The business rule management market is starting to see growth around the world as major vendors such as SAS, IBM, Oracle and SAP come to market with more mature and robust solutions. However, the high costs of the technology and resistance to change among large organisations are holding back mass adoption of business rule engines and business rule management systems in South Africa.

Business rule management solutions are meant to enable companies to define, deploy, monitor and maintain organisational policies and the rules associated with them separately from software code. Business users take responsibility for defining business rules, while IT defines software requirements.

In theory, this should allow business users to quickly update business rules in production systems so they can keep pace with an evolving business environment. These business rules represent the enterprise’s core business logic, guiding and controlling the basic business processes that form the backbone of any transaction.