Business Rule Manager™
Business Rule Manager helps control the logic that runs your business
Business Rule Manager accelerates the discovery, documentation, and organization of business rules hidden deep within enterprise applications. Unlike lightweight business rule scanning technologies, Business Rule Manager offers patented automatic and analyst-centric paths to locate logic.
Once discovered, the module provides a variety of documentation capabilities for users to associate business-centric intelligence with rules. The collected information is stored in an XML standard-based repository, ensuring that the collected data can be readily accessed and repurposed.
Business Rule Management Value
Your business processes are build on enterprise applications that were developed and refined over many decades. The business logic that governs these applications is often inflexible, poorly understood, and difficult to locate within highly complex source code. This can compromise the adaptability of core applications - and the business itself.
Business Rule Manager offers patented technology to uncover hidden business logic. This critical intelligence about how your business processes behave is gathered in 74% less time than manual approaches. The module delivers:
The Modernization Workbench enables users to overlay business context onto their application portfolio. For instance, a user may group artifacts based on which business process they enable, or which geography manages them. This contextualization allows users to focus their rule discovery efforts on only the software that matters to their initiative. So, an insurer may focus its project on just the software that has been grouped into the 'claims processing' system. This dramatically reduces the cost and risk of rule discovery activities.
Business rules are generally woven throughout large and highly complex enterprise applications, making their identification a challenge. Without software-enabled approaches to uncover these rules, business rule discovery initiatives are likely to involve a substantial degree of effort. Alternatives lack Business Rule Manager's patented and automated approach to locating large numbers of hidden business rules.
Business Rule Manager provides the means to automatically discover common business rules such as screen validation and computations leading to or from a point of interest. Further, an interactive wizard provides analysts with the ability to pre-select the conditional paths and contexts for which rules will be detected, filtering out non-essential rules in advance.
The Modernization Workbench provides a 'HyperView' of applications that allows users to navigate through their sources and rapidly understand the structure and purpose of software. This interactive environment dramatically reduces the amount of time analysts spend searching through source code to find and identify business rules. Users can also rely on the Modernization Workbench's flexible querying engine to develop sophisticated searches that efficiently locate target rules.
Once discovered and validated, analysts can readily categorize and add information about their business rules to the repository. This allows future users to quickly understand the use of each rule. Users can automate the organization of rules, and simplify and guide the entry of business-level information about them. Because they are tagged, analysts can quickly locate rules within the code and modify them to respond to business process changes.
Further, because rules documentation remains persistent despite changes to the code, business rules will stay relevant and useful even after the application is placed back into production. Users can also remotely access and update information about their rules via the browser-based Application Portfolio Manager.
The rules repository can be readily searched, allowing analysts to locate where specific business rules reside within their applications. This can significantly accelerate the execution of change requests and other application maintenance and enhancement activities, or for the creation of development specifications.
The repository is based on the open XML standard. This openness allows users to readily access the rules repository using third-party tools, and simplifies the integration of the rules with business process modelers and business rules engines.
An ROI study investigated the efficiency gains that come to organizations from deploying the Business Rule Manager module. The acceleration yielded by the technology allows users to quickly understand and govern their core business logic.
| Business analysts can document and organize rules into useful hierarchies. |
| Automated, patented business rule discovery locates logic in 74% less time -- and more completely -- than manual approaches. |
