A BRMS includes, at minimum: • A repository, allowing decision logic to be externalized from core application code • Tools, allowing both technical developers and business experts to define and manage decision logic • A runtime environment, allowing applications to invoke decision logic managed within the BRMS and execute it using a
business rules engine The top benefits of a BRMS include: • Reduced or removed reliance on IT departments for changes in live systems. Although, QA and Rules testing would still be needed in any enterprise system. • Increased control over implemented decision logic for compliance and better business management including audit logs, impact simulation and edit controls. • The ability to express decision logic with increased precision, using a business vocabulary syntax and graphical rule representations (decision tables, decision models, trees, scorecards and flows) • Improved efficiency of processes through increased decision automation. Some disadvantages of the BRMS include: • Extensive subject matter expertise can be required for vendor specific products. In addition to appropriate design practices (such as
Decision Modeling), technical developers must know how to write rules and integrate software with existing systems • Poor rule harvesting approaches can lead to long development cycles, though this can be mitigated with modern approaches like the
Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard. • Integration with existing systems is still required and a BRMS may add additional security constraints. • Reduced IT department reliance may never be a reality due to continued introduction to new business rule considerations or object model perturbations • The coupling of a BRMS vendor application to the business application may be too tight to replace with another BRMS vendor application. This can lead to cost to benefits issues. The emergence of the
DMN standard has mitigated this to some degree. Most BRMS vendors have evolved from
rule engine vendors to provide business-usable
software development lifecycle solutions, based on declarative definitions of business rules executed in their own rule engine. BRMSs are increasingly evolving into broader digital decisioning platforms that also incorporate decision intelligence and
machine learning capabilities. However, some vendors come from a different approach (for example, they map decision trees or graphs to executable code). Rules in the repository are generally mapped to decision services that are naturally fully compliant with the latest
SOA,
Web Services, or other software architecture trends. ==Related software approaches==