A methodology and tool support for managing business rules in organisations

doi:10.1016/j.is.2004.05.003

Information Systems

Volume 30, Issue 6, September 2005, Pages 423-443

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2004.05.003 Get rights and content

Abstract

Business rules are evidently important for organisations as they describe how they are doing business. Their value has also been recognised within the information system (IS) domain, mostly because of their ability to make applications flexible and amenable to change. In this paper, we propose a methodology that helps business people and developers to keep business rules at the business level inline with the rules that are implemented at the system level. In contrast to several existing approaches that primarily focus on business rules in the scope of an application, our methodology addresses the entire IS of an organisation. The paper also describes requirements for a tool support that would be appropriate to support the methodology.

Introduction

In the last decades, business rules have become popular in the information system (IS) community mostly because of their ability to make applications flexible and amenable to change (e.g. [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]). Both, researchers and practitioners are convinced that since business rules are very sensitive to business changes they require explicit treatment during IS development to ensure the IS agility. Otherwise many problems may occur. For example

•
Since not acquired systematically and completely, business rules do not reflect real conditions of the business environment. Consequently, applications are developed that do not meet business needs.
•
There is a lack of documentation on business rules.
•
Business rules are buried into program code. It is not clear, what kind of rules govern an application, when the rules are triggered and how they are implemented.
•
Business logic is hard to maintain as rules are distributed across the application logic.
•
Business rules are hard to control, since there is no common and single purpose store for them.

The aforementioned problems have initiated a lot of research in academia and industry. As a result, a variety of tools and approaches can be found today that provide IS developers with facilities for managing business rules in IS development [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. Business rules, however, do not pertain to IS or to its application software. Business rules are set and owned by the business and have to be therefore managed by the business.

In the paper, we emphasise that business rules may not just serve as a mechanism for making applications flexible, but could also be used as a bridge that helps to keep the entire IS of an organisation aligned with its business. As the main contribution, we propose a methodology and requirements for a tool support that facilitates business people and developers with a support for keeping business rules at the business level inline with rules at the system level. The methodology defines all the necessary activities that have to be performed within IS development in order to establish the link between an implementation of a business rule (e.g. trigger in database, method in program code, etc.) and its sources in business environment. When changes occur at the business level, the methodology and tool assist in finding the applications and their components (no matter what kind of technology they use) that are influenced by the changes.

The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 gives a brief history of business rule related research, discussing contributions from different research areas. In Section 3, we provide a motivation for business rule management in enterprises and give a brief explanation of our research approach. Section 4 proceeds with the discussion on the business rule management process, examining the activities that are required to manage business rules for an overall organisation. In Section 5, the requirements for building an appropriate tool support for the business rule management process are discussed. Finally, a discussion is provided on related work.

Section snippets

Background

The roots of business rules come from the Artificial Intelligence community, where they have been successfully applied as a way of representing knowledge. In the knowledge-based systems, the knowledge and reasoning of a human expert can be captured and stored in a form of complex networks of rules. The rules are typically described using declarative languages that do not imply order or flow of control. The rules are stored in a Rule base and processed in a special component, called Inference

BRM—the motivation

This section provides motivation for keeping information on how business rules evolve from their origin in business environment to their implementation in IS.

BRM—the process

In order to manage business rules for an entire organisation and to establish and keep the link between its business and supporting IS several activities are required. Besides the activities that are dedicated to managing rules during IS development, there are also activities that have to be performed at the business level. As a part of the BRME project, an investigation was carried out with an aim to identify these activities. Various business rule-based approaches have been studied from

BRM—the tool support

The BRM process clearly cannot be performed without an appropriate tool support. Since there are many tools on the market that offer various features related to business rule acquisition and management (BR tools), we have performed an evaluation to examine how these tools support the functionality required by the BRM process. This section represents a summary of our findings. Details can be found in [57].

