main advantages is to allow rapid access to data.  New applications, including those from external stakeholders (vendors, partners, customers), allow for further streamlining and automation of business processes.  These integrations allow our systems to be accessed by an arbitrary collection of applications.  The rules around our business operations must be automatically enforced regardless of the path by which the information arrives within our infrastructure.

In order to provide for the consistent application of rules when interacting with our data, it is the business rules which must filter the access to data.  Rules such as credit checks, minimum order quantities, user validation and so forth must be consistently applied whether the information is being manually entered into an application of our own creation, arriving via a web service call or read from a batch file.  This consistency is provided by the business rules, not the database. (more…)

Another International Business Rules Forum has run its course.  It was great to see the mainstream acceptance of leveraging Business Rule Engines (BRE) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) to facilitate both business and integration agility.  Paul Evans and I presented on that topic at last year’s Forum.  This year it was clear that vendors and implementers are leveraging the approach broadly.

I met many great people and learned a lot about how businesses are succeeding with Business Process Management (BPM) tools to automate processes.  This year there was a lot of focus on expanding to focus on data and rules.  This relates to the discussions we have regarding the semantic web.  We need to leverage semantics throughout our systems, starting with the data.  Without appropriate semantic underpinnings the promise of automated service discovery and self-describing environments cannot be attained.

I thoroughly enjoyed having an opportunity to hear Dave McComb describe the value of semantics as we pursue the use of business rule environments.  His deep knowledge of the semantic landscape and his energy while discussing it certainly inspires one to learn more about the topic.  Thanks to him I continue to evolve my thinking around the creation and structuring of data dictionaries and vocabularies when documenting and implementing business rules. (more…)

I am looking forward to this year’s Business Rules Forum (BRF – http://www.businessrulesforum.com/).  This is the 11th year this international gathering has occurred.   It is interesting to listen to the real-world experiences that people are having as they leverage business process gathering and execution environments.

Once again I have been given the opportunity to co-present a session.  This year Mike Strianese and I will be discussing the importance of security when leveraging web services.  The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach has gained a lot of traction in rule engine and workflow environments.  With the accelerated pace of integration and application deployments comes an increased risk of vulnerabilities and exploits.

Beyond the informative sessions, the BRF provides a great showcase to see and experience a broad range of tools and services available for documenting, testing, integrating and deploying rule-based solutions.  This is an efficient way to gain a lot of insight into the operation of the diverse offerings.

I am a strong advocate for leveraging rule and workflow engines to accelerate application development.  In the same way relational databases free us from creating a lot of code to manipulate data in files, these environments simplify certain aspects of enterprise business system development.  It has become rare to encounter a financial or healthcare-related enterprise that does not leverage at least one of these tools.

If you happen to be at the BRF next week I invite you to stop by our session (Security of Services, Thursday at 9:05 am – http://www.businessrulesforum.com/abstracts.php?id=350).  Feel free to introduce yourself afterwards as well!