Impressions of InterACT: Business Rules as a Science

I just returned from the Fair Isaac user conference, InterACT, in San Francisco, where I attended sessions on the new lineup of products for BRMS. There they introduced a new product roadmap and vision for Enterprise Decision Management (EDM), which includes their Blaze rule engine.

Fair Isaac’s vision of the future for BRMS includes not only the traditional management of the business rule lifecycle, but also the application of the company’s modeling and analytic environment to the optimization of the decision making process. This is achieved by linking the company’s modeler product, used to build mathematical models of, for example, consumer behavior, with the Blaze 6.5 rule engine to execute rules based on those behaviors.

An example of this might be a rule that says:

If the user is in the high risk category then increase rate by 50 basis points

How do we know if the user is in the high risk category? Because the modeling tools can construct a detailed mathematical model of high risk customers in a particular industry. When these models change, or “drift,” they can be updated in the modeler and the new model deployed to the Blaze rule engine with a point and click interface.

Furthermore, using the Decision Optimizer, business analysts can simulate various business rule scenarios and determine the effect that changing rules will have on profits or other variables in the models. This allows analysts to maximize the “decision yield” of a rule base.

These new developments may mark the beginning of a move from art to science for business rule systems, and I look forward to a full review of Blaze, Modeler, and Decision Optimizer in the near future.