What does IDIOM do?
IDIOM handles the implementation and maintenance of business rules in application software, ensuring that your systems are consistent with and enforce your business policies.
What are Business rules?
Your company relies on a number of software systems to operate efficiently. These systems process transactions, provide reports and enforce rules such as:
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You don’t offer more credit to a customer who hasn’t paid for weeks or is over his credit limit
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You don’t ship goods without a valid purchase order
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You don’t buy expensive machinery without board approval
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You don’t allow an untrained member of staff to operate a crane or drive a lorry
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This person (or type of user) can access some types of information, but not others
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Cover for a young driver with a powerful car must have a minimum $5,000 excess
Business rules drive business decisions, such as decisions about who you do business with and on what terms.
How well do your systems handle business rules?
How do you make sure the rules you have set and by which you want to run your business are being correctly and consistently applied in your business systems?
How do you make sure that the rules you set, and the way you want them to operate, have been recorded correctly in your systems? They can be pretty complicated – how do you know the software supplier has actually understood what you want, let alone implemented it right?
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How can you make sure that important changes in your company’s policies and rules are quickly and correctly reflected in your systems? Failure to implement rule changes quickly can cost you money and damage your company. For example: what if changes in credit control policy designed to manage credit risks are not implemented for several weeks? For as long as it takes to change the systems, you will be taking on more risk.
What if you decide that comprehensive insurance will not be offered to any driver under 25 years old who has a car worth more than $30,000 or engine capacity greater than 2 litres and it takes you a month to change your systems to enforce this change? You will continue to issue policies you have decided are not economicfor this entire period.
Another example: there might be new privacy legislation imposing tougher regulations on data access. If you can’t implement the new rules quickly you might face fines or other sanctions such as being unable to tender for government contracts.The performance of your business is directly impacted by the ability of your systems to manage business rules.
How does IDIOM deal with these issues?
With IDIOM rules can be easily implemented and easily changed to reflect changes in policy or business conditions, and to ensure the decisions generated by your business systems reflect those changes.
To help define and implement rules correctly, IDIOM produces plain English versions of the rules such as (continuing our motor insurance example) “if the customer is under 30 and the car is worth more than $30,000 do not offer comprehensive cover” and generates the computer code needed to run them at the same time.
With IDIOM you don’t need to rely on technical staff to interpret your requirements. As a manager or specialist responsible for setting or implementing policy, you can work alongside a business analyst and specify rules together, using the plain English version of the rules to check that the rules do what you want them to – IDIOM’s unique graphical user interface
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means you could use IDIOM yourself if you wished.
Rules and policies are easily codified, easily verified and easily changed or updated. This is good for the business and good for the IT staff because it greatly simplifies the maintenance of systems (work that is time consuming and takes a large percentage of their resources).
IDIOM rules are created once and stored once
IDIOM does not create rules and proliferate them through dozens of applications resulting in a maintenance nightmare: changes are easy as they only need to be made in one place. Applications – whether new or existing – send a request to IDIOM when a rule is to be applied or a decision to be made. The result is returned to the application.
Rules created and managed by IDIOM can be used by many different applications: they are used by multiple applications – not embedded in them. Privacy and control of access to data is a good example. Information in your company’s database will be accessed by different people with different profiles and by a number of different applications: not everyone needs to (or should) have access to details such as a customer’s home address, financial status, or health records. IDIOM ensures that the rules governing access to data are consistently applied, because all systems use the same access rules.
IDIOM - business rules for business people
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