Smart (Enough) Systems by James Taylor and Neil Raden introduces a new IT concept: Enterprise Decision Management (EDM). The core problem solved by EDM is knowing what's the right decision to make within your processes and activities and how to make it when required. InfoQ talked to one of the authors to better understand the concept of decision services and their relationship to Service Oriented Architecture. James comments:
SOA has helped a lot. Decision services represent a growing class of services in the enterprise. Until recently, applications were monolithic. The temptation was just too big to write it all in one language. In most cases, it was only when there was no other alternatives that architects and developers replaced code with rules. As people have thought about SOA more cleanly, most good development teams are thinking in terms of reusable, manageable services. Suddenly the barrier to create and reuse decision services does not seem so high. Business rule vendors see SOA as a major driver behind BRMS adoption.
The book draws examples from all industries: financial, retail, manufacturing, high tech...
The authors and the publisher shared with us Chapter 10 which explains the architecture of EDM in their IT context.