Business Rules Are Happenin'

The BRG unveiled its second paper in almost five years, creating a buzz at this year's forum

Anyone who doubts that the business rules trend is one to be reckoned with should have been at the third Business Rules Forum, held in October, 2000. Practitioners and vendors, 250 in all, converged in Atlanta to share experiences in using the business rules approach and in building and managing business rule-based applications. For me, the conference was reminiscent ofthe very first Business Rules Summit hosted by Intelligent Enterprise's predecessor publications in 1996. The knowledge sharing among attendees during the breaks and "birds of a feather" sessions was as great as the lively interchange with the speakers during the conference sessions. One impromptu birds of a feather session on business rule archaeology went on for several hours into the night.

The vendor exhibition was the largest in the Forum's history, with 17 sponsors covering the gamut of support for business rules, including capture and management, archaeology, and the development and implementation of business rule-based applications. Several consulting firms that specialize in the business rule approach also participated as sponsors. In addition, as part of the promotion for their latest paper, "Organizing Business Plans: The Standard Model for Business Rule Motivation," members of the Business Rules Group (BRG) facilitated a birds of a feather session and presented the model underlying the paper.

The BRG is the only industry standards organization focused entirely on business rules. The business rules standardization effort started in 1993 as a project for GUIDE International, a now defunct IBM users' group, with the charter "to formulate statements and supporting standards about the nature and structure of business rules, the relationship of business rules with the way an enterprise is organized, and the relationship of business rules with systems' architectures."

From the beginning, this project was different from other GUIDE endeavors. Typically, only IBM customers were allowed to participate in a GUIDE project. But, for the Business Rules Project, this business rule was changed to allow anyone who was knowledgeable in business rules concepts and methodology to join the project. How's that as an example of how enterprises change their business rules to meet market conditions! Consequently, as project manager, Allan Kolber was able to assemble a team whose member list reads like a who's who of business rule practitioners. The team included Bonnie O'Neil, John Hall, Ronald Ross, Barbara von Halle, Dan Tasker, David Hay, Keri Anderson Healy, Warren Selkow, and John Zachman, among many more. The guiding principle for the group has been that its membership must comprise experienced practitioners in the field of systems and business analysis methodology. They are practitioners who work in both the public and private sectors promoting the business rules approach.

In 1995, the project published a seminal work, "Defining Business Rules - What Are They Really?" This document focused on understanding business rules from an information system perspective. It ranked as one of the most sought after GUIDE publications for the next few years. In 1997, when GUIDE merged with its sister SHARE group, the team created the BRG to continue its important efforts to develop standards for the business rules approach. The primary focus of the latest paper has been on understanding business rules from a business, as opposed to information systems, perspective. The new paper asserts that business plans, especially as they relate to engineering business processes that include automated components, can and should be organized according to the Business Rule Motivation Model.

The BRG Business Rules Classification Scheme

The BRG's 1995 paper primarily presents a classification scheme for business rules from an information analyst's perspective. But it makes the subtler point that different communities mean different things by the term "business rule." The group proposed that when "business rule" is used within the information systems community, it means "a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. It is intended to assert business structure or to control or influence the behavior of the business....It pertains to facts that are recorded as data and constraints on the changes to the values of those facts." This definition is systems oriented and therefore may be irrelevant to the business community. Their business definition for "business rule" appears in the second paper.

According to the BRG, business rules (from an information systems perspective) fall into four major categories: definitions of business terms, facts that relate terms to one another, constraints, and derivations. In the data model, the definitions of business terms (or simply, "terms") and the facts that link terms together are collectively referred to as "structural assertions," and constraints are called "action assertions." This is a wonderful illustration of how the terms commonly used within a community are often not descriptive enough for the concept they represent. So, as information analysts, we apply the "name for clarity" business rule and create a new term that is more descriptive of the underlying concept.

For each of the fundamental business rule types (structural assertion, action assertion and derivation), the model lays out additional subtypes, complete with a view description for each and definitions for all entities depicted in the model. The paper includes a case study based on EU-Rent, a case study that has been widely used by many standards organizations, particularly within Europe. The case study provides a set of business rules for each major policy area within this fictitious car rental company.

