By allowing business analysts and business modelers to draw visual models of business processes and business rules that generate code, Business Rules Engines (BREs) promise to significantly reduce the amount of code that companies have to write. Using Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), BRE business rule models generate the code automatically. That means fewer programmers will needed in the future. As a result, many of the programming jobs going offshore will eventually be displaced by rule engines.

Below is an excerpt from comments made by Bill Gates on March 30, 2004 at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2004, Mastermind Keynote Interview, in San Diego, CA.

“Many of the Holy Grails of computer science that have been worked on for over 30 years will be solved in this 10 year period.”

"We’ll model IT systems to make them behave in very rich automatic ways. We’ll model your business processes so that instead of writing lots of lines of code to customize software for you versus some other company, it’s just going into this visual model and saying our approval process is slightly different, our payment process is slightly different.

So we won’t be writing as much code. We won’t have the kind of complexity that we have today. It’s expressing, without code, exactly what the steps are that need to take place. The heart and soul of this is to take what is required, large amounts of code, and say that a business analyst can do these things.

The beauty of this is the model… The key breakthrough in coding is to write less code.

Corporations and governments need the platform to be so high-level that with these modeling tools the amount of code they’re writing [is decreased].

Within a decade, we should be able to reduce the amount of code [companies] write by at least a factor of five.

The tools should make [sure] you’re expressing those things in a way that a non-programmer can understand.

The [consulting] services get refocused away from writing a bunch of blue code to whatever the true business value is: [designing the business model…] Designing what the resource allocation algorithm should be… Designing how when you’re working with a new partner what the model should be… It’s a real shift in the services model.

We’re talking a 10-year timeframe. This does not happen overnight. This is what the IT industry owes to it’s customers...”

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