Every company has a general ledger system to manage its finances as an enterprise concern. Why not a business system for rulebook management, to organize its business rules as an enterprise concern? Improved governance practices for companies moving into the knowledge economy will demand it. The problem is that the industry currently has no name for such a system. In this month's brief column Ron Ross proposes "general rulebook system" — and requests your feedback. [ read more ]

In this, the second of two articles on Six Sigma and Decision Management, James Taylor concludes his discussion of the topic of 'Six Sigma', which was pioneered by Motorola in the 1980s. This month, James Taylor provides an example of applying Decision Management in a Six Sigma project, showing how you can integrate Decision Management into Six Sigma and use these two complimentary approaches together. [ read more ]

'KISS' Process Modeling Technique
By Kathy Long

Last time, Kathy Long introduced the "KISS Approach" to process, highlighting some of the problems caused by attempting to include 'business rules' in a process model. This month, Kathy continues with the example process "Payment of a Cell Phone Bill" and examines various ways the business rules might be reflected in the process model. [ read more ]

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Temporal Modeling (Part 7)
By Dr. Terry Halpin

In this series on the impact of time on the conceptual modeling of business domains, the previous two columns introduced some patterns for maintaining history of objects as they migrate between subtypes. First we learned about the 'decreasing disjunctions' pattern to maintain history of migration between subtypes when the state transition graph is linear. As an alternative way to maintain history of objects as they migrate from one role subtype to another, we then learned about the 'once-only role-playing' pattern, for linear state transition cases. But these patterns cannot be used to maintain history where a role may be repeatedly played more than once during an object's lifetime. In this seventh article Terry Halpin discusses a third pattern, the 'repeatable role-playing' pattern, to handle such cases. [ read more ]

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What happened to the B and the M of BRM? ... and how the new notion of business rules documentation got introduced
By Drs. Silvie Spreeuwenberg

Has the term 'business rules management' taken on a new meaning in recent years? In this month's issue of the 'Rule Observatory', Silvie Spreeuwenberg takes a closer look at the 3 words in the term 'business rules management' to understand the problem and proposes a solution. [ read more ]

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The Zachman Framework and Observations on Methodologies
By John A. Zachman

"Calling All Zach-o-lites!" (and also any Zachman Framework 'newbies'). In this month's feature, John Zachman talks about just what a "MOTHER OF ALL METHODOLOGIES" might be, returning us all to a reasonable playing field by explaining that, "I am confident that the only way an integrated, interoperable, aligned (etc., etc.) Enterprise will ever be achieved is by creating and managing the architectural primitives as defined by the Framework with those Enterprise engineering design objectives in mind, quite independently from the implementation methodologies being employed." [ read more ]

Convincing a business-oriented decision maker to adopt business rules technology for an organization can be a tough sell. In this month's feature, Manny Gandarillas shares some of the difficulties he has encountered in making a clear case for the technology, as well as how some of the selling points have been tempered by experience. He wraps up his tale with a light-hearted look into the "private thoughts" of three main roles impacted by rules technology — business executives, programmers, and SMEs as they react to each of the selling points. [ read more ]

This is the sixth in a series that describes a practical method of developing rule statements that are in natural language (thus able to be verified by stakeholders) and unambiguous (thus able to be implemented consistently within the organisation and the parties with which it deals). Graham Witt has developed this method for a large Australian government agency that has selected the Business Rules Approach and the Object Management Group's Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) as representative of best rules practice. In this instalment Graham discusses the expression of complex data items, repeating groups of data items, ternary fact types, uniqueness constraints, and constraints on combinations of data items. He updates the templates needed and the evolving rule taxonomy. [ read more ]

In this month's issue of the 'Semantics for Business', Sjir Nijssen has invited a guest author to give some of the history of the Orange Report and to summarize its basic subjects. The "ISO Orange Report TR 9007 – Concepts and Terminology for the Conceptual Schema and the Information Base" is a widely acclaimed early publication that recognized the importance of formalizing semantics of information. This column is the fourth in a series on the Orange Report. In this instalment Joost J. van Griethuysen recaps the modelling approaches that were studied as candidates for a conceptual modelling approach. [ read more ]

This month our Standards Reporter Donald Chapin invites Paul Vincent to report some news from the OMG PRR (Production Rule Representation) team's meeting last week. A standard practice in BPM-BRMS is to 'model' decision rules using notations like decision tables and trees, and then transform these either to some custom algorithm or production rules as defined in PRR. Since the BPMN2 'business rule task' does not have a standard model or notation (beyond the notation icon) the PRR team is proposing to fill this gap with a "Decision Model and Notation RFP." Any interested OMG member is encouraged to join in on this discussion. [ read more ]

In this month's "Plainly Speaking" column, Gladys S. W. Lam talks about business rules and business requirements. She describes how they are different and how they impact each other. [ read more ]

Business Process Management (BPM) as an organizational regimen is very tricky to get your head around due to its multi-disciplined nature. Depending on who you talk to, it can be positioned as many things for many purposes and that is the heart of its misunderstanding and frequent sub-optimization. In this series, Roger Burlton treats BPM's diversity and breadth as its strength when viewed from a standpoint other than that of a functional perspective or a single point of view. He proposes that, handled well, BPM should be no more that the application of common sense to logical business problems and opportunities. In this concluding instalment, Roger covers some of the methodology fundamentals of BPM. [ read more ]