Related work

With respect to the literature, the contribution of this paper is in synthesis of traditional and special activities that deal with business rules explicitly within an enterprise modelling, IS development and further through the entire business rule lifecycle. The scenario and tool support described in the paper support the business rule management process, providing a means to keep the organisation's IS aligned with the business environment. While it has been recognised before that it is

Conclusions and outlook

We have presented an approach for business rule management in organisations, which presents another attempt towards greater business agility. The key concept of the approach is that there must be an explicit link between each business rule instance as exists in business environment and its implementations in one or several application systems. If such a link is established, then it is much easier to maintain IS in a condition that really reflects the organisation's requirements.

In the paper, we

References (59)

H. Herbst
Business Rules in Systems AnalysisA Meta-Model and Repository System
Inform. Syst.
(1996)
V. Kavakli et al.
Goal-driven business process analysis application in electricity deregulation
Inform. Syst.
(1999)
F. Van Assche, P.J. Layzell, M. Anderson, RUBRIC—A rule-based approach to information systems requirements, Proceedings...
I. Petrounias et al.
A rule based approach for the design and implementation of information systems
J.A. Bubenko, B. Wangler, Objectives driven capture of business rules and of information systems requirements,...
P.J. Layzell, P. Loucopoulos, A rule-based approach to the construction and evolution of business information systems,...
Youdeowei, The B-rule methodology: a business rule approach to information systems development, Ph.D. Thesis,...
R. Ross, The Business Rule Book: Classifying, Defining and Modelling Rules, 2nd Edition (Ross Method, version 4.0)....
C.J. Date
What Not HowThe Business Rules Approach to Application Development
(2000)
D.L. Struck, Business rule continuous requirements environment, Ph.D. Thesis, Colorado Technical University, Colorado...

G.H. Anthes, Eyes everywhere: business activity monitoring offers a constant watch on business processes,...

TEMPORA final review. Technical report, TEMPORA Consortium,...

T. Moriarty

BRM FacilitySystem Architect 2001

Intell. Enterprise

(2000)

M. Morgenstern, active databases as a paradigm for enhanced computing environments, Proceeding of the Ninth...

M. Schlesinger, E. Hanson, C. Hong, The Design of the POSTGRES Rules System, Proceedings of the IEEE International...

U. Dayal et al.

Rules are Objects tooA Knowledge Model for an Active, Object-Oriented Database Management System

J. Widom et al.

Active Database Systems—Triggers and Rules For Advanced Database Processing

(1996)

A.K. Tanaka. On conceptual design of active databases, Ph.D. Thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georga,...

H. Gallaire et al.

Logic and DatabasesA Deductive Approach

Comput. Surveys

(1984)

R. Elmasri et al.

Fundamentals of Database Systems

(1989)

H. Herbst et al.

The specification of business rulesa comparison of selected methodologies

P. Loucopoulos, B. Theodoulidis, D. Pantazis. Business Rules Modelling: Conceptual Modelling and Object Oriented...

G.M. Nijssen et al.

Conceptual Schema and Relational Database Design—A Fact Oriented Approach

(1989)

A.K. Tanaka et al.

ER-RAn enhanced ER model with situation-action rules to capture application semantics

J. Elder et al.

BIER—the behaviour integrated entity-relationship approach

E. Downs et al.

Structured System Analysis and Design Method—Application and Context

(1992)

D. Hay, K.A. Healy, GUIDE Business Rules Project, Final Report—revision 1.2. GUIDE International Corporation, Chicago,...

H. Herbst

Business Rule-Oriented Conceptual Modelling

(1997)

Cited by (100)

