I just listened to a webinar by ILOG that discusses the integration of the ILOG BRMS with BPM.

I am glad to see that they are starting to publicize the need for both BPM and BRMS and how they relate. This was a first from ILOG as far as I can remember.

In short, business processes should be calling business rules and this should avoid your business process to grow into something un-manageable over time since the decisions are being externalized into the BRMS.

ILOG mentions the following as reasons to separating process and rules:

1. Increase business agility by allowing users to manage decision logic
2. Streamline and stabilize processes by externalizing decision logic
3. Enable re-use of decisions across different processes, applications and systems
4. Enable automation of complex, variable decisions
5. Effectively manage large and evolving sets of rules

The interesting thing here is that points number 2 and 3 are now presented with a business process component instead of the “application” as it used to be.

Obviously, part of the presentation was aimed at showing why IBM bought ILOG and where ILOG’s products complete IBM’s offering and how it fits with the IBM products.

Once slide I particularly liked was one where they presented their vision of the Agility Infrastructure. Which basically is presented as:

The Agility Infrastructure:

• Detect (Business Events)
• Orchestrate (Business Process Management)
• Decide (Business Rules)
• Monitor (Business Activity Monitoring)

This is a simple representation of the 4 concepts and how they relate, yet it is a very effective one.

The recorded session and slides should be available soon on the ILOG web site.