In creating a viable business solution, you need both a business process model and business rules — not just one or the other. The trick is not to get them entangled, to remain clear about which is which. The good news is that by separating them you can simplify your business process models dramatically — often by an order of magnitude or more. In this month's column, Ron Ross explains how.
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When understanding and capturing information about how work gets done in any organization — whether a business or an educational organization — it's very important to realize what the information indicates and the best way to use that information. Many organizations miss major opportunities to improve the performance of the work/processes because they either don't have all the information that's important or they don't know how to use that information. By understanding all the components of a process — the IGOEs (Inputs, Guides, Outputs, and Enablers) — major improvements can be made to the performance of the process. This month, Kathy Long focuses on one element of the IGOE acronym, the Guides.
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Gladys Lam returns with the last article in the series on the "Top 10 Mistakes Business Analysts Make When Capturing Business Rules." In this month's column, she discusses Mistake #10: Not Communicating. Gladys provides some insights into what to communicate, with whom to communicate, and how to tailor the communication.
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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 discussed enumerated types as well as value restrictions on properties in OWL 2. In this tenth instalment, Terry examines OWL 2's support for property chains and compares this with related concepts in data modeling approaches.
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Many Business Analysts are unaware of the different categories of knowledge and what representation strategy is most successful for the particular kind of knowledge they are dealing with. In this month's issue of the 'Rule Observatory', Silvie Spreeuwenberg first shows how painful it is to use the wrong representation method for a certain kind of knowledge. She then gives a simple strategy that avoids such problems in common situations.
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Consider this interesting enigma. On one hand, Business Rules are gaining momentum due to the need for Agility in automated systems. On the other hand, despite wide appeal and adoption, the Agile methodology has hardly been applied to BRMS. Is there a way to combine both aspects of modern agile systems? In this month's column, Carole-Ann Matignon shares her thoughts on this.
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People who are starting a business rule project want to know how to "start smart!" They often ask what they should DO ... and what they DON'T want to do (what to watch out for). What has actually worked on real projects? Is there any ROI (Return-On-Investment) data for the business rules approach? How can you find that special mindset that is so critical for a rules analyst? Six panelists at the 2011 Business Rules Forum conference answered these questions (and many more) by sharing their project experiences.

Tabular models for decisions is a powerful technique highly relevant for business rules, business processes, business knowledge, and related areas. The now-familiar technique has a long and rich history dating at least to the 1950s, with a milestone standard in the 1980s and a continuous evolution in the nineties and up to the millennium. In this month's column, Jan Vanthienen presents Part 3 in the series that brings the reader up-to-date on the rich history of tabular models for decisions. Jan summarizes the principles, constraints, and best practices when modeling decision tables that were proposed in the eighties and nineties, based on extensive use of the decision table technique in a large number of environments and application areas. The requirements on structure, form, and layout emanate from the need to effectively use systems of decision tables as a well-structured technique across various application areas.
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This is the twenty-fifth 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 steps back and reflects on how some aspects of this series' specific example (airline travel) can be found in the ecosystem of most (if not all) industries.
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In his practice, assisting organizations worldwide to develop and implement their Business Process Management (BPM) programs, Roger Burlton has seen both disappointing examples of BPM as well as some very good examples where BPM has been implemented well and is delivering improved and sustainable performance improvement. He has synthesized his observations of the practices and principles that mark the difference between failure and success into a set of principles he believes constitutes an approach to BPM that will assure sustainable management of an organization's process assets. In this month's In Process column, Roger highlights the ten principles that successful organizations follow in their BPM practice.
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Many SBVR rules involve common, generic, cross-domain concepts in subject fields such as Date and Time; Quantities, Scales, and Units of Measures; Locations; and Whole-Part Structures. SBVR tool vendors and users need standard vocabularies for such concepts to improve interoperability among vendors and to ensure that they share the same concepts in the same ways. This month our Standards Reporter, Donald Chapin, reports on the OMG's recent adoption of a beta specification for one of these major foundation vocabularies — the "Date-Time Vocabulary."
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Several recent publications have popularized the topic of "Decision Modeling" — the modeling of business decision logic for and by business users. The OMG has just released an RFP for a Decision Model and Notation (DMN) specification, but that document says little about how DMN might relate to SBVR and BPMN, and there are many open questions. How do SBVR rules relate to decisions? Is there just one or are there multiple decisions per SBVR rule? Is there more to say about how SBVR and DMN relate to BPMN? This month, Mark Linehan and Christian de Sainte Marie provide their perspective on DMN and how it is positioned in the context of the SBVR and BPMN specifications.
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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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