Business Rule Management (BRM) is a means to make decision-making within organizations explicit and manageable. BRM functions within the context of an Enterprise Architecture (EA). The aim of EA is to enable the organization to achieve its strategic goals. Ideally, BRM and EA should be well aligned. This paper explores through study of case study documentation the BRM design choices that relate to EA and hence might influence the organizations ability to achieve a digital business strategy. We translate this exploration into five propositions relating BRM design choices to EA characteristics.
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From the article: Abstract Business rules (BR’s) play a critical role in an organization’s daily activities. With the increased use of BR (solutions) and ever increasing change frequency of BR’s the interest in modifiability guidelines that address the manageability of BR’s has increased as well. A method of approach to improve manageability and modifiability is to utilize architectures to structure BR’s. In current literature three different methods to structure business rules can be identified: 1) the rule family-oriented approach, 2) the fact-oriented approach and, 3) the decision-oriented approach. Scientific research comparing the ability to modify business rules in each of the three architectural candidates is limited. The goal of this research is to evaluate which architectural candidate and underlying architectural structures allow for the best modifiability. We sought to do so by applying design science research for the creation of the architectural candidates and by conducting semi-structured interviews to identify the case-specific productivity scores. By applying an Architecture-Level Modifiability Analysis using eight years of historical data from the British National Health Service each architectural candidate is evaluated with regards to its modifiability. Results of the analysis reveal that the rule family-oriented architecture scores best on modifiability, followed by the fact-oriented architecture, and lastly the decision-oriented architecture. The results of this study provide a foundation for further research on the application and evaluation of business rule architectures.
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Decisions and business rules are essential Components of an organization. Combined, these components form a basis for securing the implementation of new laws, regulations and internal policies into processes, work instructions and information systems. To ensure proper implementation, business rule types must be taken into account, as the functions per type may be different. The current body of knowledge on decision and business rule management offers some insights into different types of business rules, however, these types are often presented as a secondary focus of a contribution or set in stone without proper evidence supporting these claims. This study therefore aims to explore the different business rule types utilized in the body of knowledge as well as practice. This will form a basis to determine possible overlap and inconsistencies and aid in establishing the functional differences between the defined business rule types. By applying a literature review, semi-structured interviews and secondary data analysis, we observed that the current body of knowledge shows serious diffusion with regards to business rule types, the same holds for practice. Therefore, future research should focus to research these differences in detail with the aim to harmonize the proliferation of business rule types.
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