You are here: Home / Business Communication

Business Communication

A Quick 5-Item List of What Are Not Business Rules!

by Ronald G. Ross on June 7, 2013

1.       Assigning values to variables.
2.       Asserting mandatory GUI fields.
3.       Specifying which data can be viewed by which users.
4.       Expressing which documents are to be routed to which queues.
5.       Orchestrating tasks assignments in an execution environment.
Depending on your implementation preferences, specifications for such things might (or might not) appear rule-ish.
But … business [...]

Read the full article →

Why can’t standards use the real-world meaning of ‘decision’?

by Ronald G. Ross on May 31, 2013

A person close to the DMN (Decision Model Notation) standard recently wrote about its definition of “decision”:
“This means a technical rather than business-person definition of ‘decision’, as the businessperson is not the target audience for the specification (metamodel) but of the results of the specification (models).”
My Response
Well, that’s a shame. Many people will be [...]

Read the full article →

Feeling Feisty Today. Any of These Points a Burr Under Your Personal Saddle?

by Ronald G. Ross on May 30, 2013

1. No government or regulatory or similar body should issue operational policy unless the vocabulary is fully and precisely defined (in people language, as possible under SBVR) and the business rules are spelled out in practicable form (as in RuleSpeak). Try to imagine the amount of time and energy wasted because everybody has to do [...]

Read the full article →

Externalizing Semantics from Business Processes … Why the Procedural Approach is a Flawed Paradigm for the Knowledge Economy

by Ronald G. Ross on February 24, 2012

For IT professionals the state of processes has always reigned supreme. In procedural approaches the internal state of a process is represented by some token. Most computer languages use that approach (the token generally falls through lines of code sequentially). Many current approaches to business process modeling do as well, at least implicitly.
But why should [...]

Read the full article →

‘Concept Model’ vs. ‘Fact Model’ … Where in the World are the Instances?

by Ronald G. Ross on February 16, 2012

In a dramatic development, the new release of SBVR (1.1) has replaced the term “fact type” with “verb concept”, and the term “fact model” with “concept model”, for all business-facing use.[1] Why the problems with “fact type” and “fact model”? Let me see if I can explain.
First some background: Since its inception in the [...]

Read the full article →

Data Modeling: Art or Science?

by Ronald G. Ross on January 11, 2012

A practitioner recently commented: “Everyone has their biased view of what a data model is. Data modeling is art – not science. Give 6 data modelers one set of requirements and you’ll get 7 solutions all distinctively different.”
My response: To me that’s a huge problem. No, ‘data’ modeling is not a science, but nor should [...]

Read the full article →

Requirements and Business Rules … All Just a Matter of Semantics (Really)

by Ronald G. Ross on October 24, 2011

It almost goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that you must know exactly what the words mean in all parts of your business requirements. In running a complex business (and what business isn’t complex these days?!), the meaning of the words can simply never be taken as a ‘given’.
Some IT professionals believe that [...]

Read the full article →

Bots “Communicating” (Funny!) … What about SBVR and RuleSpeak?

by Ronald G. Ross on October 10, 2011

If you want to hear state-of-the-art machines (bots) talk to each other, see: http://goo.gl/LEIMI Funny! Rude and petty … just like humans sometimes. I don’t think we’re quite there on Star-Trek-style communication with machines(!).
If you want to see a suitable set of guidelines for writing unambiguous business rules that machines should be able to understand, [...]

Read the full article →

Something Important All Business Analysts Owe to Business People … Probably Not Something You’d Expect?

by Ronald G. Ross on October 6, 2011

One of the first rules of business analysis should be never waste business people’s time. One of the fastest ways to waste their time is not knowing what they are talking about … literally … and do nothing about it. So you end up just wasting their time over and over again. Unacceptable.
Is there a [...]

Read the full article →

Just Organizational or Application Silos? … Worse, You Have Semantic Silos

by Ronald G. Ross on October 3, 2011

Difficulties in communicating within organizations are by no means limited to communications among business workers, Business Analysts, and IT professionals. In many organizations, business workers from different areas or departments often have trouble communicating, even with each other. The business workers seem to live in what we might call semantic silos (reinforced by legacy systems). 
A [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries