The main question in this PhD thesis is: How can Business Rules Management be configured and valued in organizations? A BRM problem space framework is proposed, existing of service systems, as a solution to the BRM problems. In total 94 vendor documents and approximately 32 hours of semi-structured interviews were analyzed. This analysis revealed nine individual service systems, in casu elicitation, design, verification, validation, deployment, execution, monitor, audit, and version. In the second part of this dissertation, BRM is positioned in relation to BPM (Business Process Management) by means of a literature study. An extension study was conducted: a qualitative study on a list of business rules formulated by a consulting organization based on the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission risk framework. (from the summary of the Thesis p. 165)
Aligning IT to business needs is still one of the most important concerns for senior management. The message of Business & IT Alignment (BIA) is logical and undisputed, but implementation apparently difficult. As part of a research program on the differences between the theory and practice of BIA this paper presents a conceptual exploration of the impact of national cultures on the maturity of BIA. The paper relies on Hofstedes framework of cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 1980) to understand the concept of culture. We present a compact literature review on the influence of culture on IT that leads to the conclusion that there is an influence and that it is likely that also alignment of business and IT will be affected by cultural aspects. After a brief introduction we analyze this influence by conceptually assessing the potential impact of Hofstedes cultural dimensions on the variables of BIA maturity.
