Business Rules Management, BPM, and SOA share a synergistic relationship, especially, when used together to provide agility to an organization. The term 'Agility' can be defined as "the ability of an enterprise to sense and predict change in their environment and respond quickly, efficiently, and effectively to that change." Agility, requires the organization to be flexible enough in introducing change and in modifying their current operations, to achieve higher levels

of performance or output. A process-driven approach to SOA allows business users to introduce changes to the process for faster execution, and with less cost. This value is amplified by using a Business Rules platform alongside process orchestration. If we look at the BPM reference architecture again, rules functionality features in various layers of the architecture, in the initial rules discovery phase, during process mapping, and in its orchestration in the SOA environment.

Business...