Companies of every size are realizing that smart, simple, agile processes require that operational decisions should be managed, automated, and improved. These high volume transactional decisions must be made to keep data flowing through processes, to empower customers to self-serve, to make systems act more intelligently. As Neil Raden and I discussed in Smart (Enough) Systems, these decisions commonly have distinct characteristics. These decisions are high volume, low latency, and necessary for both straight through processing and unattended operation so they must be automated. Yet they must also change in response to external variability, demonstrate compliance, manage risk, and be personalized so traditional approaches to automation are problematic. Coding decisions in Java makes it hard to show those decisions to a regulator to prove compliance and hard to change the decision making approach quickly and cheaply. It makes it hard for business users to truly collaborate on how these decisions should be made, limiting the ability to bring risk management and personalization to these decisions.

Fortunately, there exists a technology and an approach to deal with these challenges. Instead of using traditional approaches companies attacking the decisions as a separate problem and managing those decisions explicitly. Decision management externalizes these decisions as decision services so they can reused and systematically improved. Decision management replaces traditional procedural code with business rules—declarative, atomic, manageable fragments of business logic. Business rules allow business users to participate in writing business logic.

With Drools 5, JBoss and the open source community have delivered a true business rules management system for the first time. Using Drools, organizations can take control of the logic that drives their operational decisions. They can build simpler, smarter, and more agile business processes and systems.

Michal introduces business rules and JBoss Drools to programmers in this book, walking them through all the major features of the product. Extensive code extracts and worked examples illustrate all the major, and many of the minor, features in the new release. Whether you are new to Drools or used to a previous version, Michal's book will help you navigate the new release. With Drools 5 you can take control of the logic in your systems and manage your decisions for better business results and greater agility, and this book will show you how.

It's time to change the way you build system, time to manage operational decisions, time to put business rules to work.

James Taylor

CEO, Decision Management Solutions

Author, with Neil Raden, of Smart (Enough) Systems (Prentice Hall, 2007)

blog: jtonedm.com, twitter: jamet123