Effectively using business rule technology requires a fundamental shift of the responsibility for managing business logic from the technology group to the business experts. There are a number of elements to this. Here we explore some of the foundational elements of this transition.

The rule designer is a fundamental part of effectively using business rule technology. The rule designer must allow non programmers to be productive and safely configure business logic. To accomplish this, the following elements are critical:

Flexibility and constraint. The designer needs to allow users to express the business logic but also needs to guide them as to what is allowed and how to construct the logic.

Graphical. All business rules claim to be graphical, but that is not just having text show up on a document. The ability to visualize the rules and edit them in a visual form is important.

Validation. The rule engine needs to tell the rule designers that what they have done is not ideal or allowed.

The Decisions rule designer allows construction in both a ‘structured text’ format and ‘diagram’ format.

• Text-based
• Graphical Rule Debugger
• Rule Table

When constructing a rule, the rule designer is led through selecting what data element they are interested in, what the ‘verb’ is and what the other parameters are in the rule configuration.

• Step 1: Select Element 
• Step 2: Select Verb 
• Step 3: Other Parmeters

Any data supplied in rule configuration can come from:

• constant – data supplied in designer
• other data in rule
• looked up from other sources

When something is incorrect in design, it shows validation issues that need to be corrected (see graphical business rule view above).

Click here to contact us for a demo of this functionality.