This new diagram also shows the connection to Rete, CLIPS, Jess, and Drools. Rule engines that use the Rete algorithm have an "R" flag. Engines based on CLIPS have a "C" flag. and engines based on Jess have a "J" flag.

We also show what environments each rule engine runs on (i.e. COBOL, C++, Java, and .Net), and whether it runs natively on that environment. This section is still under construction. We've asked BRE vendors to confirm this information, so we can finalize this section. We planned to present this chart for the first time at the upcoming October Rules Fest conference in Dallas, TX.  But now that IBM and ILOG are uniting, I thought you would like to see this chart now.  If you are a vendor representative, please take a look at your product data and let us know if we missed anything or if you'd like to update your product information. 

This is a guide to many of the leading BRE vendors that we are familiar with. It is not an exhaustive or complete list - there are probably other BREs on the market and not on the list that we haven't even heard of yet. Let us know who you are!  This guide is a good start for companies trying to evaluate and assess the BRE market. 

If you need more information about these BRE vendors, or if you need help selecting the best and the right rule engine for your particular needs, call BIZRULES at 305.994.9510. Some of you have asked for the BRE Family Tree poster... Call us for info about that.

IBM has announced their intention to buy ILOG for $340 million USD. ILOG is widely recognized as one of the leading BRMS software vendors.

This move helps legitimize business rules management systems (BRMS) and rule engine technology. This will shake up the playing field in the BRMS/BRE space as ILOG BRMS competitors aligned with and partnered with IBM will need to rethink their strategy and technology.

Integrating ILOG BRMS with IBM's BPM and SOA technologies will also raise the bar in the BPM/BRMS space. Pegasystems has been a leader in the BPM/BRMS space, which Pega basically invented, ever since they released their PRPC PegaRULES Process Commmander product. BPM vendors lacking BRE capabilities are going to have to start OEMing a BRE tool, building one, or buying one like IBM did.

This move also speeds up the BRMS market consolidation that has been picking up steam in recent years. Last year SAP acquired the Yasu rule engine, and Ruleburst (previously SoftLaw) acquired Haley Rules. Prior to that, of course, Fair Isaac acquired RulesPower, and Trilogy bought Versata then Gensym. Going further back, CA bought Platinum Technology (which had acquired AION and the AION BRE). AION, of course, was started by a bunch of ex-IBMers, who wanted to improve on IBM's TIRS (The Integrated Reasoning Solution) mainframe rule engine, who left IBM to develop the AION rule engine. After TIRS, IBM began working on Common Rules. That IBM rule technology and research effort could be combined with ILOG's BRMS tool in the future.

IBM also plans to embed ILOG rules technology across its broad product offerings, further strengthening their products and further legitimizing rules technology.

The business rules market is alive and well. The tools are getting better. The vendors are getting larger. The methodologies are getting easier. As rules-based tools become more widely adopted, companies will be able to spend more time designing quality rules and managing effective rules, and less time worrying about the rule engine technology under the hood.

Companies that resisted rules technologies and methodologies in the past almost missed the boat. Now they have another chance to get on board the rules express.  IBM is ready to rule again.

See also:

• http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/24740.wss
• http://bizrules.info/weblog/2008/07/bre_family_tree_update_shows_i.html
• http://www.cnbc.com/id/25880889/for/cnbc
• http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/IBM-to-Buy-Ilog-for-340-Million/
• http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9456

• Dr. Charles Forgy, inventor of the Rete algorithm that drives many of today's leading Business Rule Engines such as ILOG, Fair Isaac, and Haley
• Dr. Dan Levine, noted AI/Neural Net scientist
• Daniel Selman, software architect and ILOG JRules Rule Studio team lead
• Edson Tirelli, Drools/Red Hat
• Gary Riley, co-author of CLIPS (where Inference/MindBox and Haley Rules originated)
• Greg Barton, TEKsystems 
• James Owen, KBSC, rules guru, consultant, noted author, and visionary
• Larry Terrill, EBDX.com
• Mark Proctor, co-author of Drools
• Michael Neale, Drools/Red Hat
• Dr. Richard Hicks, noted Validaton and Verification sicentist, creator of EZ Xpert, Texas A&M Univesity
• Rolando Hernandez, Chief Rules Architect, BIZRULES and creator of the VISION business rules methodology 

The seminars and presentations will be ideal for both CTOs, technical architects with rules experience, and developers new to business rules development. There will also be tutorials and introductions to business rules architecture, technologies, and methodologies for CIOs, managers, and analysts who want to learn why knowledge and rules matter.

