Can the same business rule be enforced differently in different contexts? The answer — an important one for re-use of business rules — is yes. In this month's column, Ron Ross explains. He also outlines what business analysts need to know to specify contexts of enforcement for a business rule effectively.
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SIPOC is an acronym for Supplier, Input, Process, Output, and Customer. The concept has been made popular by the Supply Chain process groups and Six Sigma. It was designed specifically for manufacturing organizations. Today, many service organizations are using (or attempting to use) this approach for defining and documenting service processes. This month, Kathy Long examines whether or not it is an adequate process modeling notation for service processes.
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The earlier you involve the business user in your Business Rules projects the higher your chances of success. But beware of the pitfalls: "having a business user onboard" does not mean simply providing him with a spreadsheet to dump his/her knowledge into. Carole-Ann Matignon shares her insights on helping the business user feel comfortable and in control on a business rules project.
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The increasing need for agility, transparency, and control of business policy is coercing businesses to extract their business logic from obfuscated code in their IT components and to manage that business logic as a separate, independently-evolving asset, defined in business terms. The appeal of using Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) to achieve this is clear: when used correctly, these tools can reduce policy change release cycles from weeks to hours and put business policy experts — not IT departments — in the driving seat. Why then are so many adopters of this established technology jeopardizing their own efforts and reducing the return on their investment by making the same ten mistakes? In this month's 'Rule Observatory', Silvie Spreeuwenberg has invited independent BRMS mentor Jan Purchase to continue his discussion. Jan presents the last five of ten common BRMS adoption mistakes he has witnessed over six years of mentoring BRMS pilots in the investment banking and insurance sector.
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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 provided further coverage of RDFS, and introduced different flavors of the Web Ontology language (OWL). In this fourth instalment, Terry discusses OWL in further detail, focusing on basic features expressed in Manchester syntax.
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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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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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A software development project for a New Zealand Government Agency provided an opportunity to test the business rules approach. This enhancement of the agency's core business processes aimed to make use of a business rules engine to de-couple business logic from other code wherever possible. In this month's feature, Craig McLean shares the experiences of that redevelopment activity and summarizes the success of the project in terms of the five key advantages of the business rules approach.
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Projects are sometimes characterized by the (estimated) numbers of business rules. A project with a large number of rules is probably more expensive than a project with only a few rules, all other things being equal. But what is the number of rules? In this month's column, Jan Vanthienen explains that it depends on who's counting what, and how.
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We have been seeing increased emphasis on the linkage of rules, process, and analytics. But what does this actually entail ... for organizations? ... for individuals? Is the role of business analyst gaining increased attention? What are the key areas of skills development that should be focused on near-term? At the 2009 Business Rules Forum conference, four recognized experts answered these questions (and more) by sharing their insight and experience.
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This is the sixteenth 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 rule statement quality checking, examining some of the 'extreme' cases of qualifying and conditional clauses. He then looks at self-contradictory qualifying and conditional clauses. He concludes with a discussion of structural cardinality rule statements and data format rules.
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In order to ensure good relationships with stakeholders of any type, it is useful to view relationship management as being comprised of a lifecycle of trust relationship activities, based on a Customer-Supplier model that is based on commitment. In this month's column, Roger Burlton takes a look at a trust relationship model.
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The OMG's Regulatory Compliance SIG has produced its first major deliverable with the publication of the "Management of Regulation and Compliance (MRC)" RFP. This month, our Standards Reporter, Donald Chapin provides an overview of this important new work and encourages anyone interested in participating to get involved.
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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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"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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