Business Rule Revolution: Running Business the Right Way

Learn from an anthology of contributing authors and experts who share, step–by–step, how to justify and manage the ROI for the BR Approach. The book covers the business‘s perspective and the technology perspective.

Authors represent the healthcare industry, financial services experience, state and federal government experience, and senior practitioners spanning many industries.

This book accomplishes the following: 1) It is for managers and decision–makers who make things happen in their organization. 2) It addresses BRs as a leverage for agility, compliance, and corporate intelligence, as a key mechanism for engineering the business itself. 3) It is not meant to be read cover–to–cover. Business people will focus on section 2. Technical people will focus on section 3. 4) Together, the sections provide a step–by–step management approach that crosses business and IT barriers. 5) Real case studies are written by real people in well–respected corporations, government agencies, consultancies, and software vendors. 6) Leading technology is highlighted. 7) Present the possibilities that BR Approach can achieve for both business and IT

From the back cover:

Taking care of business: "Without a doubt, every contributor to this book is a hero in their own right... None are afraid to share both good and bad so that readers can grow from their experiences." Barbara von Halle

"The requirement will be for enterprise–wide, integrated implementations for immediate delivery." John Zachman

"Business specifications are no longer requirements that support the development of IT design.. they are the business configuration that is expected to be loaded into the IT solution." Neal McWhorter

"The implementation of this tool [at Oregon Public Employee Retirement Systems] allowed us to consolidate business rule responsibilities from IT (QA) systems staff to the primary business users after appropriate training." Larry Ward and Jordan Masango

"What proved most effective, then, was not a top–down, process–to–rules approach, but one that iterated between both perspectives." Art Moore and Michael Beck

"The delivery of the Rule Wizard [at Aetna] not only resulted in a huge advancement in enabling the rule authors to write rules, but the rule authors could now easily address rule quality and integrity, all without much technical support." John Semmel

Take care of technology: "Rule architecture should be business–friendly...it should help the business better understand, manage, maintain and update decision logic." Gene Weng

"The core of a business is its business rules, which need to be protected from deliberate or accidental misuse. A well–defined business rules methodology, focused on business goals and objectives, addresses most of the concerns." May Abraham

"While the promise of BRMS is alluring, realizing the benefits requires more than finding rules and integrating a business rule engine." Brian Stucky

"As an ASP, Equifax manages the core environment, development and maintenance of customer systems, with business rule maintenance performed by the customers themselves." Linda Nieporent

"The greatest ROI becomes possible when automating and improving operational decisions across the enterprise." James Taylor

Bring the two sides together: "So we believe that agility is the single most important quality for a competitive organization. Not technological agility, a necessary but insufficient condition, but business agility." Larry Goldberg

About the Author:

Barbara von Halle, Executive Editor of the upcoming KPI Business/IT Transformation Series, is the founder of Knowledge Partners, Inc. (KPI) and a business rules pioneer. She is responsible for evolving KPI‘s business rule management methods and tools (KPI STEP (tm) License) and well as evolving their rule maturity model (KPI RMM(tm)).

She serves as the Chair Person for Brainstorm‘s Business Rules Symposium, and sits on the editorial board of the Business Rules Bulletin (electronic publication) as well as the BPM Strategies Magazine. In 1996, she received the honored Outstanding Individual Achievement Award from the International Data Management Association.

She is co–author of The Handbook of Relational Database Design (Addison–Wesley), which is beyond its 20th printing, co–editor of The Handbook of Data Management (Auerbach), and co–author of Business Rules Applied (Jon Wiley & Sons). She served as the leading columnist for 5 years in Database Programming and Design Magazine and the publisher, Miller Freeman, often displays "The Best of Barbara von Halle" on their Website

Larry Goldberg, is Managing Partner of Knowledge Partners, Inc. with over thirty years of experience in building technology based companies on three continents, and in which the focus was rules–based technologies and applications. Commercial applications that he has sponsored, and in which he played a primary architectural role include such diverse domains as healthcare, supply chain, and property & casualty insurance.

Prior to joining KPI, Goldberg was Senior Vice President of Sapiens Americas, Inc., and was CEO and founder of PowerFlex Software Systems, which was acquired in 1999 by Sapiens.