Business Rules Management

Business analysts can spend less time troubleshooting and more time implementing changes in business rules based on customer feedback, regulatory changes and competitive actions. The exciting thing about business rules is that a business rule engine can generate executable code automatically to create a working application. This means that models validated with rules management are free from the distortion of business and technical errors and can now be used to run different business scenarios to document a business case.

Managing Rules: Reusable Rules, Updates and Versioning
Many business rules in current systems are duplicates, resulting from copies of sections of programs or rule sets being made over time; for example, to address variations on existing products. Rules analysis also detects individual rule errors contained in different rule sets throughout a business process. This enables new techniques for further reducing complexity so analysts can focus on business solutions. Just as a complex mathematical equation can be factored into its basic prime elements, rules can be organized into reusable rule sets. The rule management system can then validate the interactions between these reusable rule sets.

Having all business rules in one place provides a comprehensive view of a business process and further leverages the power of rule management. A true business logic management repository should provide a centralized storage of a full range of business logic regardless of the execution environment. Version control, access control and other features track changes and updates, manage the deployment of processes and foster collaborative efforts. The repository should have the ability to translate and distribute rules to other environments for execution and avoid the maintenance costs associated with duplication of business rules in parallel locations, such as the same data validation rule used in Web, telephone and e-mail interfaces.

Managing Rules
With the elements of analysis, organization and visualization, the skill level required to use these new innovative tools is now similar to that of an Excel spreadsheet. In fact, the rule-writing interface has the familiarity of an Excel spreadsheet to provide a business analyst the ease of use of that product.

Other key characteristics of a solution with rules management include:

- Ability to tie the business purpose of a rule set to the individual rules that combine to achieve these goals

- Governance of business rules to assign stakeholders, stewards, governing party and reviewers, so that a committee can be organized to manage the change process

- Ability to trace rules to document the linkage of the source, status, confidence and forms of the business rule to facilitate committee review and approval

- Support for manual activities to capture exception-handling as part of a process improvement feedback loop.

Looking Ahead
Returning to the question, if management creates and maintains the policies in an organization, why can't business create and maintain the business logic that represents these policies? In the '70s and '80s, computers, word processors and scheduling software enabled managers to type their own memos and manage their own appointment calendars. This reduced costs, improved efficiency and shortened business cycle time. In fact, the composition of the workforce has restructured to provide more meaningful, productive jobs. A similar transformation is in process today to enable businesses to manage the creation and maintenance of business logic that drives applications. A new flexible infrastructure technology, business rules-driven Business Process Management (BPM), is poised to have the same enabling impact on corporate America's infrastructure and workforce.