Business rules, whether they are stated explicitly or implicitly, contain all of your organization's business knowledge. Expressing and defining your business rules will allow the most benefit from a BPM initiative.
Barbara von Halle is the founder of Knowledge Partners, a company specializing in business rules services. Her most recent book, "Business Rules Applied" is the first book to contain a systematic approach for delivering business rules systems.
The definition of business rules that Knowledge Partners uses is, "A collection of your organization's business policies, constraints, computations, and reasoning capability." Organizations run by these rules whether they are explicitly stated or are implicit to the organization. A business rules approach is a formal way of managing and automating the business rules of an organization so that it evolves as intended. This includes the tasks, roles, rule repositories, rules engines and the formal ways of expressing rules so that business policy can be quantified, accessed, and changed.
The business rules approach has these characteristics:
There are different kinds of rules.
BPM is accelerated by a business rules approach.
Von Halle recommended KPI's Rule Maturity Model (RMM) which judges the maturity of rules on a scale from 0 to 5. At this time, all the participating companies are at rule Levels 0 or 1. Most are trying to manage rules for constraints and validations and to create complex inference rules for decision-making. Initial findings about RMM are:
According to von Halle, there is a new breed of systems emerging where business processes and business rules are managed as separate but closely connected resources. They are separated by process execution, rule execution, and database execution.
The BPM/ BRE offerings today include the stand-alone BPM products, stand-alone BRE products, single vendors with an integrated BPM/ BRE product, and vendors partnering for BPM and BRE offering.
In a business process management environment, tasks can become powered by the rules, whether they are manual or automated. The rules are documented and handled by the BPM software, and it all fits together.
Barbara von Hallerecently spoke on this topic at BrainStorm’s Business Process Management Conference in Chicago. For more information on this conference, visit www.BPMConference.com
Jon Huntress
Special Events Correspondent
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