Extreme Business Agility — Part 1: A Value Chain for Re-Engineering Your Company’s Products
By Ronald G. Ross

What is true business agility and what’s really needed to achieve it? This six-part series takes the position that extreme business agility is inseparable from extreme customizability of the company’s product(s). You can re-engineer business processes all you want, but until you re-engineer the operational know-how of the product itself, you’ll never completely get there. You’ll just spin your wheels forever in work-around-land. In this first part in the series Ron Ross asks whether there is a natural build sequence in product engineering. The answer is yes — and you can model it using a simple value chain. [ read more ]

Last month's column introduced the idea of decisions in the context of Enterprise Decision Management. Having found the decisions you think might be suitable for the approach, the next step is typically to lay out and then define the business rules that support that decision. Much has been written on various techniques for finding the rules that support decisions. This month, James Taylor focuses on the perhaps less common approach of using data to find and refine business 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 concluding instalment, Roger covers some of the methodology fundamentals of BPM. [ read more ]

This column is the next in a series that will provide 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. In this month's issue of the 'Rule Observatory', Silvie Spreeuwenberg discusses recommendations on how to create a rule service that can infer new information based on existing information with rules, using a rules engine [ read more ]

The published SBVR Standard is presented in a language, SBVR Structured English. However, the Standard does not standardize this (or, indeed, any) language, and Structured English is just one of many possible notations that can be used. In this month's issue of the 'Semantics for Business', Sjir Nijssen and John Hall compare the strengths and weaknesses of two different SBVR notations, namely the text based Structured English notation and the CogNIAM diagrammatic notation. [ 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 ]

Natural Language, Semiotics, SBVR, ORM, and CQL
By Clifford Heath

When I utter a word, that word has some meaning for me, and I hope that when you hear it, the word will invoke a corresponding meaning in your mind. The science of semiotics studies the way symbols (such as words) relate to meanings, and yields insight into the nature of meaning itself. In this month's feature, Clifford Heath explores some of the fundamentals of semiotics, shared by Object Role Modeling and the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR). He introduces the Constellation Query Language (CQL), which is being defined as part of the ActiveFacts project. [ read more ]

The primary role of the technical business analyst is to elicit, analyze, and document business requirements for projects that support the strategic analytical objectives of the company. Using a Business Rules Approach enables the analysts to create deliverables so that the business recognizes its requirements, developers can use them, they pass quality assurance tests, and the overall system will be accepted with confidence. And on a special kind of project, a Data Project, there are additional deliverables required that really help nail down the requirements. In this month's feature (the second of two parts), Pat Wilson discusses how to avoid the Data Project Pitfalls that were outlined last time, thereby ensuring a successful Data Project implementation. [ 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 ]