Event and Process Semantics Will Rule

The convergence of business rules with business process management (BPM) has been predicted for many years and is now a matter of fact. Every major BPM vendor has incorporated or acquired rules technology within their products and platforms. However, most rules offerings are only loosely integrated with processes at the task level. The use of business rules remains largely confined to managing isolated decisions services. Weak integration and isolation effectively relegates rules to an implementing role rather than a first class citizen in the capture and management of enterprise knowledge.

As the largest vendors bring their rules offerings to market and as standards from the W3C and OMG mature to adequacy, the opportunity for vendor-agnostic business rules management systems (BRMS) approaches. And continued improvement in end-user accessibility of BRMS promises ever less technical and ever more semantic expression and management of enterprise knowledge, including process and service models in addition to data models and business rules.