Dallas Rules Group is a new business rules user group formed in January 2008 by folks interested in business rules architecture and development, knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge engineering, AI (artifiical intelligence), expert systems, and enterprise rules integration.

This will be a technical seminar for technical people.  For those interested in the business side of rules, join some of our distinguished speakers the following week in Orlando, FL at the 11th International Business Rules Forum.

The Justice Department says Spitzer is likely to be charged with a relativley obscure statute or rule called "structuring". Even people who know the rules break the rules. It all started a few months ago when a bank in New York followed the rules for filing a Suspicious Activity Report. It ended with his resignation last week.

To help understand the rules that "fired" Spitzer, we created an interactive business rule model of SAR rules. The rules are on www.RuleMap.com. This is a new website we created for demonstrating our interactive BIZRULES® RuleMap™ rulebooks and business rule models.

A picture is worth a thousand words. We beleive this RuleMap makes it easy to understand the rules that Spitzer broke.

But sometimes that's not enough.  Taking the next step and getting to the next level requires simulating business rules so they are easy to review and verify.

Over the past few months BIZRULES has been working on a new product that lets us do both. It's a visual tool that lets us not only draw diagrams of business rule models, it also lets us simulate the rule logic. This tool helps us speed up the rules harvesting process and improves the quality of our rulebooks.

BIZRULES® RuleMap™ is an interactive rulebook that models business rules and simulates business logic.  This logical model lets you see how your business rules really work. It lets you visualize the Reasoning Chain™ that leads to smart conclusions and right decisions.

We use this tool to document your business rules independent of any BRE - yet it can be implemented using any BRE. Again, this is a logical model of your business rules.  It can be used as the rulebook or specs for authoring the rules in any BRE.

Take a look at a sample RuleMap. And let us know what you think. Contact us for pricing or a web demo.

10,000 more will retire next Monday. And Tuesday. And so on. That's the way it's going to be for the next 20 years. Key personnel and subject matter experts with 20 to 30 years of experience are going to clear their desk and head down to Florida. As they walk out the door, invaluable corporate knowledge will simply disappear.

Intellectual capital, a vital corporate asset, will melt away unless companies do something to stop the brain drain and to retain critical knowledge.

Visible Knowledge LLC (www.visibleknowledge.com) has a solution:

• An interactive RuleMap™ that models business rules & simulates business logic
• An interactive Expertise Blueprint™ that transforms knowledge into Visible Knowledge™
• A Legacy Interview(sm) 

Visible Knowledge helps companies retain vital corporate knowledge before it melts away. They focus on documenting invaluable critical knowledge from your top domain experts and key personnel, before they retire. It can take companies years and millions of dollars to recover from losing this type of knowledge.

A traditional exit interview is just not enough when you're dealing with subject matter experts or super experts. So Visible Knowledge has developed a Legacy Interview(sm) process that extracts and documents critical knowledge before experts leave or retire. They use a rapid knowledge acquisition process to extract maximum amount of knowledge in a minimum amount of time. Visible Knowledge focuses on capturing critical knowledge.

If Know It All Ken just gave you two weeks notice, and he's the only one who knows how to fix the $5 million widget making machine, Visible Knowledge can help. They can spend a few days with Ken and document the crucial knowledge you need to keep the business running.  

If Super Expert Sally is retiring in a few months, Visible Knowledge can spend a few weeks with her to elicit as much vital and critical knowledge as possible before she leaves.

If your entire Dept of Super Experts is retiring next year, Visible Knowledge can work with your team over the next few months or years to document the critical knowledge you need to retain.

Later, if you need to automate the knowledge that was captured and retained, companies like BIZRULES can help you do that. BIZRULES works with leading knowledge software vendors to design and build knowledge-based and rule-based solutions.

The BizRules.com website has a fresh new look. The top level pages are designed for quick reading and briefing readers on the products and services we sell. If you want to see more details, many of the links take you to the "classic" website containing more detailed information. Over time we'll refresh and modernize those pages as well.

BizRules.info, the Business Rules Knowledge Base, is where we show and tell you what you need to know about rules. We're redesigning that site and will launch that in the next few months.

