-
Via James Taylor (who disagrees with this point of view, as do I) — a vendor with a combined process/rules engine on why any other approach is just plain stupid, or “glorified spreadsheets called via a stateless web services from some workflow engine”
Pages
Feeds
-
Recent Posts
Categories
- ACM
- BAM
- BI
- blogging
- BPA
- BPM
- BPM history
- BPM standards
- BPMG-BPTG
- BRM
- business
- case management
- CEP
- cloud
- compliance
- CrisisCampTO
- EA
- EAI
- ECM
- ESB
- Lean Six Sigma
- Links
- mashups
- MDM
- off topic
- open source
- outsourcing
- PKBoK
- Rant
- SOA
- social
- Software design
- sustainability
- technology
- torcamp
- Vendors
- Web20
- ·conferences
- Appian World
- Architecture&Process
- ARISProcessWorld
- BBC
- BEAparticipate
- BPF
- BPM2009
- BPM2010
- BPM2011
- BPMcamp
- BPMGProcess2006
- BPMThinkTank
- BrainStorm2007
- BusinessRulesForum
- CASCON
- DemoCamp
- E2 conf
- E2.0 TTW
- ExperienceTech
- FASTforward
- FileNet
- Forrester
- Gartner
- IBM
- IIR BPM
- InnovationWorld
- IntlBPM
- IQPC
- IRM BPM
- IT360
- Lombardi
- mashupcamp
- NewSoftwareIndustry
- Open Group
- Pegasystems
- Proforma
- Progress
- SAP
- SharedInsightsPCC
- TIBCO
- TransitCamp
- Ultimus
Archives
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. -
{ 2 } Comments
Seems to me that everytime I have implemented anything more than a trivial workflow I find myself moving the decision making bits out to a rules engine. In other words, rules engines and workflow engines kind of go hand in hand in my experience. So, having the rules engine understand the context (data, parameters, and state for example) of the process side would be quite useful, not too mention more productive in a unified modeling environment, so I’m interested in why you also disagree with the idea of a unified rules and workflow engine.
Cheers, Gavin.
Gavin, I believe that BPM and business rules should co-exist and be integrated. However, I don’t believe that they should be part of the same engine, since rules may need to be reused elsewhere in the organization besides within processes (i.e., called from other applications), and most of the time when rules and process come from the same engine, the rules engine isn’t sufficient powerful (or available) for use as a general purpose rules engine. Of course, that means that you (usually) lose the ability to model the rules and process in a unified environment — although some vendors have integrated to allow this — but you gain both rules reuse and typically a more user-friendly interface for tuning the rules to impact in-flight processes.
I presented at the Business Rules Forum (link to my slides) in October on the integration of BPM, business rules and business intelligence, and I agree that there are quite different opinions on this. I’d be very interested in hearing more about your experiences with implementing process and rules together.
Post a Comment