10.20.11
Business Rules Exposed
[Cartoon]
Why is it good to expose some business rules and keep others a secret? Exposing rules allows business people to modify the flow of information processing without the need for IT to change systems. For business functions where the rules often change, this can reduce IT costs and substantially increase delivery of needed changes.
If exposing some rules is so beneficial, then why not expose them all? Why keep so many a secret?
Exposing business rules usually requires a rules engine. This engine evaluates all of the rules as a whole and reports on any logical invalidity. The rules engine accomplishes this by taking each rule as an axiom and applies them in the order given to determine validity. For example, if one rule states that a numeric value must be greater than 10 and another rule states that the same numeric value must always be less than 10 then an error is detected.
Because there can be a large number of rules and multiple people applying changes, axiomatic errors can occur that are not as obvious as the one in the previous example. The ability of a rules engine to take thousands of rules and evaluate them for consistency is the advantage of having a rules engine.
One approach to systems development is to expose all business rules. In this approach the development process is to uncover all the business rules. The rules include the conditions that must exist for the rule to be true and the actions to be taken when the rule is true. The rule may even initiate other rules so entire processes can be defined as a set of automatic events. One event can initiate other rule-based events and then, in turn, these rules can initiate even more events.
This approach where all the rules are exposed is like a “cause and effect” view of processing. It works on the idea that a tiger poked with a stick will respond by attacking the stick. In business, this means that a customer initiating a sale is like poking the stick and the business must respond by jumping on the sales information to make sure the customer receives the product ordered.
In this approach it can be more difficult to visualize the process steps than having basic process flow diagrams. In traditional approaches, process-flow diagrams are prepared at a high level and can be drilled down into for more detail. In the rules-based approach, all of the information is at the detail level. This can make it harder to conceptualize higher levels for better understanding.
Business rule-based systems usually operate in an interpretive mode. This means the rules are stored as data and processed by the rules engine. This can have tremendous overhead cost at execution time. As the number of rules is increased, the processing often increases exponentially. Since the traditional programming approach has a more linear processing growth as rules are increased, it is no wonder some rules are not exposed using a rules engine.
So maybe it is not an issue of business rules being kept a secret. It is more of a cost issue in exposing the rules for everyone to see. In the future, we will see great advances in the performance of rules engines and are likely to see more rules exposed. One day there may be no secrets.
The Enterprise Architects can see what is coming and are already preparing. They know that this will be their time. Corporations will be able to completely focus on their business, and automation will be viewed as an agile enabler. Automation will finally become the self-service contributor that the Corporate Office has always wanted it to be. –Enterprise Architects Masters of the Unseen City
Closing the Business / IT gap.
