Legacy Modernization, Semantics, and the Knowledge Economy ~ Have You Connected the Dots Yet?!
By Ronald G. Ross

Ron Ross writes, "My past several columns have discussed SBVR, opening the door to the knowledge economy. If you think that's just about the web, reconsider!" In this column he discusses how semantics can be applied pragmatically for the nuts and bolts of everyday business — no matter what channel it happens to use. He also explains why semantics and business rules are the only viable path forward for companies struggling to modernize legacy systems and to meet urgent challenges in the marketplace. [ read more ]

This column is the next in a series that provides the reader with best practices on using or choosing a rules engine. The target audience for this series is typically the user of a rule engine, i.e., a programmer or someone with programming skills. All coding examples should be read as pseudo-code and should be easily translated to a specific target syntax for a rule engine that supports backward and forward chaining in an object-oriented environment. In this month's issue of the 'Rule Observatory', Silvie Spreeuwenberg discusses the question of when are method-calls useful in combination with logic expressed as declarative rules. [ 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 third instalment, Roger continues his coverage of the evolution of the process revolution at the stage where some organizations begin to recognize the need for a back to the future revival in their approach to process management. [ read more ]

The name of the SBVR standard might suggest that it is primarily concerned with 'business', in a commercial, for-profit sense. The truth is that the standard opens up new possibilities in many other fields, including education and IT. In education, SBVR gives the opportunity to drop the prevailing stovepipe approach and implement an approach that is characterized by full integration of all subjects. This month, Sjir Nijssen has invited two guest authors, Huub Gillissen and Harry Habets, to share their experiences in a bachelor programme based on SBVR. [ read more ]

This is the fourth in a series of articles on the impact of time on the conceptual modeling of business domains. The previous article focused on how to maintain history of changeable fact types that are nonfunctional (e.g., m:n binaries, or higher arity fact types). In this month's column, Terry Halpin provides yet another way in UML 2 to maintain history of nonfunctional, changeable fact types. He also discusses rigid subtypes and role subtypes, and related dynamic constraints. Three graphical notations are used for examples. [ 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 ]

"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 ]

   

Context is King: A Practical Approach to Rule Mining
By Mannes Neuer

Extracting logic from legacy applications is often used to accelerate rule formulation. However, many 'automated' approaches suffer from two fatal flaws. First, it can be exceedingly difficult to locate and understand highly interdependent logic that has been interwoven into millions of lines of software code. Second, rule miners may often fail to recognize that business rules are in fact creatures of the business and not simply technical entities. Mannes Neuer explores how contextualization and insight into existing applications provides a basis for transforming logic into refined true business rules. He also discusses best practices around semantic capture of technical rules and their abstraction into business rules. [ read more ]

   

Business and IT often speak a different language. Although both are talking about similar concepts, they do so with different purposes, different meanings, and different levels of detail. The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is a successful endeavor to unite the two as it allows for using a language that is understandable by the business, and yet precise and complete enough to be used for IT systems. In this month's column, Jan Vanthienen shares his perspective on the SBVR approach to business modeling. [ read more ]

For the past decade IT vendors have been advertising the claim that their particular product or service ‘bridges from IT to business.’ However, regardless of how valuable their product may have been for some particular purpose, such claims have been empty because a foundational component — the tower of the suspension bridge on the business side — was missing. SBVR provides the foundational bridge component that has been missing since computers began to be used in organizations in the 1950s. Donald Chapin explains how SBVR achieves this. [ read more ]

Completion of the Object Management Group's Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is an important step toward putting information technology under more direct and immediate control of business decision makers. To accomplish this SBVR has defined an XML interchange format so that a variety of tools and services can interoperate in an SBVR Ecosystem. Don Baisley outlines several scenarios that demonstrate how the Ecosystem can deliver on the goal of direct and immediate control. [ read more ]

Now that the SBVR standard has reached approval, what's the next step for SBVR-related standards? One important process is standards maintenance — dealing with the inevitable questions that will come up with the first implementations. This is the job of an OMG-chartered group called the SBVR Revision Task Force (RTF). Mark Linehan, member of the RTF, discusses another important step in the progress of SBVR, the standardization of ‘Foundation Vocabularies’ — terms and fact types for basic cross-industry concepts in areas such as dates and times, quantities, units of measure, and locations. [ read more ]

The architecture for building an interface for rule-based applications is quite straightforward. As when selecting parts for a motorcycle there are a host of vendors that are willing to supply the components. In this month's column, Mark Myers describes three recommended patterns that can be employed when building an application to keep agility and performance at a maximum and maintenance at a minimum. [ read more ]

Previously, Bonnie O'Neil has discussed the importance of well-defined terminology and standard vocabulary in an enterprise. The glossary is also a great place to begin a knowledge capture initiative and to start encouraging businesspeople to contribute their expertise. Last time, she talked about the importance of capturing 'business metadata': all the stuff that is in people's heads, the special knowledge they have about the job that is not written down. In this column, she explores this further, with the name 'Corporate Knowledge Base'. [ read more ]

In last month's column Stan Hendryx discussed the Object Management Group's (OMG) Model-Driven Architecture(TM) in terms of the recently-approved "Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules" (SBVR) specification. That column discussed how concepts are represented and how modeling languages and models are composed. Many models are required to describe fully anything so complex as a business or a distributed information system. In this month's column, attention is turned to the bigger picture of how to organize and relate a series of models that collectively describe a complex business or information system. This is the topic of architecture. [ read more ]