Ab Initio features an intuitive interface for expressing business rules — for capturing and operationalizing the important business logic at the heart of enterprise applications.
Using an intuitive, spreadsheet-like environment, business experts and data analysts can interact directly with data to develop, test, and debug their own business rules without having to learn traditional programming languages or work through software developers. They can update business rules easily as conditions change, incorporate new data or new logic, test their changes, and even promote their changes (with the appropriate permissions) into production, all without involving IT.
How do you provide transparency when your software is a black box?
For business analysts, a complex software system can seem like a very large, opaque black box. Data goes in one end and results come out the other end. Then it’s time to evaluate the data. Is it correct? Does it make sense? Without knowing exactly where the data came from and what transformations were performed, evaluating the quality and validity of the results can be challenging.
For one major bank, the lack of transparency had become a serious problem. Business analysts approached the software with trepidation, as though a mysterious machine periodically handed them results to evaluate. That made it very difficult for them to work with engineering to develop and implement business logic, jeopardizing the project’s success.
After looking at a variety of different technologies, the bank chose Ab Initio for their new system. Ab Initio is easy for even non-technical people to use. Ab Initio makes it possible to implement a complete business dictionary and full data lineage. All the information the analysts needed was now at their fingertips. Instead of having to solve mysteries, they knew where the data came from and what had been done to it. For maybe the first time ever, the analysts felt that they really understood exactly what was happening.
Even better, analysts could easily develop their own rules instead of having to work through developers. In addition to the analysts knowing the path taken by the data, they were now directly involved in creating that path.
The opaque black box is now transparent; life is now much better.