Business Rules Technology Belongs In Your Architecture

Checkmate! You're Toast.

Those are words you don't want to hear when playing chess. Similarly, you don't want to be checkmated in the rough and tumble of the business real world.

To win at chess and in business to you have to make smart decisions constantly and consistently - decisions that are guided by a carefully crafted strategy designed to checkmate your opponent or, at a minimum, to stay in the game. Deciding what moves to make in chess is hard enough even though it is just you and your opponent. The decisions businesses have to make everyday can be much more complicated and the stakes are much higher.

Where Is Your Decision Logic Implemented?

Most firms embedd them deep within its application code far from the businesspeople who understand the business rules best. That might be OK for business rules that do not change frequently. But, for business rules that change frequently or need that need to change quickly, there is a better way. Forrester has identified business rules technology as one of the Top 15 Technology Trends Enterprise Architects Should Watch and one of the 5 key changes app dev shops should make in 2010 (attend or replay the free Webinar Live: Tuesday, October 20, 2009, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time).

Avoid Checkmate. Include Business Rules Technology In Your Architecture

Business rules platforms (often called decision management) allow decision logic to be authored and executed external to you application. The result is better management and faster change of your business rules because:

• The business rules are not embedded deep in application code such as Cobol, .NET, or Java code that only a programmer can change.
• Business rules are executed consistently across all applications that need them because they are implemented once and shared for all applications that need the.
• Businesspeople who understand the business rules can author and maintain the rules directly instead of explaining the rules to programmers who then have to code them in a programming language.

The result for your business: faster change and consistent decisions.

Research For Application Development And Enterprise Architecture Professionals

John Rymer and I consistently published research on business rules platforms, best practices, case studies, and technical architecture. If you are interested in learning more about business rules technology please feel free to schedule an inquiry with John and me and check out the research documents below.

The Forrester Wave™: Business Rules Platforms, Q2 2008

The Truth About Business Rules Algorithms

Best Practices In Implementing Business Rules

Case Study: California Association Of Realtors Innovates With Business Rules

Case Study: Hypo Real Estate Enables Credit Risk Professionals With Business Rules

Must You Choose Between Business Rules And Complex Event Processing Platforms?

Case Study: The Doctors Company Innovates While Rebuilding Its Core Systems

Deputize End-User Developers To Deliver Business Agility And Reduce Costs

Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst

email: mgualtieri@forrester.com

twitter: mgualtieri
 

Leaving User Experience To Chance Hurts Companies

Have you ever driven in Boston?  If you have, then you know that the streets are very difficult to navigate. Why? In colonial Boston someone built a house. And then someone else built a house. Then they built a path between the two houses. And so on and so forth. As a result, Boston’s layout was accidental and the result is a convoluted set of streets that frustrates both residents and visitors.

Similarly, application development shops achieve poor results when they design without a plan, leaving user experience to chance. They:

• Hurt conversion rates. A well-designed site can have up to a 200% higher visit-to-order conversion rate than a poorly designed site. And visit-to-lead conversion rates can be more than 400% higher on sites with a superior user experience.
• Alienate customers. Retained customers become an annuity to your business and are ambassadors of your value and brand. Well-designed sites have page abandonment rates up to 41% lower than their inferior cousins.
• Run up development costs. Upfront user experience design can greatly reduce the need for extensive redesign and redevelopment that may be necessary to fix a poor user experience.

Wow! App dev shops who are not doing user experience design have a great opportunity to substantially increase their value to the business. Our latest research on user experience (UX) design shows application development professionals how.

Mike Gualtieri

Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

The Dream Stack For Developing And Deploying Web Applications

I want to develop a Web application - a really good Web app. The kind of Web app that will make me so rich that I can buy an $9.4 million co-op over looking Central Park, a Yacht registered in Monaco, and hire an architect to build my dream-house west of Boston that is a combo of Buckminster Fuller, FLW, and MTV cribs. Throw in a vintage sweet ride like Don Draper's Cadillac and lifetime membership to the Boston Sports Club. I'm set.

The problem: What technology am I going to use to develop and and deploy a pwn-some Web app that will scale forever and never go down. (I need a great idea too!)

The solution: Enlist your illustrious help to come up with the perfect Dream Stack to help make all my dreams come true.

Dream Stack: What Are The Requirements?

The Dream Stack is a perfect combination of tools, technologies, and platforms that meet both development and deployment requirements. But, deciding what combinations of technologies to use is no simple task because there are choices and combinations galore. Here are my requirements for the Dream Stack:

Development

• Low-cost tools (because this is a startup).
• Maximize developer productivity.
• Faster development and faster change.
• Can develop great user experiences.
• Availability of talented developers (we plan to grow fast).
• Will support a scale-out deployment architecture of both data and computing.

