REI (Recreational Equipment Inc.) is a member owned co-op, selling outdoor recreation & sporting goods, and clothes via some 125 retail stores in about 30 states, catalogs, and the Internet.  Charles specializes in requirements facilitation workshops, root cause analysis, detailed functional specifications, data analysis, strategic planning and business case dev

I am not a poker player.  This is probably wise since my grandfather lost the family farm one night in a poker game.  Sadly, as the story goes, he never won it back.  This caused me to wonder how he made the decision to bet the farm on a game.  Which decision-making mechanisms were at play?  Which were flawed? In addition, more likely, which had shut down for the evening?

A lot has happened in the last year regarding The Decision Model. In November 2009, our book described the formalism and usage of The Decision Model (von Halle and Goldberg, 2009, Taylor & Francis LLC, The Decision Model: A Business Logic Framework Linking business and Technology). Since then, adoption of The Decision Model has escalated faster than anticipated. It also caught the attention of the Object Management Group which is the subject of this month’s column.

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...

Barbara von Halle is the founder of Knowledge Partners, a company leading clients through successful business rules projects through the licensing of KPI STEP, a Business Rule Management Took Kit. Von Halle is a pioneer in Business Rules and received the Outstanding Individual Achievement Award from the International Data Management Association. As a journalist, she wrote for Database Programming and Design Magazine and co-authored several books.

More and more corporations are realizing the benefits of separating and externalizing their business rules from code, documents and even people’s heads. Fortunately, there are business rule harvesting methods (such as KPI STEP™) and BRE technology that is in place today that assist corporations in documenting, analyzing and implementing business rules in a separate technology. One critical issue to address is where an organization will store the business rules aimed at the business audience. What tools should they use for their source rule repository?

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.