As one website puts it, history is a puzzle made up of a million different pieces. For business history, the pieces tend to be automation artifacts. You may be translating pieces of history into BPM and BR technology. At times, you operate as a historian, studying written records, some incomplete or incorrect. At other times, you play the role of archeologist, studying objects, whole or partial, lying on the surface of your target universe or hidden from sight. You seek lost treasures–those business processes and rules buried under many civilizations of programming professionals.
Business rule mining is the process of extracting essential intellectual business content (as business rules) from packaged or legacy software, and recasting it in a form understandable and changeable by today’s business leadership.
At least three challenges come to mind. First, you must know where to dig. Proper surveys, estimation techniques and software tools can hint at what lies beneath your target universe, reducing the size of your excavation. Second, you must translate rule artifacts into business ideas. A historian and archeologist aims to fit pieces together, explaining the meaning behind the patterns of past cultures. Thus, you will become involved in diagramming models and building a business glossary (of synonyms). Finally, you must organize rules for stability over time. An often-overlooked challenge is organizing the rules in a way that bridges the past (BR Mining), present (current business directions) and future (strategic visioning).
 Considerations
Consider the following. Rules are embedded in system artifacts in various and, often, creative ways. Embedded rules are not usually grouped for the rule paradigm or business perspective. More likely, they are implemented based on the design paradigm of the legacy platform. Organizing rules for today requires new thinking–a mechanism consistent with managing rules over time. A new kind of anchor point is needed around which to organize yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s rules. The business needs to compare, challenge and deploy them as a cohesive, business-relevant collection.
This elusive missing link lingers behind the business process model. Call it a business decision. Define it as a judgment to be made about a business term (such as customer, loan application, credit history) where that judgment is guided by rules worth managing as a business asset. Managed as a business asset, business decisions are governed by business leaders, have a real-world ROI, and are managed to business objectives and metrics.
So, start by identifying the business decisions in business process models. For each business decision, collect relevant rules from legacy code, documents and futuristic visioning sessions. The rules will be bound together by the business decision they are to guide and, though they can change, as long as that business decision remains relevant to the business, it will serve as a stable (and reusable) organizing factor for rules from all sources and operating in all parts of the business.
In the end, you will uncover the business rules and put them back where they belong–sitting precariously between changing business objectives and the business processes that achieve those objectives. They will emerge as subtle but powerful business levers.
