Business Rules

Business Rules Management Systems are born with the main objective in mind of fulfilling a common need within the IT infrastructure of the organizations: ease the definition, testing, deployment and tracking the company's business rules. This process is known as business rules life cycle management.

We could differentiate three approaches to rules deployment and management, mainly:

• Hardcode: This is probably the most traditional system, fortunately almost obsolete. Rules were implemented directly in the source code of the business applications. Therefore, this approach leads to extremely complex, costly maintenance where agility and efficiency were always highly jeopardized.
• BRE (Business Rules Engine): They were born to make business rules independent from the rest of the source code. A BRE is basically composed of a rules repository and an execution engine. To be honest, they performed a remarkably advance over the "hardcoded" option, due to the fact that BRE could "hot"-deploy the rules without the need to modify the rest of the source code. However, they are systems still too IT-oriented and they don't succeed in allowing the business areas to define their rules in an isolated/independent manner.
• BRMS (Business Rules Management Systems): They are the natural/logical evolution of a BRE. BRMS complement a BRE by offering a graphical IDE together with functionalities/features strongly oriented to non-technical users, therefore providing a platform to handle the complete life cycle of a business rule. As such, BRMS have became the most complete/powerful tool to manage business rules inside a company and favor the collaboration between IT and business departments.

The actual state of the art for BRMS is a bet on taking the business rules one step further than the simple 'IF x Then y' statements, and to incorporate advanced decision-making systems that would support the deployment of much more complex rules like scoring models or neural networks.

Source: Delta-R