Oracle Business Rules - Moving towards smarter business processes
Ever since the birth of the IT revolution Business Rules
have been a part and parcel of the applications. There usage has mainly been a
part of the applications and changing the business rules meant changing the
application which involved huge impact in terms of time and money. With this
challenge came the thought of separating the Business Rules from the
application in such a way that the change in business rule has no impact on the
underlying application. This brought in more agility to the applications and
reduced the maintenance cost of applications. This has benefited the
insurance, health care, financial and government sectors the most as these
sectors have applications whose defining business policies are subject to
frequent change.
Business Rules are used to implement the business policies. They are written as simple if <condition> then <action> implementation. Rules analyze facts against the conditions and perform the corresponding actions. The rules engine is defined as the entity that executes these rules. Once the rule engine is provided with the set of rules, it can process the facts and perform the derivative actions. Oracle Business Rules (OBR) in Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is one such product which can help in making the business analyst more independent and also help the applications to be more flexible. The Oracle Business Rules is an integral part of the Service Component Architecture and hence can be used in tandem with any SOA Component.
A business process typically accepts an XML as input invokes some services and produces an output which is again an XML. Typically a business process orchestrates the different services that are to be invoked and can itself be exposed as a service. The Business Rules in OBR can be exposed as a service called the decision service. This is used to access the modeled rules by any SOA component. The business rules provide following benefits to the business process:
1. Agility: Using the Oracle Business Rules, it is easier to modify the business process. The process is less time consuming and more rapid.
2. Reduced Cost: Changing the business rules using OBR is much easier than modifying the complete application and hence reduces cost of maintenance.
3. Transparency: Since the business rules are now available on the SOA Composer they can be easily viewed by the directors, auditors, business analyst or anyone who is allowed to access them.
4. Lower deployment times: Business Rules configured in once instance can be directly migrated to production with no or very little effort. This is a huge benefit for applications where the change cycle is very short.
5. Reduced business process complexity: Since the business logic has been moved to the business rules, the overall complexity of the business process is reduced.
With this we come to an end of how we can increase the flexibility of our business process. Please leave your feedback on kuldeepsingh_dhillon@infosys.com. In the next blog, I will be discussing some features of the Oracle Business Rules.
