Recently Asked Questions
Get answers from the top-ten questions asked in our recent BRMS IT moderninzation webinar series and answered by an ILOG BRMS expert.
How much IT involvement is necessary for making rule changes—assuming that non-technical business people can change and test rules on their own?
Because IT teams are always responsible production platforms, they control the,quality of the deployed rules. IT teams can work collaboratively with non-technical business users, however.
Business users can maintain the rules within the Web-based component, and can deploy the rules to a test server to perform simulation testing and what-if analyses. When the user is satisfied that the rule execution set is ready for deployment to production, the IT team can extract the rule set from the rule repository and apply some non-regression testing to verify that the rules are still working as expected. This is a good time to verify that changes made at the data model level (logical or physical models) are not impacting the existing rules.
The following diagram illustrates different activities by role:
As the diagram shows, IT teams are still responsible for production quality control, version control, software component integrity, production server monitoring and management.
What kind of training does a business analyst require to quickly change rules?
In this context, we assume business analysts will maintain the rules and act as liaisons between the pure business teams and IT teams. In such cases, business analysts must learn how to use the BRMS tool, with the goal of understanding the big picture of building business rule applications—including the interactions required between the business and development teams—with products such as ILOG JRules.
Such training includes rule analysis and programming, and an introduction to the BRMS components—especially the Web-based component, since business analysts will use this every day. Business analysts must also be trained in the deployment process and version management, and they should learn the following ILOG JRules features:
- The benefits of the business rule approach
- Business rule management and rule application development cycles
- Rule team server (RTS) rule authoring and baseline management
- How to author rules and create programs using a business rule approach
Finally, analysts should clearly understand modeling concepts and Unified Modeling Language (UML) notation (the classes, inheritance, relationships, use cases, objects, object models and activity diagrams) related to modeling for business rules.
Is there a conflict if the analyst in charge of changing the rules is the same as the rule writer?
There should be no conflict. Rule writers should take part in the analysis done at the beginning of the project. The more analysts understand about the motivations behind a business policy, the better they will understand the underlying object model, and the better the rules will be.
