Business infrastructure

Rules Development Environment

Cúram Express Rules (CER) is a language for defining questions that can be asked, and the rules for determining the answers to those questions. The environment for developing CER rules is the CER Rules Editor.

In CER, each question specifies:

• The question name.
• The type of data which provides the answer to the question.
• The rules for providing the answer (if the question is asked).

The answer to a question can be as simple as yes or no. For example, the question "Is this person eligible to receive benefits?". However, CER lets you define answer types to be as complex as you need. For example, the question "Which groups of people in the household have an urgent need?" is answered by providing a list of household groups, with each household group containing a list of people.

The environment for developing CER rules is the CER Rules Editor. This editor provides a user-friendly environment and interface for both technical and business users to create, edit and validate a rule set and its rule classes. For more information on the CER Rules Editor, please see IBM Cúram Express Rules Reference Manual and Working With Cúram Express Rules guides

Eligibility and entitlement processing

The Eligibility and Entitlement Engine provides a mechanism for determining eligibility and entitlement on a case over arbitrary periods of time. This determination allows Cúram to automatically assess and reassess cases, taking into account legislative changes, changes in rates, citizen changes in circumstances, and other complexities.

Eligibility and Entitlement uses Cúram Express Rules for this functionality. The CER engine supports this process by acting on the rules that are defined in the CER Rules Editor and the evidence that is captured on a case. The flexibility of CER rules means they can also be used to define display rules to convey information about a case to business users. These rules can be as terse or as verbose as they need to be.

For more information about the determination of eligibility and entitlement and the CER Rules Engine, see the Inside Cúram Eligibility and Entitlement Using Cúram Express Rules guide.

Workflow

The IBM Cúram workflow management system, which is based on the Workflow Management Coalition's standards, allows organizations to break down business processes into their constituent activities and to then build flexible relationships between them.

Procedural automation of a business process is done by managing the sequence of work activities and the allocation of appropriate human and/or system resources associated with the various activity steps.

The IBM Cúram Workflow Management System comprises an interactive Process Definition Tool used to define the workflow activities and transitions, and a Workflow Engine which manages the workflow in the production environment. It also includes an administration component for maintaining instances of workflow process definitions.

This approach ensures that organizations can implement and manage their processes in a flexible manner and maximizes their ability to respond to change.

Workflow activities may involve an automated step (calling a Cúram Business Process), or a manual step (creating a task for a user to perform manually).