Guide to Process Rules

The generic term "business rule" has been used extensively in a plethora of contexts, models, and domains. Everyone agrees on its importance. At the very core, the purpose of business rules is to capture what should or should not be allowed in a business enterprise.

Businesses can be viewed as an aggregation of rules and all activities in the business and processes as steps undertaken to carry out the rules. Policies and procedures are time-honored methods for collecting and publishing the rules of the business. Business rules are essential for all types of business processes: business-to-business (B2B), which includes application-to-application (A2A), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-employee (B2E). We call these process rules. In the emerging and increasingly dynamic arena of e-business interactions, one of the most important challenges is to capture and put into effect the business rules of the processes that span the extended enterprise.