Decision Management in the Enterprise – It’s Time for a Conference

[ttrapp]

I already blogged in the past that in my opinion SAP’s BRM technology has great potential because it allows to separate business rules form business processes in IT systems and can make ERP systems more transparent and easier to change.

SCN has much to offer in the area of business rules management: we can ask questions in forum, blog about our experience with this technology and SAP does a great job by explaining tutorials as whitepapers and blogs.

If you look at the forum there are sometimes really challenging discussions by practicians, about do's and dont's and best practices – and sometimes I’m surprised because of the challenges people face and about smart solutions.

It is great to have a forum but I think now it’s time to come together to learn from each other. In a conference about decision management we could share success stories and best practices how to use BRFplus/Decision Service Management in the context of SAP Business Suite or how to use it in custom development projects.

My Suggestion is to arrange an SAP user group conference about business rules and decision service management where we can exchange and learn from each other.  In such a conference there should be both technical and non-technical tracks so that business and IT can meet because this is the most important success factor for any business rule management. So the attendees are

• enterprise architects/CTOs  who want to centralized governance and management of business rules
• developers who create rule sets
• business experts who work hand in hand with developers to achieve high quality rule sets
• software architects who want to use BRFplus their solutions.

There are many things we could discuss, let me mention only a few:

• Do's and Dont's for implementation of decision management in enterprises
• best practices for collaboration of business and IT in business rules management projects
• best practices for creating rule sets using BRFplus/DSM
• best practices for reduction of custom code using BRFplus/DSM
• modularization of rule sets
• best practices for documentation and changes of rule sets
• best practices for central government of business rules
• tracing and evaluation of traces of rule set execution
• best practices for testing rule sets
• optimization / fine tuning of rule sets
• best practices for migration of rules sets – think of migration from BRF to BRF+
• architecture of rule based systems
• using DSM on non-ABAP and non-SAP platforms and devices for centralized rule execution
• how to make rule sets “HANA ready”?
• using DSM in combination with HANA
• presentation of Partner-AddOns for SAP NW DSM and best practices for using them
• how to build own AddOns on top of SAP NW DSM

I think ASUG and DSAG offer perfect opportunities for this discussion. What is your opinion?