Business Rules

Business rules enforce what an enterprise can do in tactical or operational detail, while strategy states enterprise focus at a macro level to optimize results. Strategy provides high-level direction about what an organization should do; business provides the tactical or operational detail about exactly how a strategy translates into action.

Business rules exist for an enterprise whether written or not, talked about, or even part of the organization’s consciousness. It’s a fairly common practice for organizations to gather business rules at least informally.

Enterprises may choose to proactively describe business practices in a rules database. For example, a consultant may research and provide recommended solutions that organize, document, and consolidate various enterprise-wide standards, methods, and techniques currently in practice.

More commonly, business rules are discovered as part of a formal requirements discovery and capture process during the initial stages of business analysis, in which case business rules collection is coincidental.

Projects, such as the launching of a new product, might lead to a new body of business rules for an organization, i.e. this new product would require the employees to conceptualize the purpose and direction of the organization within a freshvision. This practice of coincidental business rule capture is vulnerable to the creation of inconsistent or even conflicting business rules within different organizational units thus dreating silos, or within the same organizational unit over time. Business Rules Methodology is the process of capturing business rules in natural language, in real-time while empowering users to manage rules with a few simple steps.

Categories of business rules

Definitions of business terms – the most basic element of a business rule is the language used to express it. The very definition of a term itself creates a business rule that describes how people think and talk about things. Thus, defining a term is establishing a category of business rule. Terms have traditionally been documented in a Glossary or as entities in a conceptual model.

Facts relating terms to each other (relationships) – the nature or operating structure of an organization can be described in terms of the facts that relate terms to each other. To say that a customer can place an order is a business rule. Facts can be documented as natural language sentences or as relationships, attributes, and generalization structures in a graphical model.

Constraints (also called “action assertions”) – every enterprise constrains behavior in some way, and this is closely related to constraints on what data may or may not be updated. To prevent a record from being made is, in many cases, to prevent an action from taking place.

Derivations – Business rules (including laws of nature) define how knowledge in one form may be transformed into other knowledge, possibly in a different form.

©2003-2012 Chuck Morrison, Hollister, CA, All rights reserved