In a dramatic development, the new release of SBVR (1.1) has replaced the term 'fact type' with 'verb concept'. As a consequence, professionals interested in business vocabularies, business rules, and business semantics should now refer to their deliverable as a 'concept model' rather than a 'fact model'. We believe this development is hugely important. 'Concept model' and 'verb concept' are much more intuitive. They also finally bring some clarity of purpose to the term 'conceptual data model' as used by many data professionals. Is that term even meaningful? This month Ron Ross examines that and related questions.
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Gladys Lam continues her series on the "Top 10 Mistakes Business Analysts Make When Capturing Business Rules." In this month's column, she discusses Mistake #9: Not Having a Business Rule Methodology. Gladys provides some insights into what are some components of a business rule methodology.
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The "IGOE" concept (Input, Guide, Output, Enabler) was created for the purpose of documenting service-oriented processes, with its terms and definitions adapted from earlier, manufacturing-focused techniques to fit into service sector business. Considering that a significant number of organizations in the world are service sector type organizations, it makes sense to have an approach for documenting and understanding process that is intentionally geared toward services. This month, Kathy Long presents an IGOE template and illustrates it with some examples.
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In this series of articles, Terry Halpin has been discussing ontology-based approaches to modeling, with a main focus on popular ontology languages proposed for the Semantic Web, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema (RDFS), and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Last time he explored support for ring constraints within OWL 2. In this ninth instalment, Terry discusses enumerated types as well as value restrictions on properties in OWL 2.
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Many Business Analysts are unaware of the different categories of knowledge and what representation strategy is most successful for the particular kind of knowledge they are dealing with. In this month's issue of the 'Rule Observatory', Silvie Spreeuwenberg first shows how painful it is to use the wrong representation method for a certain kind of knowledge. She then gives a simple strategy that avoids such problems in common situations.
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Consider this interesting enigma. On one hand, Business Rules are gaining momentum due to the need for Agility in automated systems. On the other hand, despite wide appeal and adoption, the Agile methodology has hardly been applied to BRMS. Is there a way to combine both aspects of modern agile systems? In this month's column, Carole-Ann Matignon shares her thoughts on this.
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One area where many business analysts get tripped up is in confusing business rules and business requirements. In this article Ivan Walsh looks at what business rules and business requirements have in common and where they differ.
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This is the twenty-fourth article in a series describing a practical method of developing unambiguous natural language rule statements. 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 continues his discussion of the role of the time dimension in rules — giving a series of fact types supporting temporal rule statements and then expanding the templates to provide for these new types of rule.
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Decision tables and table structures provide a good overview of a set of business rules. Relations between tables model the relations between the final decision and lower-level (intermediate) decisions, while the tables model related business rules with common conditions and outcomes. Experience shows that, although decision table models usually already provide a good representation of the decision logic, there may still be multiple ways to simplify and optimize the model. In this month's column, Jan Vanthienen presents best practices for decision table simplification.
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In his practice, assisting organizations worldwide to develop and implement their Business Process Management (BPM) programs, Roger Burlton has seen both disappointing examples of BPM as well as some very good examples where BPM has been implemented well and is delivering improved and sustainable performance improvement. He has synthesized his observations of the practices and principles that mark the difference between failure and success into a set of principles he believes constitutes an approach to BPM that will assure sustainable management of an organization's process assets. In this month's In Process column, Roger highlights the ten principles that successful organizations follow in their BPM practice.
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Many SBVR rules involve common, generic, cross-domain concepts in subject fields such as Date and Time; Quantities, Scales, and Units of Measures; Locations; and Whole-Part Structures. SBVR tool vendors and users need standard vocabularies for such concepts to improve interoperability among vendors and to ensure that they share the same concepts in the same ways. This month our Standards Reporter, Donald Chapin, reports on the OMG's recent adoption of a beta specification for one of these major foundation vocabularies — the "Date-Time Vocabulary."
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Several recent publications have popularized the topic of "Decision Modeling" — the modeling of business decision logic for and by business users. The OMG has just released an RFP for a Decision Model and Notation (DMN) specification, but that document says little about how DMN might relate to SBVR and BPMN, and there are many open questions. How do SBVR rules relate to decisions? Is there just one or are there multiple decisions per SBVR rule? Is there more to say about how SBVR and DMN relate to BPMN? This month, Mark Linehan and Christian de Sainte Marie provide their perspective on DMN and how it is positioned in the context of the SBVR and BPMN specifications.
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"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."
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