Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence

TURNING OPERATIONAL KNOWLEDGE & COMPLIANCE INTO A COMPETITIVE EDGE

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Posts Tagged ‘AI’

Additional Response to: Business Rules vs. Expert Systems – Same or Different?

guest post by Ryan Trollip, Practice Director, Decision Management – www.prolifics.com ‘Expert system’ covers a pretty broad swath. Rules engines in the business world, in practicality, and in the majority of implementations, are simply operationalizing decisions, whether derived by predictive modeling or prescriptive business rules (e.g., regulatory). The conditions that reach a decision are largely pre-determined and operationalized in the rules system. Yes, there is a RETE algorithm involved. But don’t be fooled, this doesn’t give it intelligence, it is simply a style of execution. You can argue that in some implementations, sequential (non-forward chaining) is sufficient. In the real world, the management tools for rules systems, in my opinion, are more important than the algorithm. They have become the focus to externalize rules and allow for rapid change. I wouldn’t call a business rules system an expert system although you could probably create one with the tools out there. It’s simply a specialization much like how DBMS came about to better handle data. Not as sexy as AI, imperfect reasoning, etc., but certainly useful and practical.

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Follow-Up on ‘Harvesting Business Rules’: Business Rules vs. Expert Systems

The guest post by Cecilia Pearce earlier this week (http://goo.gl/QL9zL) stirred up an unexpected controversy, one that deserves clarification – are business rules and expert systems the same? No!  Business Rules  Business rules are organizational rules created for the purpose of running day-to-day business operations. Business rules always have an original source in the form of some law, act, statute, regulation, contract, agreement, business deal, business policy, license, certification, service level agreement, etc. I often like to say that business rules are really about keeping commitments. Expert Rules  In response to Cecilia’s post, Rolando Hernandez explains:

 “If you need to go beyond gathering [i.e., harvesting or mining] business rules to trying to understand “The Knowledge” [sic] that experts know, how experts think and decide, what the expert rules are, or what the higher-level heuristic rules are, then knowledge engineers … will keep using “knowledge acquisition” (KA), “knowledge representation” (KR), and “knowledge engineering” (KE). AI guys know that means.”

In other words, expert rules arise from an individual who is outstanding at his particular knowledge task. That’s very different. Expert Systems  Wikipedia describes expert systems as follows: 

 software that uses a knowledge base of human expertise for problem solving, or to clarify uncertainties where normally one or more human experts would need to be consulted … a traditional application and/or subfield of artificial intelligence (AI)”

Bob Whyte, a practitioner for a major insurance company, makes the following observation about the difference between business rules and expert systems[1]:

“What makes the real-world challenge of managing business rules so much more tractable than it appeared to academics and researchers in the1980s, the heyday of knowledge engineering and expert systems, is that in the day-to-day business world the institution plays role of ‘god’. 

… for business rules the problem is not one of having to discover and define hidden, unknown or unexpressed rules, which takes you into byzantine solution spaces, but rather one of documenting known rules invented overtly and explicitly by actual historical person(s). 

With business rules you are generally not discovering rules no one has ever consciously considered, but rather uncovering rules that some manager, lawyer or other expert decided on one day, but probably did not record simply for lack of an appropriate infrastructure for rulebook management.”

Excellent clarification!
[1] from Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules, by Ronald G. Ross with Gladys S.W. Lam, An IIBA® Sponsored Handbook, 2011, pp. 257-258http://www.brsolutions.com/bbs 

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Business Rules and Expert Systems/AI … Friends or Foes?

There are very important differences in the traditions of business rules vs. expert systems. Perhaps that’s why business rules had a completely different origin. In any case, they didn’t start finding each other until the late 1990s. (The first Business Rules Forum Conference was in 1997 … and every year since except in 2000.) The general goal of expert systems was broadly to mimic intelligent behavior – any kind of intelligent behavior. As a colleague put it, that’s like trying to read the mind of God. Human behavior (even the not-so-intelligent kind) is exceeding complex. The goal of business rules was always to capture the rules of organizations, not individuals. That’s one or two or more orders of magnitude easier – those rules have to come from somewhere … and that ‘somewhere’ was originally knowable (even if an arbitrary design decision by some programmer). So the issue with business rules is as much about business traceability (rule management) as it is expression. This problem goes right to the very heart of business governance and business agility. Continuing to embed business rules in procedural code (a) makes the business rules very difficult to trace, and (b) very difficult and expensive to change. It’s like setting the rules in concrete. It also precludes the possibility in the future of supporting specification-time detection of anomalies and intelligent dialogs to help Business Analysts remove ambiguity. For business rules, it ultimately comes down to the words you use and ‘remembering’ the interpretations made of them. There’s no way to demonstrate compliance without words, and no way to support transparency and accountability without traceability. The solution to all these problems, which are problems of business governance and therefore business engineering, leads inevitably in one direction. That’s why I’ve put so much time into researching business rules since the early 1990s and before. (Originally we thought in terms of databases and integrity constraints, another difference in origin from expert systems.) It’s also why I’ve spent so much time on the SBVR standard over the past 6 years or more. (At the risk of oversimplifying hugely, SBVR is about words and sentences.) The bottom-line: The way we do things today simply has to change. Change does take time. It also takes false starts and trial-and-error. But we’ll get there. Hey, business automation is barely one human generation old. That’s incredibly fast in the big scheme of things. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  Read more about the history of business rules: http://www.brcommunity.com/history.php    

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