This forum is very informative and a great place to exchange ideas. I have not found too much content to do with business rules or Enterprise Decision Management and how these fit as integrated within an organisation's business processes, performing operational decisions.

There is an emerging role for Business Analysts in the discovery and collaborative working with business managers and stakeholders, to discover and map the rules or business context under which certain steps in a process are undertaken. e.g. If customer A has already spent > £x's this month, automatically apply the higher discount. or pass this lead to the Sales Manager and send a letter of thanks.

Any comments or BA interest  here in Business Rules and Decisioning within Business Processes?

Hi Nigelus,

I myself have spent a lot of time working with the Business Rules Approach. I have an article I can post here if people are interested (and I figure out how to post it,...Adrian?).

For overall direction, search out the the Business Rules Group and their Business Rules Manifesto, easy to find with google or yahoo. The thought leader is Ron Ross, but with some other major contributors. A Business Rules Conference is held annually in the fall, which I have attended  a few times and presented at once,

As for Enterprise Decision Management, you must be referring to the work  of James Taylor, author of "Smart (Enough) Systems", see www.smartenoughsystems.com 

The interesting thing at this point is, are Business Rules really Requirements? I would suggest its a Requirement of any and all systems that they be able to support the definition and maintenance of business rules by business people, i.e. no systems changes needed to change a rule,; that's because Rules are more like occurences of data in a database, as opposed to things that are implemented by system functionality, especially with Business Rule Management Systems and Engines.

I agree that right now it is Business Analysts working on projects that document Business Rules more than any role does in an average company, but that does not make rules Requirements. That's my opinion, shared by others I think, but would like to hear fresh thoughts or arguments on the topic... Dave W

Hi All,

I do not profess to have superior knowledge in this space, but I have had some experience and have done a lot of research too and have some ideas to add. Adrian you seem to have the whole BA approach in the correct perspective. I think it is an emerging BA opportunity to further reduce the gap between business managers/owners and IT.

There is a fairly large following of the scenario that goes, if business processes which are operational in a  very complex  business area, the complexity and business rules/logic which might have to be executed within that process step can be included within the configuration of that process, however, a new way of thinking separates the business rules from the process. The business rules and decision models are stored within a business rules management system which is made available to the process/application as a service. This can be a tightly coupled service or a loosely coupled Web-service.

The benefits behind this are that business rules change often (why unsettle a process or application to make a small change to a business rule). Like-wise if a business process/application requires a configuration change, why unsettle the business rules/logic?  

Processes are the domain of Operational Management where business rules and decisions are the domain of Business managers/stakeholders. This is fairly controversial I guess. I feel that there is a new strain of BA emerging as SOA, BPM and business rules and decisions continue their proliferation. It is fairly difficult to quantify as BA roles are, but it is interesting to get all your views. In my mind the BA plays a bigger role in this new arena of busines and system architecture, but perhaps in a differing way to how it always has been done.