Toward a Functional Reference Model for Business Rules Management

Abstract

Business rules can be crucial to an organization's business operations. In view of a growing number of internal and external challenges (such as compliance with regulations, the need for organizational agility, or the need to retain organizational knowledge), organizations increasingly are forced to actively manage their business rules in order to stay successful. However, business rules management (BRM) is an organizational task that cannot be encountered simply by implementing a software system. The paper describes the design process toward a functional reference model for business rules management. The model provides three perspectives on tasks and functions to successfully manage business rules. Practitioners may use the model to establish BRM in their organizations, facilitate communication between business and IT, and evaluate software solutions for BRM. From a scientific perspective, the model is a design artifact, representing a theory for designing and developing information systems with the objective of managing business rules.

“Designing” Design Science Research – A Taxonomy for Supporting Study Design Decisions

“…In example 2 (the dotted line in Fig. 2), the paper describes the design process toward a functional reference model for business rules management for practitioners evaluating software solutions [44]. From a scientific perspective, the model represents a theory for designing and developing information systems with the objective of managing business rules.…”

Introduction to the Minitrack on Business Rule Management Technologies

“…Finally, (3 -implementation) BRM comprises the actual integration, application and monitoring of BRs. In all of these phases, there has been a wealth of recent works, e.g., [2,3] (strategic alignment), [4,5,6,7,8] (capturing/mining), [9,10,11,12] (verification), [13,14] (monitoring and analysis), to name a few. As it seems, the topicality of business rules management seems to have gained recent interest in the community.…”

Business Rules Management and Decision Mining - Filling in the Gaps

“…One approach to do so is referred to as Business Rules Management (BRM). BRM can be defined as a systematic and controlled approach that supports the elicitation, design, specification, verification, validation, deployment, execution, evaluation, and governance of business decisions and business logic [6,14,18,25]. Business logic can be defined as: "A collection of business rules, business decision tables, or executable analytic models to make individual business decisions" [16].…”

“…The gap in current literature and practice is interesting given the fact that both BRM and DM process business decisions and underlying business logic with the goal to improve decision-making at organizations [12,15,18,23], and should therefore be tackled. In this paper, we aim to do this by conceptually integrating the BRM capabilities and DM phases as well as by demonstrating probable entry points for DM output to be used as BRM input for managing business decisions.…”