An overview of the role of business rules within SOA and BPM projects.

1. Service Oriented
Architecture
Agility Rules!
Daniel Selman, Product Manager

2. Today’s Agenda
• Introduction
• Motivations
• Key SOA Challenges
• BPM and Business Rules: friend or foe?
• Conclusions
• Q&A
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3. ILOG Quick Facts
• A software 200 company
• Founded in 1987
• Publicly traded (NASDAQ, Euronext)
• $125 million revenue in FY 2005
• Over 2500 customers
• Over 420 ISV/OEM partners
• Market leader in Business Rules
• Gartner “Magic Quadrant”
• Forester “Wave” leader
• IDC “…the leading vendor for
BRMS…”
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4. ILOG Quick Facts: SOA/BPM partners
Plus others…
See http://www.ilog.com
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5. Traditional Software and Change
… are incompatible
Internal process
Competition Regulation
Market Crisis
Business Software
Change is guaranteed
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6. Typical IT System -- complexity!
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7. Why Rules?
What are the challenges
when deploying an SOA
that cause companies to
consider business rules?
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8. Transparent
• Rules are statements of business
policy accessible to business owners
• Not cryptic code!
• Largely self-documenting
• Drives reuse
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9. Version Management
• IT
• Maintains multiple versions of running services
• Provide side-by-side execution with zero downtime
• Support flexible client to implementation routing
• Business
• Understand what policy has been deployed. What is
the policy that is in effect for a transaction.
• Support effective and expiration dates for business
policy implementations
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10. Designed for Change
• Traditionally causes major problems
• Object Model Evolution
• Rules are written on the Business Object
Model
• Rules are execution on the Execution
Object Model
• B2X Mapping provides a layer of
abstraction
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11. Platform Independence
• IT is heterogeneous
• .NET Clients and Java servers are
common
• Supply a B2X mapping for a .NET
Executable Object Model
• Deploy rules to either a native Java or
native .NET rule engine
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12. Location Independence
• Rules define the implementation of the
decision service. Protocol and API
independent.
• Can be invoked from…
• A Web Service
• Asynchronously using JMS
• Remotely using RMI
• In-JVM using a Plain Old Java Object
• Stateless or stateful invocations
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13. Combinable
• Reuse rules across services
• Rules (can be) atomic
• Share data validation rules across the risk-
assessment and the account-creation
services for example
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14. Auditable
• Rule Engine is an ideal audit mechanism
• Generates callback events whenever a rule is
fired/activated
• Whenever data is modified
• All rules are transparently auditable
• Adding auditing support usually has no impact on
the rules
• Typically replaces invasive ad hoc logging
mechanisms
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15. Where are your Business Rules?
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16. Key Challenges to implement a SOA +
BRMS solution?
• Identify key business decisions in services
• Where in the process or service?
• What for?
• Who will define, manage and maintain them?
• Capture the business decisions in ILOG
BRMS
• Extraction, Selection criteria, Classification
• Rules organization, definition, validation
• Interaction with the business process
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17. BPM and BRMS
BPM and Business Rules:
Friends or Foe?
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18. A most likely scenario…
What happens
if your BPM layer is
the only flexible piece
of your architecture?
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19. Streamlining The Process
From End to End
Streamlined process
works fine today…
Request
for
• Until Change
•New Product
•New Policy
•New Regulation
•New Pricing Rules / Model
•New Scoring Rules / Tables
• …
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20. Streamlining The Process
From End to End
Streamlined workflow
works fine until…
Your ‘streamlined’ process in x weeks
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21. Streamlining The Process
From End to End
Streamlined workflow
works fine until…
Your ‘streamlined’ process in x months
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22. Streamlining The Process
From End to End
Streamlined workflow
works fine until…
Your ‘streamlined’ process in x months
Your ‘streamlined’ process in x years
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23. BPM + BRMS = Streamlining The
Process from End to End
Validation
Validation Rules
Eligibility
Eligibility Rules
Business
Rules Pricing
Pricing Rules
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24. Combining BPM and BRMS
• Externalizes business logic from the
business process
• Enables changes to decision logic
without process redesign
• Allows users to access business logic
in their own business terms
• Simplifies modeling and management
of logic in structured processes
• Applies complex decision logic to
processes
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25. The ILOG Value Proposition
Build Decision Services using BRMS
• Accelerate the execution of your business processes
• Achieve true Straight Through Processing (STP)
• Manual processing for exception only
=> Lower the cost per transaction
• Accelerate the maintenance
• Separate Business Logic from Process logic
• No IT skills required to update policies
=> Lower Total Cost of Ownership
• Accelerate the compliance of your business processes
• Better transparency
• Better traceability
• Better re-usability
=> Priceless!
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26. The Business Rule Approach in
BPM and SOA
The major elements of a Business
Rule Management System (BRMS)
User Tools provide
accessibility and
rule management
User Tools
Rules are extracted
and stored in a
Rule Repository
Rule Repository
Rule Engine provides
execution and
deployment
throughout the process
Rule Engine
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27. Changing the Rules
• Business users see
business policy in their
own terms
• Policy lifecycle is not the
same as the process or
code lifecycle
• Quickly update the
business policy within
deployed services
• INCREASED AGILITY
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28. Conclusions
SOA Best Practices
• Design course-grained business services
• For architectural and integration agility
• Externalize and manage business rules
• For competitive business agility
• Decouple changes in business policy from
expensive (IT intensive) code and process
deployments
• Version business rules for audit, accountability
and compliance
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29. For additional information
Daniel Selman
Product Manager, ILOG
e-mail: dselman@ilog.fr
Alain Gendre
BPM Program Manager, ILOG
e-mail: agendre@ilog.com
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30. Thank you
Q&A
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