I'd like to ask you a question: What information would you like to see in the business rules knowledge base?  Please contact us with your suggestions or ideas so that we can improve the site for everyone interested in business rules techniques and technologies.

Haley Rules was acquired yesterday by RuleBurst. Previously, RuleBurst seemed to position itself as an up-front rule modeling tool or rule management tool, especially for government applications, that integrated with the Microsoft Business Rule Engine for rule execution. With this acquisition, RuleBurst acquires one of the fastest rule engines on the block. Now they don't need the MSFT rules engine because they have their own! And instead of taking a few more years to build a stronger presence in the U.S., they established a strong presence in the US market overnight.

RuleBurst is a natural fit for legislative rules. As a matter of fact, they used to market their tool as Legislative Rulebase Technology years ago, when the company was called SoftLaw. They talked about the idea of Electronic Legislation. E-Government is a great niche, because government is good business.

Now it seems clear that RuleBurst is ready to go after the corporate / private-sector market just as hard. Ruleburst is very serious and methodical. They plan ahead strategies like international expansion (done), government rules market leadership (done - can you spell I R S?), and long-term expansion into the corporate rules market as well (well underway with Haley acquisition).

Adding the Haley Rules Engine could improve performance for deployment. Not sure what they would do with Haley Authority - that is very impressive natural language technology that is like nothing else on the market. There's a good reason Haley is based in Sewickley, PA: Carnegie Mellon University and A.I. expertise. Softlaw was one of the first companies to get into the rules market, and they are among the few who are still around today (under the name RuleBurst of course).

The new BRE Family Tree 2008 (as of yesterday) shows a quick summary of that history:

Here's the official press release about the acquisition.

Here's the rest of the story:

In September 2001 I met with a SoftLaw executive (not sure if he was CEO at the time or if he became their CEO later) in Orlando, FL to brief him on the U.S. rules market and advise them on their expansion plans and strategies. We talked about challenges faced by government agencies such as the IRS, and their search for business rule engines and business rules management solutions. At that time I was working for IBM on the IRS Modernization project. Back then the IRS was looking at CA AION, Sapiens, etc. It took a few years, but SoftLaw (RuleBurst) finally broke through and is now one of the tools used on the IRS project.

During those meetings we also talked about marketing opportunities in the US. I told them about the Business Rules Forum and other rules conferences that they should attend and exhibit at. They started attending, and are now regular exhibitors.

This year at the Business Rules Forum it was a little odd that Haley Software did not have a booth. Now we know why.

This year BIZRULES was at the Agility Alliance booth.  The alliance has grown since last year when we focused on the business rules experts group. Now our scope includes rules, process, and knowledge management.  Agility Alliance members will start blogging soon over at http://agilityalliance.com/. 

Every year at the Forum I like to hand out what I call the BRE Family Tree. This year I didn't update it and, of course, many attendees stopped by to get the latest one. It's a good thing I did't update and print it yet, however, because it would have been obsolete by the end of the conference!

What's happened is that in the last few months, key mergers and acquisitions have taken place.  And vendors with new solid product offerings like Visual Rules are making waves and getting traction in the BRE market.  

And the pace seems to be quickening:

• In August, Trilogy announced their intent to acquire Gensym. As many of you know, Trilogy bought Versata last year. Trilogy's investment and committment to the BR market is impressive. The fact that Val Huber, one of the architects and founders of Versata/Vision Software is onboard and actively involved with their new direction tells me they are very committed to the BRE market.
• Just a few days ago, SAP announced plans to buy Yasu. That brings SAP into the BRE market.
• Recently, IBM acquired System Architect from Telelogic. Although not a business rule engine (BRE), SA is used on very large business rule enterprise projects as a rule/process modeling tool. How IBM plans to meld SA with their Rational sw modeling tools is still unclear, but something to keep an eye on.
• Haley Systems is undergoing a transformation. They were not at the conference this year, and the speculation was that they were or are about to be acquired. Nobody knows. I certainly don't, despite being a Haley services partner. Other Haley partners and customers I spoke with didn't know what was going on with Haley Systems either.

So, who would be interested in Haley? Here's what I think...

• "...the replacement of expertise and intuition by objective, data-based decision making, made possible by a virtually inexhaustible supply of inexpensive information. Those who control and manipulate this data will be the masters of the new economic universe. Ayres calls them "Super Crunchers," which is also the title of his book..."

