David, I enjoyed your input together with Adrian's comments. What was your reaction to the articles on "Smart Enough Systems", do you see it as a way forward. I am really keen to get more discussion on the role and efficasy of business rules and decisioning and the positioning that is ermerging within modern day system and application design. I question whether some of the business rules systems available today actually enable agile authoring and change of rule and deicison models?

Nigel

Nigel, see my other post to Adrain about real use of rules engines.

I see EDM as the next step; some business people don't 'get' business rules as a concept, but everyone understands automation of decisions.

Adrian thanks for your input here and you are clearly identifying all the areas where the tried and tested methodology that business takes when faced with business rules and decisioning requirements to assist with the management of complexity.

I find that a lot of talk on the forums around business rules and examples used are almost in the category of "process rules" or business rules to manage where a next step should be routed to in a process.

The ability to change rules on demand and for agility in this area is not made easy by the very issues you raise of proprietary scripting or rules language required for complex scenarios, and the costs for these skills, make it equate to code written by programmers and leave it open to "bugs" that need rigorous testing.

There are new emerging rule management systems, which cut across the traditional approach as above, and these are not getting the attention they deserve because of the entrenched approaches that the legacy rules systems have engendered in the IT and BA community. These emerging tools are bringing rule and decision model authoring right into the hands of Business Analysts and busines managers/stakeholders. They employ inbuilt test data generators and debug facilities, so that you can test as you build and end up with production ready models for deployment in days rather than months. e.g. www.qualiasystems.co.uk

As you so rightly mention though, business needs to identify their requirements for business rules and the areas of complexity they would like to address. It just feels as though this area of the whole requirements process needs modernisation to come into line with other agile methods available to analysts and consultants.