Links - Business Rules and SOA
One of the hot areas for cross-fertilization these days is business rules and service oriented architecture.
Business rule and object technology veteran Ian Graham has written an excellent book on the subject titled Business Rules Management and Service Oriented Architecture: A Pattern Language.
He has also has the goodness to provide extracts and actual chapters of the book to the public via the web. See related links.
This is a extended quote from the chapter Aligning IT to the Business ( PDF, on page 8 ), discussing the business drivers for the adoption of BRMS:
- Current software development practice inhibits the rapid delivery of new solutions and even modest changes to existing systems can take too long.
- Accelerating competitive pressure means that policy and the rules overning automated processes have to be amenable to rapid change. his can be driven by new product development, the need to offer customization and the need to apply business process improvements rapidly to multiple customer groups.
- Personalizing services, content and interaction styles, based on process types and customer characteristics, can add considerable value to an organization’s business processes, however complex. Natural dialogues and clearly expressed rules clarify the purpose of and dependencies among rules and policies.
- In regulated industries, such as pharmaceuticals or finance, the rules for governance and regulation will change outside the control of the organization. Separating them from the application code and making them easy to change is essential, especially when the environment is multi-currency, multi-national and multi-cultural.
- Even in unregulated industries, companies subject to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are required to make their business processes (and thus the rules that they follow) visible. If such rules are scattered through multiple applications, duplicated (consistently or otherwise) in different places and embedded in procedural code, this becomes a costly and nigh impossible exercise.
- Business rules and processes can be shared by many applications across the whole enterprise using multiple channels such as voice, web, and batch applications, thereby encouraging consistent practices.