Gartner’s David McCoy recently posted on his frustrations with the idea of “business rules” – or at least some prevalent ambivalency towards the management of rules:
<<I’m beginning to think that most people DO NOT CARE about business rules… So, is it any reason we haven’t seen more uptake of Business Rule Management? No. I think the story is clear. BRM isn’t sexy. It’s not even something that people want. It’s a necessary evil in too many eyes. … >>
He adds some exceptions, though:
<<We’ll just let those of us who know the power of rule-driven behavior benefit from BRM …. Those of us who know, know things like this:
Rules + events = real-time reaction
Rules + scenario analysis = policy-driven agility
Rules + process = mutable processes that stay within bounds
Rules + applications = rapid adaption to new opportunities>>
Of course, different people have different understandings of rules. The “business rule gurus” talk about rules that to many are more like policy or regulations – i.e. constraints on the business like “A Driver of a Vehicle must have a valid Driver’s License”. While documenting and communicating such rules allow good governance, as well as providing useful input as requirements to an IT project, you can see why such efforts could be construed as “not something people want” per Gartner.
On the other hand, decision rules – determining either facts or actions – are what drives businesses (e.g. the sorts of rules one usually associates with “real-time reaction” and so forth).
Therefore it was interesting to read from John Hall on the EU Ontorule research project when he posted about a Decision Oriented Business Applications workshop to take place this year; I’d understood that Ontorule had been about mapping SBVR vocabularies and (policy-like) rules to production rules executed in a rules engine.
<<One change that has occurred since the [Ontorule] project [researching operationalising rules and ontologies] started is the growth of decision management and modelling…>>
So when analysts complain about the lack of take-up of “business rules”, I suspect they are really talking about SBVR-type rule repositories (which remain useful for governance, but are not yet used to support many IT projects today). “Decision rules” as used in Business Processes, and the management of said decisions, remain a hot topic and bridges the business vocabulary world with the IT execution world. And event-based decisions provide the real-time reactions that businesses are increasingly concerned about…
