Transoft evolveIT BRM Business Rules Mining

"Many organizations are beginning to realize the potential benefits of identifying the business rules buried in their legacy systems. By mining out the existing core logic that controls the behavior of a business and making this information available to both technical and non-technical user communities, companies can become more agile, implementing new business processes faster, while understanding existing processes more thoroughly".
Dale Vecchio, Gartner Senior Analyst

Business rules are the policies, practices and procedures that define the way your company works. They determine your way of doing business and contribute to your competitive edge. So they are immensely valuable. Many of these business rules have their primary expression in the mission-critical IT systems that support the organization. In most cases these rules have been developed and modified over decades and are buried in these legacy applications. So identifying and documenting these business rules is very difficult but can deliver significant business benefits, such as:

• Improved business agility by being able to rapidly modify business rules to mirror changing business requirements, and free business processes from IT constraints.
• Improved business consistency by consolidating sometimes inconsistent functions into a well defined and documented inventory of business rules.
• Improved technical flexibility by uncoupling your business functionality from underlying technology, allowing you to migrate your business rules to new technologies much more easily.
• Improved customer satisfaction by enabling more customizable product and service offerings.
• Improved corporate regulatory compliance by providing documented business rules to support Sarbanes/Oxley and Basel II governance requirements.
• Improved decision making by testing rule-based scenarios at lower cost.

The process of mining business rules from your legacy COBOL applications

Because business rules are the diamonds of logic in your legacy applications, and are usually buried deep within the applications, they are hard to find. That's why we call business rule identification, documentation and deployment 'Business Rules Mining'.

Business Rules Mining is a process and like any mining process you need good tools to help with the digging. Transoft Business Rules Mining follows an iterative process consisting of five broad phases: understanding, partitioning, identification, consolidation and deployment.

Business rules are the policies, practices and procedures that define the way your company works. They determine your way of doing business and contribute to your competitive edge.

These five process phases are enabled using Transoft evolveIT/BRM, an additional module to the proven application understanding capabilities provided in the core Transoft evolveIT product, plus specialist Transoft Professional Services that can support every phase of your project.

Transoft delivers a proven methodology for Business Rules Mining projects

Understanding - Transoft evolveIT provides comprehensive understanding through powerful graphical views of the application and a range of printed reports, based on an application inventory containing a detailed semantic model of all your relevant application elements: programs, batch jobs, screens, transaction definitions, database schemas etc.

Partitioning - Using the detailed application understanding provided by Transoft evolveIT as your foundation, you can target specific areas of the application you want to investigate for business rules. Transoft evolveIT supports this with the concept of a 'View' within its Inventory - an independently managed area comprising any chosen subset of the Inventory assets.

Identification - Transoft evolveIT/BRM lets you select one or more application 'Seeds', such as specific database items, screen fields or COBOL data fields, and trace either backwards or forwards through a View to identify the pieces of program logic (referred to as Rule 'Sites') that are involved in the processing of the Seed item(s). These pathways are called 'Seams'.

When the actual rules have been identified from the Rule Sites, they can be stored in a team-level (View-level) business rules inventory, where additional documentation and commentary can be added.

Consolidation - It is likely that many business rules will have been duplicated within a large application and that the same rule may have been found independently, with differing implementations, by more than one individual or team. It is important to identify these multiple implementations and record them as such centrally. During this phase, business rules within the specific team inventories are "promoted" to a central inventory. Typically, at this point formal specifications or standardized implementations of the rules are created.

The central rules inventory provides a single reference resource for all its rules. As business requirements and processes change IT and business staff can access the repository to identify the corresponding rules and changes needed to reflect the new business environment.

Deployment - Having populated the central rules inventory, Transoft evolveIT/BRM provides a variety of export capabilities, such as XML documents or feeds, providing flexible deployment of the business rules through rules engines and development tools.

Transoft evolveIT/BRM features

• Uses Transoft evolveIT to provide system wide comprehensive application understanding as starting point for Business Rules Mining process.
• Partitions application into 'Views' to search areas associated with specific business processes instead of 'scanning' entire application for random business rules.
• Allows creation of multiple 'Seams' of investigation within a View.
• Uses wide variety of user defined 'Seeds' to trace through program code to find business 'Rule Sites'.
• Easy to use trace diagrams enable interactive user navigation of the application.
• Multiple 'mark-up' capabilities provide graphical tags to ease business rule identification in code.
• Designed to support multi-user team-based projects.
• Maintains central Business Rules Inventory as a shared asset, with export in a variety of formats, including XML, providing flexible deployment of the rules through rules engines and development tools.

Transoft's Application Migration, Application Modernization and Application Integration tools and solutions can operate in conjunction with Application Mining. They provide you with a comprehensive approach for the evolution of new solutions from your existing applications throughout the entire lifecycle of these applications.

Download a White Paper on Business Rules Mining.

Read more about Transoft tools and services for the ICL VME user.

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