As an information analyst, I think the paper is extremely valuable in understanding what business rules are, as long as I remember that the business and information system development communities have distinct perspectives of what business rules are. The business rule classification scheme is an important business rule analysis technique that I'm happy to add to my toolbag. However, nowhere in the document is there anything that describes why I need a business rule classification scheme. Why is it important? How do I use it? I had to answer these questions on my own. I was also disappointed that the business rules included in the case study were not classified according to the paper's classification scheme. I guess this exercise is left to the reader.

The Motivation Behind a Business Rule

The BRG's second, recent paper - "Organizing Business Plans: The Standard Model for Business Rule Motivation" - begins to address the business community's perspective on business rules by, first, offering a definition of business rules more appropriate to this stakeholder. "A Business Rule is a directive that is intended to influence or guide business behavior. Such directives exist in support of business policy, which is formulated in response to risks, threats, or opportunities."

It is essential to understand why the business community's definition of "business rule" is different from the information system community's perspective. When we are given a business rule statement, it's usually as a fait accompli. Our job is to determine how to support the business rule within the information asset, not to question why the business rule exists. However, the business's managers are responsible for formulating the business rule. They must understand why they need a business rule at all and why this is the optimal business rule to put in place. Thus, much of the business perspective on business rules deals with motivation: What threats and opportunities the business faces, how it should deal with them, and when the current course of action should be modified. This is the realm of business planning.

Lots of research has been done in the area of business planning. Plenty of books have been written on business planning. Did we really need another one addressing this topic? I asked this question quite often during the BRG sessions. I now agree with my BRG colleagues that we have taken a fresh approach to this topic. In researching the available management science books about business planning, we found inconsistent definitions for the business planning fundamentals: mission, vision, strategy, goals, objectives, and tactics. These terms are very often used with no attempt to define them. Many authors use the "definition by example" technique, going into lengthy descriptions of the characteristics of the thing, how the thing is used, how the thing relates to other things, and examples of the thing. But the author never actually defines the thing. You must glean the definition based on the discussion provided about the thing. The BRG Motivation paper attempts to assimilate all these perspectives on business planning together into a cohesive model of business planning, with each term clearly defined.

Furthermore, this paper goes beyond business planning in two ways: It identifies the forces, both external and internal, acting on the enterprise - the forces that cause an organization to invest in a planning effort. And it indicates how the planning activities result in a set of business policies and business rules that govern how the enterprise is intended to behave.

The BRG motivation model is based on an "ends-means" paradigm. An end is something that the enterprise wants to achieve; the means are how the enterprise intends to accomplish an end. Ends include "visions and the desired results" (goals and objectives). Means include "missions, courses of action" (strategies and tactics), and "elements of guidance" (business policies and business rules).

An important aspect of the motivation model is its treatment of the things that can influence the organization's set of ends and means. External influences are things that lie primarily outside the control of the enterprise, such as regulations, technology, the market and competitive environment, and other players in the environment, such as customers, partners, and competitors. Internal influences are primarily under the control of the enterprise, such as corporate values, resource quality, assumptions, habits, and management prerogatives.

An influence is neutral. On its own, it poses no threat and reveals no opportunity to the enterprise. However, after the enterprise assesses the influence, it may regard it as a risk or deem it a potential source of reward that the business plan should address.

Examples of each concept presented in the model are liberally sprinkled throughout the document, based on the EU-Rent case study. However, these examples are not consolidated together into a cohesive case study.

I think this paper is destined to achieve the same level of acceptance within the business rule community that the initial paper has achieved. Both papers are available through the BRG's Web site: www.BusinessRulesGroup.org.

The industry is moving too fast for standards to emerge as seldom as five years apart. The BRG recognizes this pressure and is gearing up to meet the demand for additional standards. The group is pursuing two new initiatives in parallel: "Organizing Business Concepts: The Standard Model for Business Rule Structure" and "Rules for a Business Rules Management Environment."

Terry Moriarty (terry@inastrol.com), president of Inastrol, a Southern California-based information management consultancy, specializes in customer relationship information and metadata management.