Best Practices and Experiences in Business Rule Management

Registration

Free. Space is limited. Pre-registration is required.

Agenda

Seminar Description

The demand to provide government services over the web, the need for increasing operational efficiencies, replacement of aging infrastructure, and compliance with new government mandates are driving the re-engineering of current business processes and systems. New tools and architectures such as automated workflow and web services are available to support this effort and are being marketed as “solutions” by system integrators and software vendors.

However, engaging in an initiative without a systematic approach that addresses the organizational challenges in capturing legacy knowledge of processes and policies can jeopardize the success of a re-engineering effort.  Technology platforms for Business Rule Management (i.e. Decision Management) provide for capturing, modeling, testing and implementing business rules in a technology that is easy to learn, use, and maintain by domain experts.

Business Rule Management addresses the need to automate and manage decision-intensive processes as sets of inter-related business rules. The result is the consistent and reliable execution of an organization’s practices, policies, and guidelines by all its employees.  The enabling Business Rule Management System (BRMS) for the creation of rules, should allow a business analyst (domain expert), rather than a technology specialist, to create the required rule set. Conflicts in a rule set must be automatically detected, along with rule anomalies or ‘missing’ rules, and presented to the business analyst for an opportunity to modify the parameters or operating conditions for the rule set. The end result should be an optimized rule set with proven run-time capability as all testing of rules is carried out at design time. Rule sets for specific decision-making activities can be deployed within any multi-threaded Java container, which allows integration with Business Process Management (BPM) solutions.

An early consideration in implementing any Business Rule Management System is whether a BRMS provides the appropriate solution to the problem at hand.  For example, when the rule logic to be encoded in the BRMS is fairly straightforward, will “never” change, and does not need to be visible to business users, then implementation through traditional coding is an option.  More likely, however, the underlying business rules and policies supported do change often and/or it is desired that business users be given more visibility and control over the encoding of the rules.  In that case, a BRMS that is non-IT oriented and user-friendly may very well be a perfect fit.  Once it has been determined that a BRMS is indeed the right solution, then there are two major implementation considerations that follow: the source of rules and the business terms, and the target technical architecture.  The source of rules and business terms are often found in policy manuals or processing guides.  The best possible case is where the rules are clearly defined and documented in these policy manuals and guides, and there is an existing data model that includes business terms (or vocabulary) used in the rules.  If these resources are not available, the required time and effort must be devoted to rule discovery work: mining rules from existing legacy system code, building or adding terms to a data model, etc.  With regards to architecture, the level of effort required for integration of the BRMS depends on the details of the target architecture and how the BRMS in question can be deployed. For instance, integrating the BRMS with an architecture that supports Web Services or that is built in Java should be relatively simple, compared to integrating with a legacy system built in COBOL.

In this seminar, you will hear from recognized experts in the field as they describe an approach to capture this legacy policy and business rule knowledge as well as best practices for ensuring success for an e-government business rule management project.  Case study examples in government will also be shared.

Presenters

Gladys Lam

Gladys S.W. Lam is a world-renowned authority on applied business rule techniques.  She co-founded Business Rule Solutions, LLC (www.BRSolutions.com) with Ronald G. Ross, which has become the most recognized company world-wide for business rule methodology, publications, consulting services, and training.   She is also co-founder and regular columnist of Business Rule Community (www.BRCommunity.com).  BRCommunity.com is a vertical community for professionals working with business rules and related areas and is home of the Business Rules Journal. Ms. Lam is the co-creator of Proteus™, the BRS Business Rule Methodology, which is used by many companies world-wide.  Ms. Lam is also the Executive Director of the Business Rule Forum, the premier international conference on business rules.

Ms. Lam is an internationally recognized expert on business rules and related techniques.  She leads numerous large-scale companies in adopting the Business Rule Approach. She manages business rule projects that focus on the capture, analysis and management of business requirements including business rules.  Ms. Lam speaks internationally at conferences and other professional events. She co-presents the Capturing Business Rules public seminar offered by DCI.

Ms. Lam manages multi-million dollar projects and is recognized internationally as an expert IT project manager.   She advises top senior management of large companies on organizational issues and on IT solutions to business problems. She has extensive experience in various business contexts, including business process re-engineering, strategic IT planning, and managing and implementing information systems.

Ms. Lam is most recognized for her ability to identify the source of business issues, and for her effectiveness in developing pragmatic approaches to resolve these issues.  She has also gained a reputation for fostering positive professional relationships with principals and support staff in projects.

Ms. Lam graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Bachelor of Science degree majoring in Computer Science.

Bonnie Moonchild

Bonnie Moonchild has experience in many aspects of Information Technology. In the last 17 years she has been a programmer, data modeler, systems analyst, business analyst and project manager. She has worked for Washington State at Department of Transportation, The Evergreen State College and the Department of Social and Health Services. For 7 years she worked as a consultant doing projects for Department of Health, Labor and Industries, Fish and Wildlife and the Department of Social and Health Services.

Ms. Moonchild is currently employed at DSHS where she has recently completed a HIPAA project and is beginning a project to collect union dues and L&I premiums from providers of services to the agency’s clients. She is also working on a project to collect all of the payment system’s business rules and put them into a rules engine. Ms. Moonchild spoke at the 2001 Business Rules Forum on the topic “Business Rules on a Budget.” She is a very enthusiastic supporter of business rules and business rule engines.

Ed Hernandez

Ed Hernandez is the Vice President of Sales for Corticon Technologies, Inc. Mr. Hernandez has over 20 years of enterprise sales and sales management experience in the software and service industry, with emphasis on financial services and customer relationship management. He has had direct management responsibility for strategy development and management of direct and indirect sales channels, including global strategic alliances. Most recently with Chordiant Software, Mr. Hernandez held a number of executive sales management positions, and was responsible for enterprise sales and strategic alliances from Chordiant's inception through its IPO. Prior to Chordiant, he was part of the executive team at the Foundation Group of Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting), and, as executive director, had responsibility for enterprise sales in the EMEA Region and, later, for global technology alliances. As an independent management consultant, Mr. Hernandez has assisted many companies in the development of enterprise sales and alliance strategies and processes. Mr. Hernandez majored in business administration at the University of San Francisco.

Keith Brzozowsky

Keith Brzozowsky is the Director of Professional Services for Corticon Technologies, Inc.  In this role, he is responsible for managing the successful implementation of the Corticon Platform for direct customers.  He also provides ongoing consulting services to several customers and has extensive experience in training customers and partners in the use of the Corticon Platform.  Mr. Brzozowsky previously held management and project management positions with ECnet, a global supply chain management software firm, and Applied Materials, Inc., a semiconductor capital equipment manufacturer.  Prior to these assignments, he served as a nuclear submarine officer in the U.S. Navy.  He holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy and an M.B.A. from the University of Hawaii.

For More Information . . .

. . . contact Sheryl Hall or Mike McVicker, IPMA Professional Development Committee Co-Chairs.