Business rules analysis is used to recognize, communicate, prove, clarify, and organize rules that form the regular business behaviour and steer operational business decision making.
Business policies and rules direct the everyday operations of the enterprise.
A business policy is a guide which generally controls, impacts or regulates the actions of an enterprise.
A business rule is a particular, verifiable directive that serves as a standard for guiding behaviour, forming judgments, or making decisions.
The examination of business rules requires recording business rules from sources, communication them clearly, confirming them with stakeholders, clarifying them to resonate with business goals, and arrange them so they can be effectively managed and reused.
The sources of business rules may be clear such as business policies, regulations, or implied such as undocumented stakeholder knowledge, business practices, or corporate culture norms.
Business rules should be specific, clear, available, and sole sourced.
The fundamental concepts of business rules include the following:
- Establish them on standard business terminology to allow domain subject matter experts to confirm them.
- Communicate them independently from how they will be administered.
- Explaining them at the microscopic level and in an affirmative format.
- Isolate them from the processes they support or restrict.
- Linking them to the decisions the rule supports or constrains.
- maintaining them in a system such that they can be observed and adjusted as business situations adapt over time.
A group of rules for making an operational business decision may be communicated as a decision table or decision tree, in decision analysis. The number of rules in such a group can be fairly large, with a great degree of difficulty.
Business rules need a steady use of business terms, a glossary of definitions for the fundamental business theories, and an understanding of the basic relationships among the theories.
Business rules should be communicated and administered independently of any execution technology since they need to be accessible for reference by business people.
There are often exceptions to business rules; these should be treated as additional business rules.
Existing business rules should be questioned to ensure that they are in line with business goals and remain applicable, especially if new solutions come out.
1. Definitional Rules: definitional rules form theories or produce information. They show something that is fundamentally true or untrue about some theory.
In disparity to behavioural rules, which are about people’s behaviour, definitional rules constitute operational knowledge of the organization.
Definitional rules cannot be breached but they can be misused.
An example of a definitional rule is:
A customer must be considered a high valued customer if they buy more than one hundred thousand dollars worth of goods and services.
Definitional rules usually advise how information may be obtained, deduced or calculation based on the information available to the business.
Groups of definitional rules are usually used to make operational business decisions.
An example of a calculation rule is:
The local tax on a sales order must be calculated as the (sum of the prices of all the order’s taxable ordered items) × local tax rate amount.
2. Behavioural Rules: Behavioural rules are the rules created by people even if the behaviour has been automated.
Behavioural rules serve to direct everyday business activity, they do so by setting up some responsibility or forbiddance on behaviour, action, operation, or procedure.
Behavioural rules are rules that the organization selects to impose as a matter of strategy, often to decrease risk or increase efficiency. They usually make use of the information created by definitional rules .
Behavioural rules are intended to direct the activity of people working within the organization, or people who relate with it.
They may compel individuals to execute actions in a particular way, hindering them from performing actions, or direct the conditions under which something can be accurately done.
An example of a behavioural rule is: To place an order, the billing address of a credit card must match that provided to the credit card provider.
In contrast to definitional rules, behavioural rules are rules that can be breached directly.
By definition, it is possible to violate a behavioural rule, regardless of the fact that the organization safeguards against this.
Because of this, further investigations should be carried out to decide how strictly the rule needs to be enforced, what kinds of penalty should be enforced if it is violated, and what additional answers to a violation might be suitable.
Such investigations usually leads to specification of additional rules.
Different levels of enforcement may be stated for a behavioural rule.
For example:
• Allow no breaches which must be strictly enforced.
• Override by an approved actor
• Override with a description.
• No active enforcement.
A behavioural rule for which there is no active enforcement is simply a directive that conveys preferred business behaviour.
The business rules analysis has both its strengths and limitations, which include:
Strengths
• When imposed and managed by a single enterprise-wide engine changes to business
rules can be completed quickly.
• A condensed repository creates the ability to reuse business rules across an
organization.
• Business rules provide structure to direct business behaviours.
• Clearly describing and managing business rules allows the enterprise to make changes to policy without changing processes or systems.
Limitations
• Organizations may create lengthy lists of ambivalent business rules.
• Business rules can create unanticipated results when merged unless confirmed against
one another.
• If accessible vocabulary is not business friendly, or is poorly defined and organized, the ensuing business rules could be erroneous or conflicting.