Business Rule Management White Paper

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Learn how the overlaying of business context onto software assets can dramatically accelerate the discovery and management of the logic that runs your core applications.

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Business Problem

Successful businesses can quickly adjust their operations to address new opportunities and challenges. This requires that the applications that automate and control these processes can themselves be efficiently realigned. However, as applications age, they tend to grow more complex and less well understood. As a result, the business functions that these systems automate become progressively more difficult to adapt. This can severely compromise the agility of the organization in the face of competitive markets.

Further, as processes and the underlying business rules become progressively more obscured, developers and analysts must devote increasing effort before they can modify any process. Without proper attention to the complex interactions within their applications, developers jeopardize the stability of the company's processes.

To achieve operational agility, organizations follow one of many alternatives. They may redevelop or replace an application, incrementally move to an SOA / Web Services strategy, or perhaps they may re-architect a system to reduce complexity. Regardless of the approach, the organization must ensure that the existing and proven business logic within its system is captured. This intellectual property represents a core differentiator that must be extended.

Solution: Business Rule Manager

A business process may contain thousands of rules buried within millions of lines of code across numerous applications. The execution of these rules will be further complicated due to variables like business context, timing, sequencing, and other factors. As a result, an unaided manual approach to rule identification is generally not practicable.

Relativity Technologies' patented technology for business rule discovery takes a more customizable approach. Whether the needs are for rapid discovery of logic, or more powerful and automated management and organization of logic, Relativity Technologies can help. Our technology can be readily deployed as your business rule needs adjust over time and by project. Business Rule Manager provides:

• Context: Logic should be located and understood within the appropriate business perspective.
• Automated Identification: Sophisticated analysis should be available to quickly locate candidate business rules.
• Assisted Identification: Users may decide to uncover logic as they browse through source code.
• Management and Documentation: Information about the structure, function, and context of a rule must be captured and propagated to provide meaning to the rules.
• Reuse: The discovered rules must be leveraged in some fashion, for instance via useful documentation for specifications, or componentization into reusable elements.