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Business Rules ‘Floating in Space’? Not!

by Ronald G. Ross on June 6, 2013

Business rules do not ‘float in space’. They mean only what the words they use are defined to mean. So they are tied directly to business vocabulary (concept model), which in turn is represented in a system by a data model or class diagram.
These days if approaches for business systems don’t step up to [...]

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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 [...]

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Great example of why you need to define the vocabulary used by business rules …

by Ronald G. Ross on December 14, 2012

Rule: Every product must be tested on animals. Clear? Maybe not. Better define that bit of vocabulary ’tested on animals’!

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Concept Migration … First You Have a Vocabulary Problem, Then You Have a Data Problem

by Ronald G. Ross on October 22, 2012

When one company acquires another, or two companies merge, there is inevitably much consternation over data migration. Indeed, it’s always a hard problem.
Underlying every data migration problem, however, is a concept migration problem. By ‘concept migration’, I really mean integration of business vocabularies. After all, business vocabulary comes before data.
Consider the case of two airlines merging [...]

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Business Rule Manifesto FAQs Added to BRCommunity.com

by Ronald G. Ross on October 12, 2012

I am pleased to announce that a comprehensive set of authoritative FAQs about the Business Rules Manifesto has been added to BRcommunity.com: http://www.brcommunity.com/brm.php
The Manifesto is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year – and remains as powerful and as vibrant to today’s business challenges as ever. I will be covering a good many of its insights [...]

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What Rulebooks, Rulebook Management and GRBS Are About

by Ronald G. Ross on October 11, 2012

You can find definitions and discussion of all terms in blue on Business Rule Community: http://www.brcommunity.com/BBSGlossary.pdf
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rulebook:  the collection of elements of guidance for a business capability, along with the terms, definitions, and wordings that support them
Discussion:  The rulebook of a game enumerates all the do’s and don’ts (rules) of that game along with the terms [...]

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What are three most common responses in vocabulary and definition work?

by Ronald G. Ross on September 13, 2012

‘I’m not sure what that means.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I thought that was in scope.’

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From Alexander Gunjko’s presentation at the Sydney Building Business Capability (BBC) Conference – Sept. 10-11, 2012

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Words of Wisdom re: Business Rules Initiatives from the Sydney BBC Conference … See If You Agree

by Ronald G. Ross on September 13, 2012

From Matthew Cooper’s presentation at the Sydney Building Business Capability (BBC) Conference – Sept. 10-11, 2012 …

“No progress will be made until you achieve a common business vocabulary. You just have to have it.”
“Vocabulary, facts, rules. You can’t do them one at a time. You have to do them together, iteratively.”
“Writing business rules helps you [...]

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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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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 [...]

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