Business Rules Management

A conflict error, for example, occurs when two business rules share the same decision criteria but call for different actions:

- If a customer has good credit, then assign a credit rate of 6.
- If a customer has good credit, then assign a credit rate of 8.

These rules, however syntactically correct, contradict each other; they would cause the arbitrary assignment of a credit rating of 6 to some customers and 8 to others. This intermittent kind of business logic error is extremely difficult to diagnose with even sophisticated testing tools. After the system goes live, it may be months until the error is detected and corrected. During that time, the company may need to cope with unknown losses of customers or unprofitable accounts.

Another type of business logic error is a gap in coverage. Rule coverage is incomplete if the conditions of all the rules in the rule set don't together account for all possibilities. For example, corporations are organized around 'separation of duties' to avoid fraud. Sensitive transactions are decomposed into several smaller steps, which different individuals execute. Perpetrating a fraud would require collusion of several individuals. These steps and the authority of individuals are best represented as business logic. However, how would gaps in coverage within the business logic be found? Many such loopholes aren't found until it's too late. The National Association of Certified Fraud Examiners reports that workplace fraud costs businesses more than $400 billion a year. The average organization loses about 6 percent of its total annual revenue to employee fraud and abuse.

Most rules products typically don't assist in identifying and resolving any potential business rule errors, such as conflicts and gaps that may occur. At best, they show a log file of rules that the engine executed in production. The discovery and diagnosis as to the cause, identity, and resolution of errors is entirely manual today and requires highly skilled and trained personnel, usually with six to 10 years of rules expertise. Even with this formidable expertise, rules specialists typically are hindered by their lack of knowledge in the specific business problem. Ironically, business analysts, who are often regarded as being close to the industry and customers' needs, are nevertheless marginalized due to the age-old barrier of technical expertise required.

Prevent Business Mistakes Across Both Rules and Workflows
Business Process Analysis (BPA) software, with rules management designed specifically for the needs of both business analysts and IT, automatically uncovers and helps resolve errors at the time of modeling, such as conflicts, collisions, gaps, overlaps and redundancy (see Figure 2). Some companies are beginning to offer basic rule management capabilities; however, the future will be with those that extend this capability across the combination of both rules and workflows natively within a single modeling tool. Representing business rules within the context of workflow processes not only provides business analysts with a comprehensive and intuitive view of a business process, but also enables error detection to be propagated across both rule and process interactions. This advanced business logic management encompasses analysis of process elements to identify missing input or output information that's needed for a rule or process to execute as well as rule dependencies on the process elements. Alternatively, advanced business logic management will detect information defined in the process that will never be used, identifying the incompleteness of a model or the potential 'disconnects' between contributors.

The effects of changes can be propagated throughout the business process to indicate upstream and downstream impacts. Business analysts also can visualize the relationships between different process elements by viewing a cross-section of the process organized by the chain of dependencies that exists between the different model elements rather than the logical flow. Global rules provide an opportunity to define formula and sequence-type business rules that apply to all processes in an organization and to help establish corporate policy. Whenever new processes are created and the process is analyzed, the formula and sequence enforcement is applied.