Business Decisioning and Business Rules Implementation

Business Rules at Any Cost

What is your business rules management program like? Many organizations can't answer this question because they don't have a rules management initiative in motion. Companies which don't place an emphasis on the discovery/capture of business rules, their analysis and synthesis into the organization's operations, and their subsequent introduction into production (i.e. rules execution) can be at a disadvantage. Because business rules are the constraints on your business (how you introduce and manage products and services, how you engage your customers and trading partners, and how you address your competitive threats) and because they're interweaved throughout your business processes, a program to manage and deploy rules is paramount.

Enterprise Agility's business rules practice is divided into four areas: Business Rules Analysis; Business Rules Modeling; Business Rules Lifecycle Management; Business Rules Deployment.

Business Rules Analysis

Rules analysis comprises all of the front-end activities that help organizations harness their rules. We help companies harvest legacy rules from application code and a myriad of other obscure sources; discover and document new business rules; and, most important, help business analysts and their business users with pair analysis of business rules. New business rules are often not expressed as pure rules but, rather, stakeholder requests, business requirements and even defect reports for existing enterprise software applications. We mentor teams in how to refactor these disparate sources into viable and measurable business rules that can be modeled and ultimately deployed in the organization. Finally, we teach organizations how to document and organize business rules so that they are traceable to the objectives of the company.

Business Rules Modeling

Business rules are constraints on your business, which is knowledge about the business in its purest form. This knowledge is atomic, meaning that it's expressed in its simplest form and cannot be broken down or decomposed any further. Knowledge about your business should be incremental-each tidbit of knowledge may be built upon previous knowledge about the business. Such an approach is the underpinning of what is described as inference knowledge. Business rules that are truly inference rules rely on previous knowledge to assert new knowledge. The organization that treats its business rules as inference rules can then begin to structure complex, yet elegantly easy to understand, networks of inferred knowledge, or inference networks. Examples of an inference network, also known as a rule set, could be claim processing rules, underwriting rules, diagnostic rules, and scoring rules.

Such inference networks should be visible to the business users who discover and manage the knowledge about the business. Enterprise Agility helps organizations visually model business rules so they can see each rule's relationship to one or more other rules. Visually modeling rules helps people grasp how rules are leveraging previous knowledge about the business (i.e. constraints on products, services, customers and trading partners). We teach non-technical business users how to use advanced tools to help them model and analyze business rules in one or more inference networks.

Business Rules Lifecycle Management

Though an important best practice of business rules management is to empower business users with the tools and skills to help them manage their own rules (as opposed to the IT staff), it is important to incorporate the business rules management program into the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Even though rules should ideally be harvested (i.e. removed) from application code and other obscure sources, the methodology of business rules management should complement an organization's SDLC.

Enterprise Agility helps IT organizations and their business user constituencies incorporate business rules management components into the software development lifecycle. We teach teams how to integrate rules analysis activities with co-dependent requirements management activities. We also help other team members, such as testing, QA staff, and change management staff, with incorporating rules into their domains so that testing can measure business rules efficacy, application quality is maintained, and that the change management system can accept and act on rules changes and defects. While rules analysis should be the pantheon of the business users, business rules engines are software applications that are still managed and maintained by the IT organization. It is imperative that this critical enterprise application component be managed using the same SDLC through which other applications are managed.

Business Rules Deployment

Business rules deployment, or business rules execution, is the business of running the business rules you have discovered, analyzed and modeled in a real operational production environment. It is where the rules' rubber meets the road. Enterprise Agility has helped organizations transition from their logical view of modeling business rules to the deployment view of actually running them day-to-day. We help IT staff identify the best rules engine solution for their needs and then assist them with incorporating the rules engine into their software architecture. Last, we make sure that production rules are properly defined from the modeling environment; that rule changes are properly executed in the rules engine; and that round-tripping can be accomplished if rules change in the rules engine (which can happen frequently when the constraints of an agile organization change at the last minute) so that the rules model is maintained properly.