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Business Rules:  Birth of a Movement

by Ronald G. Ross

This column originally appeared in the May/June 1994 issue of the Data Base Newsletter.

Mark this year as the official date of birth for a new approach to developing information systems:  business rules.

For the record, this approach is not the invention of any single person, nor the result of any single event.  Rather, it represents the rapid coalescence of many people’s ideas and many individual breakthroughs.  The Newsletter is proud of its continuing role as catalyst in this process.

As object orientation is to structured analysis, design, and programming, business rules is to Martin-style information engineering (IE).  In other words, it is a successor, commanding higher theoretical ground and correcting practical flaws of its predecessor.

Also, just as Martin-style IE encompassed the best concepts of the structured movement, so too business rules will encompass the best concepts of object orientation (e.g., inheritance and abstract data types, including encapsulated methods).  It is much more, however, than object orientation as we now understand it -- and much more fully adapted to the special needs of business information systems (i.e., of databases).

Business rules offers both an innovative ideology for information systems development, as well as a distinctive technological contribution.  The ideology is expressed in the pragmatic definition of a business rule offered by Terry Moriarty of The Bank of California:  A business rule is an assertion which describes an essential concept, relationship, or constraint about the business.

At the risk of oversimplifying, read this definition as follows.  'Concept' means a definition for a business thing (e.g., a business object).  'Relationship' means interaction between such things.  'Constraint' means rule.  Here are the important points:

  • First, a business rule is an assertion, which is to say that it does not start life as a model.  (CASE has put the cart before the horse in this regard.)

  • Second, a business rule is about the business -- of the business community, by the business community, and for the business community.  (It therefore must be non-technical and non-procedural.)

  • Third (this is implicit), a business rule is something that can change.  This implies that the approach must be so integrated with the business that changing the business and changing information systems are viewed as identical.  (In a technical sense, this means 'repository' as a 'given. ')

  • Fourth, a business rule can be a constraint (a. k. a. rule -- something that does not translate into "data" (or objects or relationships) per se.  This is where the real technical whizbang begins.

The special technological contribution of business rules appears for these rules.  Dick McKee of The Travelers and I have defined a rule as something that references current state and constrains, enables, or causes as a result.  Here are the important points:

  • First, 'current state' may refer either to the business itself, or to a surrogate, in the form of an information store (i.e., a database).  Which is "correct" depends on the level of discourse.
  • Second, the target of the rule’s ‘constraining, enabling, or causing’ purposely is left unspecified.  It may or may not be an action (or method), which may or may not be considered part of the rule.  In other words, rules are rules, and actions are actions.
  • Third, there is no sense of how any of the above is accomplished.  Rules are nonprocedural (i.e., purely declarative),  in contrast to actions, which are innately procedural (i.e., always describe a step-by-step recipe for how something is accomplished).

This focus on declarative rules, in preference to procedural logic, distinguishes business rules from other approaches to information systems development, including Martin-style IE and most of object orientation.  It is where business rules derives its special flavor, as well as unprecedented opportunities for higher-order automatic generation of code.  It also positions business rules as the next evolutionary step in database thinking -- a heritage that dates to the mid 1960s.

Much progress is being made about how to specify business rules declaratively.  This work seems to be occurring in two major tracks.

  1. At the business strategy level, a rule may refer either to some heuristic aimed at achieving broad business objectives, or to some significant impediment therein.  I believe this will require new business modeling techniques that look nothing like the data models (or object models or business activity models) of today.
  2. At the business operations level, a rule means establishing criteria for database integrity in declarative fashion.  Data models (or object models) can be used directly as a platform for new modeling approaches that address this important requirement.  As previously discussed in the Newsletter’s Business Rule Forum, I believe Ross Method (formally published in the first quarter of 1994) is an important landmark in this regard.  My article in this issue of the Newsletter describes the basics of that technique.

Just as new methodologies and techniques for business rules now are emerging, software tools surely will follow.  This will be exciting.  I expect both new business simulation and prototyping tools to address the business strategy level, as well as new rule-based code generation tools and/or new DBMS extensions (or new DBMS) to address the business operations level.  Producing and proving these will take time, but accelerating market demand should push it along rapidly.

Now the caveat:  Do not allow software vendors to sell you a bill of goods.  There are no tools on the market today (of which I am aware) that achieve business rules in the full sense of the definitions above, including the crucial part about rules.  Vendors naturally are prone to sell whatever they happen to have.  New insights about business rules, however, increasingly indicate that what they have is not altogether what we need.


standard citation for this article:
Ronald G. Ross, "Business Rules:  Birth of a Movement," Data Base Newsletter, Vol. 22, No. 3 (May/Jun. 1994), URL:  http://www.BRCommunity.com/a1994/a294.html.

