We have a pretty small ODM shop at the moment, in which all changes are made by the development team. Knowing that what sets ODM apart from other rule engines (and what we're paying for! :) ) is its ability to have business users make changes with minimal IT involvement. Of course, this is a scary thought for some people, so I need to be prepared for any issues that come up in advance.

One concern I really anticipate is the ability of a user to deviate from a rule's "structure". For the most part, we should be happy with changes like Decision Table contents (without changing the column definition) or in the case of an action rule, something like "add message __ to the response" with the message being changeable, but nothing else. When playing around with templates, I saw that you could freeze portions of a template, and that seems to work when using the Guided Editor in Rule Designer. This would be ideal if it worked beyond that setting, but almost everything else I try (Intellirule editor in Rule Designer, editor in business console, etc) seems to ignore those changes.

It would be really great if those changes were frozen and the business user couldn't even edit the value in their web console. But as an alternative, it would also be fine if the rule could be edited, but an error was given if it didn't match the template upon saving (and changes don't get saved, of course). As a last resort, a check could be made at deployment, but I'd prefer it be caught earlier if possible.

I suspect that this would involve working with the Decision Center API in some way, similar to governance. I am, unfortunately, in the "want to learn more" phase on this aspect of ODM and Decision Center. If that does turn out to be needed, I'd really appreciate a more simple explanation to start.

Thank you!