I can say from my previous experience of Drools that Rule engines are must in your company if your business model requires frequent changes and quick turnaround time. But the business people are doubtful as usual because they don’t see the virtue of the rules engines upfront.

I think just to demonstrate them the virtue of a rule engine projects should demonstrate them using some open source solutions like Drools. After the first cut if required they can go for commercial solutions like JRules or Blaze Advisor etc

That’s a good post – although I’d come at the problem from a slightly different angle , probably due to the different nature of consulting that we do!

I think your post focus is on changing manual decisions (requiring human intervention) to automated ones.

My main focus in the talk was taking existing automated decisions coded in spaghetti (what Java looks like to normal people!) to something that can be reviewed by business decision makers.

Both are two sides to the same coin, and both require balance – just because you *can* automate a decision doesn’t mean that you *should*. In both cases you end up with a better, clearer, system.

Paul

James Taylor
Author, with Neil Raden, of Smart (Enough) Systems
Smart (enough) Systems LLC

regards, tom.