Nowadays, business rules automate hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions of operational decisions that some organizations make every day. The most representative examples of such organizations are financial, insurance, and healthcare sectors. All these organizations make automated decisions with several combinations of terms and conditions, legal constraints, eligibility criteria, risk levels, and price ranges. In this blog, I explain how business analysts and ‘citizen developers’ author decisions with rules, data, standards, and apps in Sparkling Logic SMARTS™.
Business rules
Business rules are not new; but until recently they were encoded in the rule syntax as “IF THIS THEN DO THAT” statements. As such, they needed detailed specifications from business analysts and skilled developers to code these business rules. And once the business rules were coded, they were complicated for business analysts to understand or control.
Authoring with data
Gone are the days when business rule creation started with lengthy interviews where IT professionals asked business experts how they made decisions in line with company policies, industry regulations, and market dynamics. Starting with data, transactions, and use cases is now the new way. Fully in line with this new approach, SMARTS provides RedPen™, SparkL, and Pencil. These are three independent but complementary technologies that business analysts can use to import data, and start authoring rules.
RedPen is Sparkling Logic’s patented technology for authoring decisions through point-and-clicks. Using RedPen, business analysts write business rules using a use case approach. The loaded sample data provides the context to create, test, and run rules without prior knowledge of a special rule language and syntax. RedPen mimics what business experts do on paper when they flag decisions with a red pen. When business analysts activate RedPen, they can pin an existing rule, a field of this rule, or a rule set and modify it as if they were using a pen on a paper. They can also create new rules with RedPen, SMARTS will automatically turn them into executable rules. For cases where advanced logical, mathematical, and symbolic manipulations are required, business analysts can use SparkL.
SparkL (pronounced “sparkle”) is Sparkling Logic’s language for writing rules in a natural language format. SparkL can be used by business analysts with no formal technical background in rules syntax while still benefiting from mathematical expressions, string manipulations, regular expressions, patterns, dates, logical manipulations, constraints, and much more. They can express any imaginable decision logic and symbolic computation, making it the choice for highly sophisticated decisioning applications where the conditions as well as the actions can take a great variety of forms.
Other cases where the decisioning projects necessitate formal requirements and decision modeling, the standards development organization (OMG) offers a standard called Decision Model and Notation (DMN). Sparking Logic has adopted this standard and developed Pencil to operationalize DMN.
Authoring in the context of DMN standard
Pencil is a tool for users to model business decisions by dragging and dropping graphical icons to form a decision process. Pencil models comply with the DMN standard. Using an intuitive graphical interface, business analysts can immediately start capturing data requirements, decision models, and business rules, while collaborating to achieve the best explicit description of the decisions required for systems and applications. Pencil’s glossary can be used across decisions to achieve consistent use of terminology related to decisions. Business analysts can create or import data and then execute, test and continue to refine and improve decisions. Once decision modeling is done, Pencil provides a direct path to an executable decision.
With SMARTS, a user has not to adapt to the tool, but the reverse, it is the tool that adapts to the user. The business analysts select the appropriate way for the task at hand. In the same project, they may choose Pencil to model decisions, RedPen for the major part of the application, and SparkL for the rest of the application. At any time, they can choose to display the rule sets as a group of rules, a decision table, a decision tree, or a decision graph. Moreover, they can switch from one representation to another and vice versa.
Orchestrating business apps
As intuitive as a decision management tool can be, it may never meet the needs of a real business person. The bells and whistles that business analysts need can be overwhelming for the credit manager or insurance underwriter who needs access to decision logic. This person is certainly more inclined to exploit decision-making logic than interested in learning how to create it, and even less in training on a rules authoring tool.
For untrained business users, SMARTS sets the bar higher towards more simplification, and still within the same interface. They have full control over the configuration, management, and assembly of the decision applications that business analysts have developed, and they can do it all through web forms and point-and-clicks. With this added level of abstraction, untrained business users, business experts, and ‘citizen developers’ can adapt to industry regulations, company policies, and market dynamics, without IT intervention beyond the first installation.
Takeaways
- Business rules have moved from coding rules in “IF THIS THEN THAT” statements to authoring them with data, standards, and apps
- SMARTS implements this new way via RedPen, SparkL, and Pencil, three independent but complementary authoring tools that business analysts can use to express their decision logic
- Business users need business applications, not authoring business rules or developing machine learning models
- SMARTS gives business owners full control of business apps through web forms and point-clicks
- Today change is the rule, with SMARTS, automated decisioning is flexible to accommodate ever-changing regulations, company policies, and market dynamics
If you envision modernizing or building a credit origination system, an insurance underwriting application, a rating engine, or a product configurator, SMARTS can help. The Sparkling Logic team enjoys nothing more than helping customers implement their most demanding business requirements and technical specifications. Our obsession is not only to have them satisfied, but also proud of the system they build. Just contact us to request a free trial.
Learn more about Decision Management and Sparkling Logic’s SMARTS™ Data-Powered Decision Manager