Ayres cites some interesting examples about cancelling airline flights, medical diagnoses, Netflix, and loan approvals:

• "...Increasingly, jobs that used to call for independent judgment, especially about other people, are being routinized and dumbed down. Banks no longer care about a loan officer's assessment of whether a borrower is a good risk; everything they need to know is in the numbers..."

I think Ayres is almost "spot on", as my British friends like to say.  The information to make these automated decisions is becoming more and more widely available.  And data mining can help identify appropriate business rules. 

But the actual decision is made using an "engine", in real-time, not by the "mining" ahead of time.

Data mining isn't replacing the human reasoning or decision, the inference engine is. Of course, today the inference engine is better known as the business rules engine or the decision engine. We could also call it the "automated reeasoning engine".

Rule engines are the way to go for deployment of these automated decisions or automated reasoning. That's the right technology to implement or execute the micro-decisions and macro-decisions that data mining has uncovered.

See the rest of the story by Jerry Adler in the Sept 3, 2007 issue of Newsweek.

• Business Rule Analysts
• Business Requirements Analysts
• BRE/BRMS developers & architects fluent with rule engines, especially ILOG JRules, PegaRULES PRPC, Haley Rules, and Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor
• IBM WAS WebSphere Application Server / J2EE architects

for permanent full-time and long-term contract opportunities nationwide. If you have experience as a rules analyst, developer, or architect and are looking for challenging projects with Fortune 500 clients, contact BIZRULES or send your resume to

JOBS [at] BIZRULES.COM

305.994.9510

(See http://bizrules.com/us/page/careers.htm for more detailed job descriptions)

It sounds like it was dreamed up by marketers to put a new spin on something that great companies have been doing all along, albeit probably manually. In fact, it’s a great acronym invented by James Taylor, Vice President of Enterprise Decision Management at Fair Isaac, to describe what their customers were essentially doing with Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor rule engine: Building smart rule-based systems to manage and automate decisions.

It turns out that all sorts of companies are using business rule engines to build EDM applications. James just figured this out first and gave it a great name. By now many of the leading BRE vendors are probably updating their marketing materials with the EDM buzzword.

(shameless plug – I just added EDM to the BIZRULES website in the decisioning solutions page.)

James just published a new book, along with co-author Neil Raden, about EDM and their ideas for building smarter systems. I had an opportunity to chat with James recently and interview him about his new book called, appropriately enough, Smart (enough) Systems. (see http://www.smartenoughsystems.com/wp/main) 

Maybe the question should be "why not expert systems?"

The dirty little secret is that a lot of the rule engines out there were originally called "expert systems" or "inference engines", then they were called "business rule engines", and today they are known as "business rule management systems. (See the business rules hype cycle)

Of course, everything is better today. And faster. And connected. When expert systems first came out, the Web wasn't even born yet, and PCs were running at 10 mHz. 

The biggest problem we had at Mobil Oil between 1988-1994 when we were building the Global Expert System Strategy and Lube Knowledgebase Strategy was making and mailing floppy disks to all our affiliates.

I remember one day we were showing the customer (an executive in Mobil Marine division) a demo of the expert system, his comments were:

1. This is like an intelligent checklist, it never asks un-needed or dumb questions!
2. I like that I can click on an underlined word (a hyperlink) and popup a definition, photo, go to the next page, or whatever!
3. This is not like our other DOS or mainframe apps. Our users will not like the fact that this works on a "one page at a time" metaphor,
4. because we're forcing users to fill out information or answer questions on the page (screen), then they have to press enter to go to the next page (screen).

That one page at a time metaphor he described was basically how the World Wide Web works. We were doing this in a business rule engine (BRE), aka an expert system (ES) in 1988. Before WWW. Before Windows.

(Want proof, go here and click on the photo on the right. There's a picture from back then, in my younger days... the program on the PC behind me is 1DirPlus or something like that.... Definately B.W. Before Windows). And so back then we built expert systems that did reasoning, chaining, hypertext / linking, and of course inferencing. Basically they would fire rules exactly the same way a modern rule engine would today. And give the same answer the expert would give,

Even after the experts retired long ago!

We did that in AION. We could have used Neuron Data (which evolved into Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor), or we could have done it in ILOG. Or any number of other ES tools at the time. Some of them are still around today. (See BRE Family Tree)

Distribution of expert systems, and access, is one of the reasons they "never took off". People used to say expert systems were a solution looking for a problem. Deploying expert systems on the web solves those problems.