Business rule extraction using decision tree machine learning techniques: A case study into smart returnable transport items
2023, Procedia Computer Science
Decision support systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated (e.g., being machine learning-based), attempting to automate decisions as much as possible. However, it remains challenging to extract meaningful value from large quantities of data while also maintaining transparency in seeking justification for the choices made. Instead of creating methods for increasing the interpretability of black box models, one way forward is to design models that are inherently interpretable in the first place. Rule-based methods can automate decisions with great transparency and accuracy, helping to ensure compliance with regulations and adherence to organizational guidelines. In this paper, we propose an approach that uses a decision tree machine learning classification technique for extracting business rules from IoT-generated data to predict the asset status of Smart Returnable Transport Items (SRTIs). We report on an industrial case study that uses two years of historical data, obtained from an SRTI provider in the Netherlands, to predict the status of smart pallets. We compare the performance with the results obtained by using a support-vector machine (SVM) technique. Our experiments show that our solution is both accurate and flexible in terms of business rule elicitation. The obtained decision trees are human-interpretable, can easily be combined with other decision-making techniques, and provide a prediction accuracy marginally higher than an SVM technique.
BR4DQ: A methodology for grouping business rules for data quality evaluation
2022, Information Systems
Citation Excerpt :
In addition, [20] claims that the statement of the business rules must be written in business terms gathered from authoritative business glossaries and using any business rules specification languages (e.g. Natural language, SBVR (and variants), RuleSpeak and DMN [16,21–25].) Some authors have proposed different methodologies for the management of business rules [10,26]. However, the management of business rules typically begins with a stage of business rule compilation as the iterative process of discovering, collecting, ordering and preparing the business rules for validation [15].
Data quality evaluation is built upon data quality measurement results. “Data quality evaluation” uses the “data quality rules” representing the risk appetite of the organization to decide on the usability of the data; “data quality measurement” uses the business rules describing the “data requirements” or “data specifications” to determine the validity of the data. Consequently, to conduct meaningful and useful data quality evaluations, business rules must be first completely identified and captured at the beginning of the evaluation to perform sound measurements. We propose that the evaluation leads to better and more interpretable and useful results when the potential contribution of these business rules to the measurement of the data quality characteristics is first evaluated, avoiding the inclusion in the evaluation of those not having potential contribution and the resulting waste of resources. Considering this, we feel that for a better management of business rules for data quality evaluation, it makes sense to group all business rules having an important contribution to the evaluation of data quality characteristics, something that other business rules management methodologies have not covered yet. Through our experiences in conducting industrial projects of data quality evaluations we identified six problems when collecting and grouping the business rules. These problems make data quality evaluation processes less efficient and more costly. The main contribution of this paper is a methodology to systematically collect, group and validate the business rules to avoid or to alleviate these problems. For the sake of generalization, comparability, and reusability, we propose to do the grouping for data quality characteristics and properties defined in ISO/IEC 25012 and ISO/IEC 25024, respectively. Lastly, we validate the methodology in three case studies of real projects. From this validation, it is possible to raise the conclusion that the methodology is useful, applicable in the real world, and valid to capture and group the business rules used as a basis for data quality evaluation.
Automated business rules and requirements to enrich product-centric information
2019, Computers in Industry
Citation Excerpt :
The literature on business rule processing can be divided into two types: the business side, which provides methodologies or languages to manage business rules that are mainly not computable. Like Bajec and Krisper [2], some authors indeed consider that “business rules are set and owned by the business and have to be therefore managed by the business”. The process model BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation), for instance, enables end users to write business rules in a text format.
Current PLM or BIM based information systems suffer from a lack of checking components for business rules. One reason is the misunderstanding of the role and nature of business rules, and how they should be treated in a product-centric information system. This paper intends to provide both a process and a related model to build such a component and enrich future systems. Rules and requirements process management enables the unambiguous formalization of implicit knowledge contained in business rules, generally expressed in easily understandable language, and leads to the formal expression of requirements. In this paper, the requirements are considered a consequence of the application of a business rule. A conceptual model is then introduced, called DALTON (DAta Linked Through Occurrences Network), which supports this process. In this ontology, concepts and product data, coming for instance from an existing product database, are represented using instances and occurrences, connected together with triples built from business rules and requirements according to previous management processes. An experiment involving a set of SWRL rules is conducted in the Protégé environment that validates the model and the process.
DERIVING DECISION MINING SYSTEM CAPABILITIES: A RESEARCH AGENDA
2023, 36th Bled eConference: Digital Economy and Society: The Balancing Act for Digital Innovation in Times of Instability, BLED 2023 - Proceedings
Influence of web portals on management support and university performance: an information quality perspective
2022, Quality and Quantity
Continuous compliance using calculated event log layers
2021, arXiv

View all citing articles on Scopus

^☆: Recommended by P. Loucopoulos

View full text

A methodology and tool support for managing business rules in organisations☆