Business rules cover all the kinds of guidance needed for day-to-day business operations. Business rules fall into two fundamental categories: rules that shape concepts, and rules that guide human activity. These rules are called 'definitional rules' and 'behavioral rules', respectively. Understanding guidance from the perspective of business people also involves non-rules (advices), guidelines, business policies, and more. Ron Ross explains everything the business analyst needs to understand about the basics of business rules.
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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 introduced the basics of RDF schema. In this third instalment Terry covers RDFS and then introduces different flavors of the Web Ontology language (OWL).
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Over the holiday, Kathy Long was talking to some friends in the financial sector about the current economic crisis. They had a record year in 2008 and a good year in 2009. Curious about how they were able to accomplish this incredible feat when the majority of other organizations in their industry were struggling to survive, she asked what they did. This month, Kathy shares some insights from the (almost) too simple answer.
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Decision management transforms your hard-to-change enterprise applications into action-oriented, flexible, predictive, smarter systems that learn and adapt. Smarter systems don't require ripping out and replacing existing applications. Smarter systems are simply your current systems made smarter. This month, James Taylor explains how Decision Management can transform your enterprise backbone into smarter systems using a simple three-step process: Decision Discovery, Decision Services, and Decision Analysis.
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How many times have you heard someone complain that ‘things are so complicated because of the many exceptions in our organization’? In last month's 'Rule Observatory', Silvie Spreeuwenberg examined what it takes to describe exceptions as business rules. Now, with our exceptional cases described by 'just some more rules', Silvie takes a closer look at what options a software developer has to program such rules for automated software support.
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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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Mark Myers decided to ride his motorcycle to the Business Rules Forum in Las Vegas last Fall and the long ride, on a straight road, gave him time to ponder the question of "basic transportation" — is his bike basic transportation? Those thoughts moved on to some parallels with questions his architecture team had recently mulled over. In this month's column, Mark shares how those questions about the "basics" led the team to ask, "Do we really need a rules engine?" The answer may surprise you.
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The 2009 Business Rules Forum hosted a panel discussion by vendors whose products are innovators in the business rules arena. The four panelists who sat on the 2009 Business Rules Forum Vendor Panel responded to audience questions, sharing their perspectives on the future direction of the BRMS market.
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It is safe to assume that when starting up a process initiative, not all points of view, interests, and judgment criteria will be known. We may be unaware of one another's criteria even if we think we are aware. If we can be made aware of the different points of view then we can at least have a plan to get our perspectives aligned. In this month's In Process column, Roger discusses a quadrant of possibilities that we may start with and he provides an action plan for attaining a position of confidence and commitment to the effort at hand, depending on the going-in position of awareness and alignment.
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This is the thirteenth 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 enhances the set of business rule guidelines in a detailed examination of the rules that govern flight check-in and boarding. He ends with a recap of quality assurance of rule statements, listing criteria that can be used to test the quality of a rule statement.
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Now that most business rule tools, methods, and models also contain a tabular form of business decision rules, it is a good idea to revisit the fundamentals of good decision table design, as laid out more than a decade ago and now again coming into their own. In this month's column, Jan Vanthienen reminds us of the striking similarity between decision tables and databases, and points to earlier work on how good decision table design and good database design are subject to similar concerns, such as consistency, non-redundancy, normalization, etc.
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In this month's 'Semantics for Business', Sjir Nijssen's invited guest author concludes his history of the Orange Report ("ISO Orange Report TR 9007 – Concepts and Terminology for the Conceptual Schema and the Information Base"), an early body of work that recognized the importance of formalizing the semantics of information. Joost J. van Griethuysen shares his perspective on how this widely-acclaimed early publication relates to SBVR.
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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.
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