Business Language Authoring

Authoring is the process of encoding business decision logic into structured rules and actions that can be evaluated by a rules engine.   In order to create rules, authors must understand both the business intent and how to encode rules in the authoring tool.  Because of this, the quality and ergonomics of the authoring experience are absolutely essential to getting rules just right.  With this in mind, it is important to use a high quality authoring tool that will provide an intuitive authoring experience if the desired functionality is to be achieved.  The resulting rules are the actual business logic of the application and they must be understood by the business as well as by the engine.  

InRule's Business Language Authoring tool was created to bring the authoring experience closer to the business user through a combination of English rule representation and an interactive point and click interface.  Business Language Authoring provides easy to use guided experience that does not reduce authoring capability in spite of its simplicity.  Our interface approach supports authors in quickly creating rules without forcing them to learn a complicated technical syntax in order to take advantage of the business knowledge they already possess.  The Business Language Authoring engine monitors the author and presents context sensitive pick lists: lists that show only acceptable values based on what has already been authored.  As authors create rule constructs, Business Language Authoring visually prompts them for additional values that are required as well as depicts what the author can do to extend their rule from its current form.

Many point and click authoring interfaces make authors feel like they are like putting their pants on after their shoes because of the order in which they ask the business user to enter rules.  For example, some authoring tools require authors to pick an operator template before they pick what they want to operate on.  This can be very frustrating in the cases where there is still uncertainty about what the final rule is going to look like.  Authoring is not just about encoding rules, it is a canvas for solving business problems and as such it needs to support iteratively arriving at clean solutions.  Sometimes the creation of a rule starts with the structure and sometimes it starts with a piece of information that the author knows to be relevant.  InRule supports both of these approaches, giving rule authors the option to pick a template and fill in the blanks, or choose a value and see what they can do with it from there.

Authoring is a business oriented process, and as such, the user interface and visualization tools used by the author must address varying degrees of technical sophistication.  Authoring tools need to be aligned to the business for rule creation, and aligned to the software developers for execution.  InRule's Business Language Authoring bridges this gap between business users and software developers, resulting in improved transparency and understanding for both.