Empowering End-Users to Manage Business Rules: The Case of a Graphical Environment Built for a Telco

Abstract

We present GREAT (GRaphical tool for rules Editing and AudiTing), an approach and a tool for graphical business rules management that we designed and developed. This collaborative Web-based application with rich user interface enables easy creation and editing of business rules. Relevant features are (1) the ability to define templates of business rules with various levels of granularity and of rule elements, which can be further reused; (2) the ability to create configurable user profiles from a broad range of permissions, which combined with business rules templates, suits the tool to users with different goals and levels experience; (3) the automatic versioning of business rules. We validated our approach with real-world business rules provided by a telecommunications company. The easy to use graphical environment empowers the business experts to create the rules themselves, rather than having to resort to Information Technology professionals.