November/December 1999
The Fin de Siegle Legacy Mindset
By Ronald G. Ross

September/October 1999
Analysis Paralysis Just May Save Your Life
By Ronald G. Ross

July/August 1999
If We Had Started Coding Already...
By Ronald G. Ross

May/June 1999
Your Core Business Processes Need a Rule Engine
By Ronald G. Ross

January/February 1999
Four Things Wrong with the Way We Develop Information Systems
By Ronald G. Ross

November/December 1998
Push-Type Data Hub vs. Pull-Type Data Warehouse
By Ronald G. Ross

September/October 1998
What Knowledge Management is About (And What it Has To Do With Business Rules)
By Ronald G. Ross

May/June 1998
The Next Great Leap Forward ~ About the Changes You See
By Ronald G. Ross

March/April 1998
Business Rules as Customer Interface
By Ronald G. Ross

January/February 1998
Components and Business Rules: Do They Connect?
By Ronald G. Ross

November/December 1997
The Policy Charter: A Small-Sized Picture of the Big Picture
By Ronald G. Ross

September/October 1997

Implementing Application Packages: Is There A Better Way?

By Ronald G. Ross


July/August 1997

'Why' is Why Business Rule Methodology is Different

By Ronald G. Ross


May/June 1997

Never-ending On-the-Job Training

By Ronald G. Ross


September/October 1996

Re-Usability in the Business Rule Approach

By Ronald G. Ross


March/April 1996

The Newest Idea In Business Rules: Rules Normalize!

By Ronald G. Ross


January/February 1996

An Open Letter to DBMS Vendors: We Need Active Database Systems

By Ronald G. Ross


May/June 1995

The Greatest Irony Of The Information Age: Business Rules

By Ronald G. Ross


November/December 1995

Business Rules: Knowledge For Knowledge Workers

By Ronald G. Ross


March/April 1994

"Play Ball!"

By Ronald G. Ross


November/December 1999 & January/February 2000

Enterprise Architecture: Issues, Ingibitors, and Incentives

By John A. Zachman


July/August & September/October 1999

Packages Don't Let You Off The Hook

By John A. Zachman


November/December 1988

The History Of Steam-Powered Ships

By Ronald G. Ross


January/February & March/April 1999

Life Is a Series of Trade-Offs and Change Is Accelerating!

By John A. Zachman


January/February 1994

"Business Rules, At What Cost?"

By Ronald G. Ross


November/December 1998

"Yes Virginia, There IS an Enterprise Architecture"

By John A Zachman


May/June 1994

Business Rules:  Birth of a Movement

By Ronald G. Ross


January/February 2000

Business Systems And Information Support Systems 

By John Hall


July/August 1998

Enterprise Architecture:  Looking Back and Looking Ahead

By John A. Zachman


July/August 1991

Why I Like the Zachman Framework Architecture"

By Ronald G. Ross


January/February 1998

The Framework for Enterprise Architecture (The 'Zachman Framework') and the Search for the Owner's View of Business Rules

By John A. Zachman


March/April 1997

Business Process Re-Engineering

By Ronald G. Ross

 

 

 about . . .

 RONALD G. ROSS

Ronald G. Ross is Principal and Co-Founder of Business Rule Solutions, LLC, where he actively develops and applies the IPSpeak methodology including RuleSpeak®, DecisionSpeak and TableSpeak.

Ron is recognized internationally as the "father of business rules." He is the author of ten professional books including the groundbreaking first book on business rules The Business Rule Book in 1994. His newest are:

Ron serves as Executive Editor of BRCommunity.com and its flagship publication, Business Rules Journal. He is a sought-after speaker at conferences world-wide. More than 50,000 people have heard him speak; many more have attended his seminars and read his books.

Ron has served as Chair of the annual International Business Rules & Decisions Forum conference since 1997., now part of the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference. He was a charter member of the Business Rules Group (BRG) in the 1980s, and an editor of its Business Motivation Model (BMM) standard and the Business Rules Manifesto. He is active in OMG standards development, with core involvement in SBVR.

Ron holds a BA from Rice University and an MS in information science from Illinois Institute of Technology. For more information about Mr. Ross, visit www.RonRoss.info, which hosts his blog. Tweets: @Ronald_G_Ross

 

 





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