Application of a decision support mechanism to the business rules lifecycle

A methodology and tool support for managing business rules in organisations

“…The need for establishing an explicit link between a business and an IS has been recognised before [3,31,[36][37][38][39][40]. If such a link was established, then it would be much easier to maintain IS in a condition that really reflects the organisation's requirements.…”

“…The scenario and tool support described in the paper support the business rule management process, providing a means to keep the organisation's IS aligned with the business environment. While it has been recognised before that it is important to establish explicit links between business objectives and strategies and IS development [3,31,36,37,38,39,40], it has not been shown how business rules can be used in this regard, or any scenario that would explain how this could be achieved. The works which we briefly Business rule deployment (ability to deploy rules into their environment -this feature is desired but not crucial for the BRM process)…”

Expressing and organising business rules

“…In Ref. [9], business rules are 'statements of goals, policies, or constraints on an enterprise's way of doing business'. In Ref.…”

“…'Descriptive rules' describe valid states of an organisation's informational entities, and 'prescriptive rules' prescribe action on the occurrence of some business event. This approach is also followed by several existing methodologies, which distinguish between structural and action assertions (elsewhere referred to as integrity constraints and automation rules, or even data and process rules) [9,10,16].…”

“…DSS [9,32] is another approach that can assist in the analysis phase of IS development. Its focal point is the support of the rationale behind the establishment of rules.…”