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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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The Fundamental Problem of Software Engineering is Not about Decisioning

by Ronald G. Ross on February 6, 2012

I am always very careful to talk about ‘business rules’, not ‘rules’. We define ‘business rule’ as a criterion used in business operations to guide behavior, shape judgments or make decisions. We have not perceived any poverty of guidance that fits that definition(!).
One reason we always say ‘business rules’ is because we make no attempt [...]

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Are BPM and EA a Perfect Match? … With Business Rules Far Better!

by Ronald G. Ross on September 1, 2011

@SergeThorn asks “Are Business Process Management and Business Architecture a perfect match?” http://goo.gl/kLYvs With business rules far better!
There is an important overlap of concerns between business rules and enterprise architecture. The overlap actually comes in two forms:
1. Operation-time. Here the issue is really rethinking compliance. I just blogged about this today: http://goo.gl/Gl9wT
2. Business-analysis-time. A business needs to know [...]

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Audit Trails and Tracing the Impact of Operational Errors … It’s Ultimately about Compliance and Business Rules

by Ronald G. Ross on September 1, 2011

Robin Bloor wrote  a very interesting piece about why business needs explicit audit trails for data: http://www.dataintegrationblog.com/robin-bloor/the-quality-of-data-is-not-strained/
Here’s the gist: ”… data has no explicit audit trails, so we lose information, some of which may be critical. This has the effect of hiding the record of and the impact of data errors.” He says all data should be time-stamped. I agree … [...]

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Well If You Ask Me …

by Ronald G. Ross on July 26, 2011

… And somebody did recently: What’s wrong with current business process management (BPM) practices? 
1. When a discipline becomes mature, it stops seeing itself as a solution to every problem. BPM is not there. Limitations?

It does not provide the order-of-magnitude improvement in business agility that companies need urgently.
It is not the solution to compliance issues.
It does [...]

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Rules in a Knife Fight?! Classic Advice

by Ronald G. Ross on July 23, 2011

The other night I watched the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for about the 50th time. It’s a highly entertaining movie – all you have to do is suspend judgment. 
As a rules person, the classic scene for me is Harveychallenging Butch to a knife fight (with a knife about the size of a [...]

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