Achieving Decision Consistency Across the SOA-Based Enterprise Using Business Rules Management Systems

Abstract

The adoption of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides businesses with the ability to rapidly deploy new applications and easily integrate with other component applications both inside and outside the organization. This decentralized application environment provides a great deal of flexibility for business units and IT departments, but it also creates difficulty in managing the consistency of business decisions delivered through various applications. Business rules management systems (BRMS) provide a mechanism for managing decision logic and act as a conductor in order to align application decision behavior.

The key to BRMS is the use of a centralized rules repository, within which resides the decision logic applications use to interact with their customers. Applications communicate with a rules engine in order to process those business rules specific to the decision required for the particular application and situational context.

This paper will show how business rules management systems fit within a service-oriented architecture, how BRMS can act as intermediary between service-based applications and legacy applications, and how companies are using BRMS to manage decision processes across the enterprise.