Business Rules for Business People

IDIOM is concerned with business rules for business people. This fundamental axiom underpins both the runtime architecture and the user's view of the tool suite. Rules must be owned and managed by the individuals who are as close to the 'source of truth' as possible - that is, by business people.

IDIOM separates the management of rules and business knowledge from the technical issues involved in application development, thereby removing some of the organisational obstacles to knowledge management. This clarifies and simplifies the system architecture with benefits on both sides. On the rules side the organisation is free to manage knowledge either by developing its own rules repository or by assigning this responsibility to its solution provider or rules vendor. On the technical side, components are freed of business-specific content, making them more reusable.

Introduction to IDIOM (html)    (pdf version)

The IDIOM system architecture

For application developers IDIOM simplifies life by removing the necessity to program rules. Instead, applications access business rules by calling on the IDIOM Decision Service. The Decision Service is IDIOM's runtime component: it consists of a shell (the Decision Engine) that acts as a container for the organisation's business rules in the form of generated code. Calls on the Decision Service always follow the same simple pattern. The application sends the decision server a request containing all the business data required as input to the decisions to be made. The server executes the appropriate business rules, stores their results in the request and returns the request to the application.