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. Her most recent book, Business Rules Applied (co-authored with a KPI business rule team) was an unexpected finalist for the Software Development Jolt Award. Von Halle exclusively presents through Brainstorm.
The definition of business rules that Knowledge Partners uses is, “A collection of your organization’s business policies, constraints, computations, and reasoning capability.” Organizations run by these rules whether they are explicitly stated or are implicit to the organization and whether or not they are automated.
Business rules are expressed in a business-oriented way. A BR approach is a formal way of managing and automating the business rules of an organization so that it evolves as intended. This includes the tasks, roles, rule repositories, rules engines and the formal ways of expressing rules so that business policy can be quantified, accessed, and changed.
The BR approach has these characteristics, (STEP):
- Separate the rules so they can be found and applied consistently
- Trace the rules to know where the rules come from, why they exist, and where they are used- especially when the rule is automated
- Externalize the rules so they are in a language that is understandable to everyone
- Position the rules for change so the business can evolve
There are different kinds of rules.
- Computation rules (formula for computing costs)
- Constraint, guidelines (customer must pay past bills before new orders are shipped)
- Inferred knowledge rules (‘A’ credit rated customers are premium customers)
- Action-enabling rules (for orders over $10,000, notify sales manager)
A business rules approach starts with a business process and covers a business activity. The rule is first stated in natural language, and then turned into a formal form.
BPM is accelerated by a business rules approach.
- Business processes rich in rules are identified
- The rules worth managing formally are understood
- Define business rules life cycles to meet new business objectives
- Redefine the roles of business people and IT around the new business rule life-cycle
- Provide methods and tools for your new business rules
According to von Halle, in order to have a BR approach, you need to know what you want to do with your business rules. The more you want to accomplish, (the shorter you want the rules life-cycle to be) the more mature your approach has to be. She recommends KPI’s Rule Maturity Model (RMM) which judges the maturity of rules on a scale from 0 to 5.
- Every organization starts at Level 0 (most are at this level now)
- Every organization can experience success with a Level 1 pilot at little cost
- Every organization will begin to experience significant success at Level 2 which is usually the target for the first business rules project
- The risks of not attempting to achieve Level 2 may be significant
- At Level 3, there is general knowledge and acceptance of the business rules- (very few organizations are above Level 3)
- Levels 4 and 5 require a higher level of sophistication
Von Halle discussed an ongoing survey to establish the current levels of use of the BR approach, and what industries are moving in this direction. The goal is to determine the economic impact of the BR approach as the maturity level is increased.
According to von Halle, there is a new breed of systems emerging where business processes and business rules are managed as separate but closely connected resources. They are separated by process execution, rule execution, and database execution.
The BPM/BRE offerings today include the stand-alone BPM products, stand-alone BRE products, single vendors with an integrated BPM/BRE product, and vendors partnering for BPM and BRE offering.
In a BPM environment, tasks can become powered by the rules, whether they are manual or automated. The rules are documented and handled by the BPM software, and it all fits together.
