Resources

Whitepapers

The following Idiom Software Whitepapers are available for viewing or download.
 
We recommend that you review these resources before using IDIOM to ensure that you understand the concepts and approach behind the products.
 
IDIOM Development Performance

A brief outline of development performance using Idiom Decision Manager in a 100 developer year project.

IDIOM Executive Briefing

This whitepaper discusses an underlying cause of stagnating IT effectiveness, and outlines a new approach to acquiring technology that can improve operating effectiveness while substantially reducing costs.

Decisioning - a new approach to systems development

The term ‘decisioning’ is in growing use in the business systems lexicon. The concept of ‘decisioning’ recognizes the fundamental importance of decision-making to any organization. An organization’s decision-making is the proprietary know-how that drives value and differentiates one organization from another in the marketplace.

This article presents background and definitions for decisioning, as well as outlining practical approaches and techniques for decision-centric development drawn from the author's many ‘decision centric’ development experiences.

IDIOM Decisioning.pdf 16 page PDF file (2.1MB) 27 February, 2009

Decision-centric Rules Modelling

This whitepaper discusses modelling the decision-making process as an explicit part of the business rule model

IDIOM and BizTalk Server

This whitepaper discusses extending BizTalk Server with IDIOM to create a sophisticated modelling environment for the definition of business rules

Architecture briefing

This white paper discusses the normal practice for implementing business rules and how this differs from the Idiom approach.

Evaluation Template

A spreadsheet that presents criteria that can be used to evaluate decisioning tools.

An Introduction to IDIOM Decision Suite

Any discussion of IDIOM must start with a discussion about decisions - what they are, and why they are important. We start with the premise that the decisions that a business makes, and how it makes them, is a critical defining characteristic of the business. Good decision making is at the very core of business success, and how it is approached is an important characteristic that differentiates one business from another.

IDIOM and BPEL4WS

One of the key features of IDIOM is the flexibility enabled in the runtime deployment of the IDIOM decisions and formulas. Deploying IDIOM within a business process managed by BPEL4WS offers further flexibility to the deployment of business rules. IDIOM has been designed from its inception to work in an XML environment and is therefore easily integrated into a web services architecture. By recognising that most business processes have process steps that are predominantly rule based (often decisions impact the flow of a business process i.e. approval etc.), IDIOM is well placed to contribute to a BPEL4WS managed business process.

IDIOM and IBM Business Rule Beans

One of the key features of the IDIOM Decision Suite is the range of options available for deployment of the IDIOM decisions. IDIOM generates simple components that can be integrated into most common architectures. With the release of the recent version of Websphere Enterprise Edition, IBM has added a framework for Business Rule Beans. This white paper illustrates how IDIOM and the Business Rule Beans can be integrated within the IBM Websphere environment to offer a comprehensive rules management strategy.

IDIOM and Rational Unified Process

The purpose of this paper is to describe how business rules are managed within the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and to outline how IDIOM can be used with RUP.

IDIOM and Web Services

One of the key features of IDIOM is the flexibility enabled in the runtime deployment of the IDIOM decisions and formulas. IDIOM generates simple components that can be integrated into most common architectures. This whitepaper seeks to explore options for the deployment of the IDIOM decisions and formulas as web services.