I think the Web is "the problem" that expert systems were looking for. The Semantic Web is reigniting a lot of the good stuff from the AI/ES days. Adding intelligence and reasoning to applications is what expert systems have been doing all along.

And by the way, not everyone agrees that expert systems never took off. I certainly don't.

As Richard Barfus, CEO of MindBox, (an ES/BRE/BRMS firm) likes to say, "Expert systems didn't really go away. They went undercover."

Critical Challenges Facing Business and IT Today, Sep. 8, 2005, BIZRULES Blog

If you enter those words into Google, that article shows up as #1. Here are the stats as of now:

• #1 of about 1,170,000 for critical challenges facing business today
• #1 of about 1,380,000 for critical challenges facing business
• #1 of about 1,450,000 for the critical challenge facing business today
• #4 of about 2,560,000 for challenges facing business today
• #8 of about 9,620,000 for challenges facing business
• #8 of about 10,700,000 for challenges facing businesses

I didn't realize this was such a popular topic. If you'd like to add or suggest other critical challenges to add to the list, please add your comments to that article.

If customers get different answers depending on who they talk to, you have a business rules problem.

If salespeople can decide whether to charge the right price or a bogus price, you have a business rules problem.

Best Buy, the nation's largest electronics retailer, has a business rules problem.

It's also dealing with a public relations nightmare, and an investigation by the Connecticut Attorney General's Office.

“Success in the world of business depends on understanding the rules,” I said recently during a panel discussion on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

“You need to know the internal rules and policies of your business. You have to comply with the external rules and regulations that govern your business, industry, and function. Your company must ensure that rules are followed. Your company must enforce the rules. Your company must give staff tools to help them follow the rules, make legal decisions, and prevent them from making illegal decisions. Business rule management systems (BRMS) and business rule engines (BRE) help companies comply with rules and regulations like SOX.

If you don’t have a rule engine that automatically prevents employees from breaking the rules and instantly detects and prevents fraud, you’re out of the game. You’ll end up watching your stock go from $30 to $3 during lunch. You lose. You’re out of business.

Smart companies are using business rules to ensure compliance with rules, to enforce rules, to increase agility so they can change faster, to prevent business mistakes, and to reduce IT system development costs by changing rules in days not months.

Business rules technology helps business comply with rules and regulations, helps employees follow the rules, and prevents employees from breaking the rules (either accidentally or on purpose).”

Business rules management is the prescription for business rules problems. Business rules management entails everything from the business rules approach to business rules technology. 

The business rules approach helps companies transform complex policies into easy to understand business rules. What better way is there to clearly describe and communicate policies and business rules to employees?

Business rules technology helps companies execute the right business rules at the right time every time. What better technology is there to automate business rules?

What happened at Best Buy is a great example of what can go wrong when business rules are not designed and engineered properly.

Business rules are like the glue that holds together all the parts of the corporation. Business rules integrate and align all the moving parts of the corporation. With business rules management, Best Buy can ensure that rules and processes used in the stores are aligned with Best Buy pricing policies defined in the boardroom.

Without business rules management to connect the elements of the corporation, the only way to ensure the corporation works as intended is to "hope and pray," as John Zachman likes to say. With weak or wrong business rules, the corporation falls down like a house of cards.

This is why business rules management is vital to the corporation.

Business rules management is not just about documenting business rules, defining who the owners are, and deciding who is authorized to change them. It’s not just about using rule-based languages to speed up system development instead of hard-wiring rules in legacy code. It’s not just about selecting a business rules engine. It’s not just about understanding the company’s strategies, policies and business practices, and then transforming those objectives into rulebooks, descriptive business rule models, IT specifications, and finally into automated systems.

Business rules management is also concerned with architecting and engineering the business rules so they are integrated with the rest of the business. This helps ensure that the implemented business rules that are in actual use, whether automated or manual, align with the governing rules and strategies of the business.

What happened at Best Buy?

At first, I thought the Best Buy pricing problem was complicated and hard to explain. Then I wondered how can business rules help solve this problem? What would BIZRULES do if Best Buy came to us for help?

That’s easy. I like to draw pictures to simplify complex ideas. By removing the complexity, pictures help me make even the most complex concepts easy to understand:

 

(Click to see medium or large slide)

This is an example of three business rules that were apparently in operation at Best Buy when this story broke. Of course, we really don't know the rules were, so this is just a good guess based on published news accounts of what really happened.

