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Additional Response to: Business Rules vs. Expert Systems – Same or Different?

by Ronald G. Ross on May 18, 2012

guest post by Ryan Trollip, Practice Director, Decision Management – www.prolifics.com
‘Expert system’ covers a pretty broad swath. Rules engines in the business world, in practicality, and in the majority of implementations, are simply operationalizing decisions, whether derived by predictive modeling or prescriptive business rules (e.g., regulatory). The conditions that reach a decision are largely pre-determined [...]

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Response to: Business Rules vs. Expert Systems: Same or Different?

by Ronald G. Ross on May 16, 2012

guest post by Hafedh Mili, Professor of Computer Science at University of Quebec Montreal and Computer Software Consultant
I agree that expert systems and business rules tackle different problems. Expert systems tackle two problems:
(1)   Difficult problems with no exact solutions – requiring heuristic knowledge.
(2)   Scarcity of expertise.
Hence, their first applications tackled complex engineering (and medical [...]

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Follow-Up on ‘Harvesting Business Rules’: Business Rules vs. Expert Systems

by Ronald G. Ross on May 9, 2012

The guest post by Cecilia Pearce earlier this week (http://goo.gl/QL9zL) stirred up an unexpected controversy, one that deserves clarification – are business rules and expert systems the same? No! 
Business Rules 
Business rules are organizational rules created for the purpose of running day-to-day business operations. Business rules always have an original source in the form of some [...]

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Harvesting Business Rules??

by Ronald G. Ross on May 6, 2012

guest post by Cecilia Pearce
Are we actually harvesting the business rules?
To harvest something you are required to go to a designated area to gather the crop or fruit. ‘Harvesting’ implies you ‘grew’ the business rules with deliberate purpose – cultivated special ground, keep it watered and weeded, watched over it as it matured.
This is not [...]

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R.I.P. Straight-Line, Old-School Processes!

by Ronald G. Ross on May 1, 2012

Consider the business rule: A vehicle must not exceed the posted speed limit. Some of the issues for this business rule are (a) how do you detect a violation and (b) how do you respond to a violation.
These issues raise the question, whose process is it? Are we talking about the process of the person [...]

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Business Agility vs. Agile in Software Development: Not Related!

by Ronald G. Ross on April 23, 2012

Business agility results when the IT aspect of change in business policies and business rules disappears into the plumbing.  All artificial (IT-based) production-freeze dates for deployment disappear and the software release cycle becomes irrelevant.  The only constraint is how long it takes business leads and Business Analysts to think through the change as thoroughly as [...]

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How Many Different Ways Can Your Organization Be ‘Silo-ed’? Why You Need to Address Every ‘Silo-ing’

by Ronald G. Ross on April 10, 2012

‘Silo’ is so common as an industry buzzword we mostly just take it for granted. The usual sense is ‘functional’ silo or ‘organizational silo’.
I recently heard ‘no man stands alone’ (‘alone’ = ‘silo-ed’) as a common-sense justification for Big-P process. (See http://goo.gl/Cuk3s) That logic is simply flawed. Here are other ways your business can be [...]

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How Business Processes and Behavioral Rules Relate: The Fundamental Insight of Business Rules

by Ronald G. Ross on February 29, 2012

In football, when a referee throws a flag, the results of the most recent transform (play) are undone. In effect, by enforcing a rule, the referee prevents or negates the new state (yardline and sometimes the down) and enforces some other state. That’s the way behavioral business rules[1] work. Speed through a school zone and [...]

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What Should Business Stakeholders and Business Analysts See (and Not See!) in a Business Process Model?

by Ronald G. Ross on February 27, 2012

I was recently asked the question above. It’s a good one. It arose in response to another post, “What is the best way to simplify business process models?”. See http://goo.gl/gWnO0 for a very brief, very dramatic case study.
Here’s my answer. Business people (and business analysts) should see only the core set of transforms (business tasks) [...]

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What Does Business Governance Have To Do with Business Rules? … Everything!

by Ronald G. Ross on February 23, 2012

Business governance and business rules are directly linked. Bear with me for a moment while we go over what some words mean. So as not argue over them, let’s go to an authoritative source. The following definitions are from Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary.
govern [1a]: to exercise arbitrarily or by established rules continuous sovereign authority over; especially: [...]

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