Enabling Business Rule Management for Business Users

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Enabling Business Rule Management for Business Users

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To enable business users to create and edit business rules, you can publish rule projects to Rule Team Server, a Web-based module for storing, managing, and editing business rules. After the rule project has evolved in Rule Team Server, you can synchronize its contents back into Rule Studio.

Simplifying Rule Editing for Business Users

When you have a large vocabulary, categories let you filter the terms and phrases that are available to you when you edit rules in Rule Studio or Rule Team Server. Only those vocabulary terms and phrases in a category are visible in a business rule with that category assigned.

You can also use business rule templates to guide policy managers to write rules properly and create many similar rules efficiently. A business rule template is a partly completed business rule that can be used to create a series of rules with the same structure. If you find that you are using templates to manage many rules with shared conditions and actions and are only modifying values, you may consider managing them as a decision table.

Adding Custom Properties to Rule Artifacts

To add properties to existing types of rule artifact, you extend the rule model. BAL and rule model extensions can be set up once and then deployed on both Rule Studio and Rule Team Server.

For example, you could create a property geography to identify the country for which a rule is applicable.

Synchronizing Work Between Business and IT Users

Developers store and access business rules using ILOG Rule Studio for .NET. Rule Studio stores business rules and other business rule artifacts (such as business object models) in a file system. You can integrate this file system into a Source Code Control (SCC) system for file sharing, conflict resolution, and version management. In an SCC system, each developer works on a copy of the rule projects in their Eclipse workspace, and a copy is kept in the SCC system. All interaction with the SCC system is handled by Eclipse.

Business users store and access business rules using Rule Team Server. Rule Team Server stores rule projects in a database repository. The Rule Team Server repository handles multi-user concurrency and versioning. In Rule Team Server, all users collaborate within a shared workspace, and use locking to control access to resources currently being edited.

In Rule Studio, you can synchronize the content of rule projects within Rule Team Server. Synchronization provides for:

creating a Rule Team Server project from an existing Rule Studio project
creating a Rule Studio project that is a copy of an existing Rule Team Server project.
updating the Rule Studio copy of a project that exists in both Rule Studio and Rule Team Server with changed and new content from Rule Team Server.
publishing changes in the Rule Studio copy of a project that exists in both Rule Studio and Rule Team Server to the Rule Team Server copy.

The way you implement business rule management with Rule Studio and Rule Team Server depends on who the owners of the business policy are, and whether you use the Rule Team Server repository as production storage.

Developer-centric rules

The software development cycle and business policy cycle are managed together in Rule Studio. Projects are published to Rule Team Server for review and verification deployment. Business users are given access to the rules in Rule Team Server, but they are not yet empowered to make changes. When a project is put into production, the Rule Studio project is published to Rule Team Server. When business users identify needs for rule changes, they work with developers to have the changes implemented in Rule Studio and the updates are published to Rule Team Server where the business users have an up-to-date copy of the rules. Versions are maintained in Rule Team Server this way, but change is driven from Rule Studio.

Since all rule authoring and management is performed from Rule Studio, this approach is not appropriate for projects requiring users not familiar with Java and IDEs. It also does not provide for any role-based permission management for rules.

Separated business and IT cycles

Developers use, almost uniquely, Rule Studio. Policy managers are responsible for the business policy life cycle in Rule Team Server. The Rule Team Server repository is deployed to production.

Business users can make rule updates in Rule Team Server. Developers carry out initial rule development and templates for new rules in Rule Studio. When the project is stable, but before it is put into production, they publish the rule project to Rule Team Server for business user review. Business users are able to make updates and create new rules based on templates. The developers synchronize any rule changes back to Rule Studio and deploy from there. Rule changes may be made either in Rule Studio or Rule Team Server and are synchronized.

Post-production updates are driven by Rule Team Server. Once the application is in production, not only can business users make rule changes, they can also deploy rule changes from Rule Team Server to a test server where they can test the changed rules with the existing application before having IT complete the deployment to production.