Many IT projects ultimately end in failure and are simply written off. Same old story, time and time again. Why is it so hard? Why can't we figure out beforehand whether some solution will actually work once we roll it out? Most project management approaches and many IT methodologies include steps for building business cases and provide guidelines for project planning and estimating. So what's missing? In the first of a two-part series, Ron Ross identifies the answer: Developing a business strategy and business solution before jumping into system design.
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Gladys Lam continues her series on the "Top 10 Mistakes Business Analysts Make When Capturing Business Rules." In this month's column, she discusses Mistake #9: Not Having a Business Rule Methodology. Gladys provides some insights into what are some components of a business rule methodology.
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The "IGOE" concept (Input, Guide, Output, Enabler) was created for the purpose of documenting service-oriented processes, with its terms and definitions adapted from earlier, manufacturing-focused techniques to fit into service sector business. Considering that a significant number of organizations in the world are service sector type organizations, it makes sense to have an approach for documenting and understanding process that is intentionally geared toward services. This month, Kathy Long presents an IGOE template and illustrates it with some examples.
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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 explored support for ring constraints within OWL 2. In this ninth instalment, Terry discusses enumerated types as well as value restrictions on properties in OWL 2.
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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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The last few years have seen dramatic shifts in the business climate and brought home for many organizations just how much of a problem it can be when systems are hard to change. Creating agile systems has long been a strength of business rules management systems. But what's next? How are BRMS vendors going to evolve their products to deliver the transparency, agility, and collaboration that are required?

• What aspects of a BRMS are changing to drive increased collaboration between business and IT professionals?

• How will BRMS vendors evolve to make it easier for non-technical users to assess the impact of a proposed change on their decision-making?

• Just how transparent are rules-based decision services and what's changing to make them more transparent?

The 2011 Business Rules Forum hosted a panel discussion by vendors whose products are innovators in the business rules arena. The five panelists who sat on the 2011 Business Rules Forum Vendor Panel responded to questions from the moderator and from the audience, sharing their insights into what's going on in the business rules marketplace — now and in the next twelve months.

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. It has ever since been a modeling technique well suited for business and business analysts. For whatever reason frequently forgotten and re-invented, on-going experience and developments with the technique have been widely practiced and well documented. In this month's column, Jan Vanthienen launches a new series that brings the reader up-to-date on the rich history of tabular models for decisions. This first part of the multi-part series acquaints readers with the origins and basics of this important technique. The other five parts will deal with a wealth of topics such as best practices, development methods, table structures, verification and validation, tooling, and business experiences.
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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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