Along with a picture of the rules, this slide shows how the rules affect the rest of the company. It also shows how the rules satisfy business rules management objectives, and business rule engineering design objectives:

Rule #1 is a conceptual explanation of the pricing policy to honor the lowest price.

• This rule tells us what management means and what their intentions are.
  

Rule #2 is a logical description of the corporate policy to honor the lowest price:

• This business rule clearly shows alignment to corporate strategy.
  

• This is the high quality rule prescribed by the pricing strategy.
  

• This rule shows integration between online and retail stores.
  

• This rule offers reusability – the same rule can be implemented online and in the store.
  

• This rule shows transparency.
  

• This rule reduces operations costs because it’s easy to follow.
  

• This rule demonstrates regulatory compliance.
  

• This picture is worth a thousand words.
  

• This rule builds Customer Trust Management.
  

• This is a “Best Buy” type of rule.
  

• This rule is easy to approve, assess, test, and certify.
  

• This rule improves governance and controllership.
  

Rule #3 is used (i.e. prescribed) by some salesman to mislead customers into paying higher prices:

• This business rule is clearly not aligned to corporate strategy.
  

• This poor quality rule is operational and being used in stores.
  

• This rule shows discontinuity and inconsistency between online and retail stores.
  

• This store rule cannot be reused online because it lacks transparency.
  

• This rule increases operations costs because it’s hard to explain and justify.
  

• This rule raises questions about regulatory compliance.
  

• You need a thousand words to explain this picture.
  

• This rule destroys customer confidence and trust.
  

• This rule is public relations nightmare.
  

• This rule may be illegal.
  

• This is a “bait & switch” type of rule.
  

• This rule should never have been approved.
  

• This rule raises questions about whether proper rules, processes, and controls are in place.

Now that I understand what the current pricing situation at Best Buy is, it seems pretty straightforward:

• Management intention is Rule #1. This is Best Buy’s pricing policy.
  
• Marketing description is Rule #2. This is what marketing thinks is happening.
  
• Sales prescription is Rule #3. This is what salespeople are actually doing.
  
• IT specification is not applicable in this example because these rules have not been automated. If these rules were automated, an executable specification of the rule (i.e. pseudo code) may need to be developed for the programmer.

These four views of the business rules fit nicely into an Enterprise Rules Architecture.

The next step is to fit these rules into an enterprise architecture framework. I used John Zachman’s influential and compelling Framework for Enterprise Architecture as an example:

(Click to see medium or large slide)

Next, I overlaid Best Buy Rules #1-3 on top of Zachman’s Enterprise Architecture Framework to add more clarity to the Best Buy pricing situation:

 (Click to see medium or large slide)

The pricing problem at Best Buy is that the business rule used by salespeople in the stores contradicts the company’s pricing policy. Clearly Rule #3 is not aligned with Rule #1 or Rule #2.
Business rules confusion is what caused the problem.

Business rules management is the solution.

To get out of this sticky mess, Best Buy needs to:

• establish or improve their business rules management.
  
• prevent salespeople from using Rule #3 immediately
  
• mandate use of Rule #2 immediately.
  
• automate Rule #2 as soon as possible. Why let salespeople decide pricing at all? Let the computer figure out what the lowest price is.
  
• use a business rule engine to automate this rule as quickly as possible. This rule change needs to happen overnight. But changing hard-wired rules in code takes take days or weeks. Often, companies that don’t use rule engines take months to change business rules as simple as these. This is one reason why companies buy rule engines: Changing rules in a rule engine takes minutes.
  
• educate salespeople on the pricing rules. Of course, if Best Buy automated the rules using a rule engine, they wouldn’t need to train as much.
  
• ensure compliance with these rules from now on.

What about the secret website?

Business rules can also help Best Buy get rid of the secret and duplicate website. It's hard enough to maintain and manage prices for thousands of products on one website, let alone two. There are costs associated with maintaining a duplicate site containing 250,000 pages; surely management and shareholders want to reduce redundant costs like these. One way is to use a business rule engine to eliminate the duplicate site and duplicate effort. Why not write a few rules to show different prices (if that really is management’s objective) depending on whether the salesman pulls up the web pages on the Internet or the "secret website" on the Intranet?

How else can business rules management and business rules technology help Best Buy? Please comment and let me know.

Rolando Hernandez

CEO & Chief Rules Architect, BIZRULES