Sapiens: tackling a dirty little secret in Decision Management

Just as is the case in so many business process automation projects, there’s a ‘dirty little secret’ in decision management and business rules automation – a big chunk of the time and money it takes to complete a project isn’t spent on the core knowledge work of modelling; it’s taken up by technical integration tasks.

Of course, every decision management or business rules vendor has an integration capability of some kind: the proportion of real-world use cases that require no data to be gathered from external sources is very small indeed.

But there’s a big difference between being able to suck data from an existing DBMS using SQL or a REST API as an input to a rule or ruleset, and being able to work seamlessly with a data store that reflects the business domain model you’ve designed; and being able to do so in a way that makes it easy not only to get input data, but also to write back data so that you can use it for later analysis of decision effectiveness and improvement.

The new Sapiens DECISION InfoHub implements the latter, larger capability – and with its launch Sapiens is adding significant value.

InfoHub is designed to act as the primary data management environment for your executable decision models. The underlying data management layer is based on the Apache Cassandra distributed database technology, and on top it layers:

• Extract-transform-load (ETL) functionality, to pull data in from external sources.
• Synchronisation, to enable changes in reference systems to be reflected immediately (rather than being replicated via a batch process).
• Object-level security (each instance of a business object, for example Customer, is encrypted using unique keys).

The release of InfoHub is part of the introduction of a new package called DECISION Suite – bundling together DECISION Manager, a native rule execution environment, DECISION Deployment Adapters (for if you want to deploy rules to a third-party rule engine), InfoHub and support for the company’s newly-packaged implementation methodology, DECISION STEP.

Decision management is a discipline and technology area that’s seeing a lot of development and interest – as a way create and scale actionable insights and a way to drive profit – and you can expect to see more from us on this topic through this year.

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