Upside Research strongly believes in the value that formalized business rules can bring to process automation, and the value of business process management solutions to an organization. To us there’s no doubt that having a strong business rules capability is an integral component of a complete BPM solution, as well as what should be an integral part of almost every IT infrastructure and application development strategy.
However there are two critical issues that organizations need to confront when evaluating business rules (and BPM) solutions: practicality and reliability.
In order for business rules solutions to be practical, they need to be useable (and manageable) by business users, not just IT administrators or developers. In many ways, that’s where the first generation of business rules products failed-they required programmers do to the heavy lifting, and effectively limited the changes and control that business managers, users or administrators had. Business rule systems that can be driven by businesses provide a variety of important benefits for organizations, including the ability to drive faster business change, reduce operational costs, and even reduce operational risks.
But as business rules and BPM solutions become more sophisticated and more critical to an organization’s application infrastructure, it also becomes more important to ensure that the rules being created or modified within the system are valid and reliable. Business rules systems without integrated validity or consistency checking leave an organization open to logical inconsistencies, or to processes and business rules that do not adequately cover the required solution space. Not surprisingly, this becomes even more important with business rules solutions that fulfill the first requirement above. The more business rules are defined, deleted, modified, or managed by business users, the more critical it becomes to ensure the accuracy, consistency and reliability of the logic and rules when changes are made.
Those are exactly the issues that business rules vendor Corticon is addressing with the release of Corticon 3.0. In addition to enhancements to its Web services support, complete support for localization and internationalization, as well as a new stand alone desktop business rules modeler, Corticon 3.0 include new capabilities for verifying potential logical errors (including loopholes or rule conflicts). Patented technology that Corticon calls the Predicate Logic Matrix™ enables its users to create business rules models that are logically complete and provide unambiguous decision for every possible outcome.
Upside Uptake
Upside Research believes that Corticon 3.0 is a significant step forward in business rules technologies. By combining a focus on both the practical modeling of complex business rules as well as providing technology to verify and ensure the reliability of the modeled business rules, Corticon is raising the bar in the business rules arena.
In addition, its new standalone desktop business rules modeler is a unique approach to broadening the audience for formalized business rules articulation, management, and use. Using business rules technology requires more than simply having developers create and manage a series of complex and arcane business rules. Instead, we believe the biggest benefit from business rules solutions comes when they can be effectively and accurately defined and managed by the business people closest to the business process and management objectives. With its new stand alone modeling capabilities and Predicate Logic Matrix™, Corticon 3 enables a broader set of business users and analysts to define and model business policies while knowing that their reliability is ensured.