Deployment

• Low-cost, linear-cost deployment  (because this is a startup).
• Support scale-out architecture of both data and computing.
• Architected to never go down.
• Employs security features
• Easy to manage and monitor

Your Thoughts? What Is The Dream Stack?

Your Dream Stack should consist of tools, technologies, and platforms that are currently available either as open source, commercialy available products or a combination of both. Your stack will probably, but not necessarily, include programming languages, databases, app servers and/or cloud, IDEs, libraries, and other platform technologies. Any combination is fine as long as it meets the requirements of the Dream Stack.

1. What other requirements should the Dream Stack have?

2. What is your recommended Dream Stack?

Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

Follow me on Twitter

Cross-posted at Dr. Dobbs Code Talk

Excuses, excuses: The Business Doesn't Know What It Wants

I have grown weary of hearing excuses (for 20 years)  from application development professionals about why they are challenged when it comes to developing and delivering applications that meet the expectations of the business. Excuses such as:

• The business doesn't know what it wants.
• The requirements keep changing.

 

Application development professionals are not served by these lame excuses because no one gets what they want or need. The business is left lacking and application development professionals deserve their reputation. If you have no excuses, then I salute you. If you want to stop the excuses, here's how:

Solution 1: Get Over It

Stop denying reality. The business either doesn't know or can't always articulate what application features they need to make their business more productive, more responsive to customers, and more flexible to market changes. And, they often change their minds because they are just thinking this through themselves and that often results in new needs or missed requirements. This is the nature of the beast. Accept it and stopping beating your head against the wall. It's not good for you.

Solution 2: Understand The Business And Your Users

What's a poor app dev gonna do? You must learn the workings of the business, understand what customers want, what competitors are doing, and what it will take to create a great user experience for users. This will give you a much better context when you speak with the business and you can work together in the requirements, offer new ideas, and head-off many of the gothcha's that come up later. This is your job and you have to start doing it to the n^th degree. Keep being strictly a tech-head if you want, but stop the excuses, please. Learn the business.

Solution 3: Build For Change

Things change constantly. You need to choose technologies, architectures, and processes that enable you to respond to change. This requires getting creative and being open to new combinations. For example, maybe an event processing architecture is a more natural way to respond to what is happening in the business than a service oriented architecture. Or, maybe you can build a more better user experience by using Adobe Flex rather than JSF. Building for change is a lot easier when you know the business because it helps you to anticipate future requirements.

Solution 4: Get Passionate About Your Craft!

The industrialization of software development has been an epic fail. Developing software is not like building a car on an assembly line or bottling beer like Laverne and Shirley at the Shotz brewery. Software development is a creative craft more akin to making a movie where talent, creativity, discipline, and passion result in great creations. For years, app dev pros have been told to keep their heads down - that all you need to do is follow the project plan and write your code. Wrong. Lift your head up, find your passion, understand the business and then use your technical creativity to make beautiful applications that users find useful, usable, and desirable.

What's your excuse?

 Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

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Distributed Cache Technologies Are Ready For The Mainstream

The open source project, Memcached, is a common staple for many of the largest Web sites including facebook, twitter, wikipedia, and others. The enterprise software vendors haven entered the market and have added features that are more attractive to enterprise IT - especially to Java shops.

In recent months, we have had a significant uptick in client inquiries about distributed cache technologies and how they can be used to improve performance, scale, and reduce costs of Web and application architectures. We are also encountering distributed cache technology in conjunction with other platform technologies such as CEP. There is also an intriguing potential for distributed cache technology to become a staple of cloud computing environments (some might say amazon S3 has the properties of a distributed cache).

Based upon this increasing level of interest, the maturity of the products, and the potential of distributed caches to radically change they way applications are architected John Rymer and I have initiated a Forrester Wave evaluation of Distributed Cache technologies.Our current list of candidates to evaluate include:

• Alichisoft NCache
• Gemstone
• Gigaspaces
• IBM ExtremeScale
• Memcached (we may also include Gear6 and Schooner since they support memcached)
• Oracle Coherence
• Red Hat
• Terracotta

Are There Any Other Products We Should Include?

These are the products that we have encountered when speaking with both vendors and customers. Are there any others that you think should be on this list? For example, should Amazon S3 make our list or are there any other commercial products that are available?

We Would Love To Hear From Customers Who Are Using Any Of These Products.

If you are a client using any distributed cache technology we would like to speak with you about your experiences with these products and the business and technical requirements that drove you to implement the technology.

Please let us know.

Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst

John R. Rymer, Vice President and Principal Analyst