The adoption of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides businesses with the ability to rapidly deploy new applications and easily integrate with other component applications both inside and outside the organization. This
decentralized application environment provides a great deal of flexibility for business units and IT departments, but it also creates difficulty in managing the consistency of business decisions delivered through various applications. Business rules management systems (BRMS) provide a mechanism for managing decision logic and act as a conductor in order to align application decision behavior.

The key to Business Rules Management Systems is the use of a centralized business rules repository, within which resides decision logic applications. Applications communicate with a business rules engine in order to process those business rules specific to the decision required for the particular application and situational context.