Home

Updated Sept 17 2008: new links

One of the great contributions to the world of business rules in the last decade is the OMG Model Driven Architecture for Business Rules. The OMG link will take you to a page listing several formats for the article. I suggest using the PDF format for Business Semantics of Business Rules, it's about 240K. They also have MS Word and RTF formats.

Make sure to see Chapter 6, Specific Requirements, it's the meat of the document. From Chapter 6:

Problem Statement 6.1.1

What is a business rule?

Business rules are simple atomic statements that define or constrain some aspect of business operations.

“A Business Rule is a directive, intended to influence or guide business behavior, in support of Business Policy that has been formulated in response to an Opportunity, Threat, Strength, or Weakness.

It is a single Element of Guidance that does not require additional interpretation to undertake Strategies or Tactics.

A Business Rule is:

• highly structured.

• discrete or atomic.

• carefully expressed in terms of standard vocabulary.”[1]

The term ‘business’ [mass noun] is used here in its core sense, “a person's regular occupation, profession, or trade,”[2] and refers to any kind of organized, purposeful human work activity. ‘A business’ [count noun] means an enterprise or a company or other kind of organization. The business rules concept applies to the policies and rules by which any organization – commercial, governmental, educational – carries out its activities and fulfills its purpose.

Much of the industry's understanding of 'business rules' has been historically shaped by the GUIDE definition, which established a general frame of reference around which much continuing work has been centered:

“A Business Rule is a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. This must be either a term or fact, a constraint, or a derivation. It is ‘atomic’ in that it cannot be broken down or decomposed further into more detailed business rules. If reduced any further, there would be loss of important information about the business.”

The semantic essence of a business rule – regardless of its syntax – expresses a crisp logical definition of some facet of the organization's way of doing business. A typical organization will have between 10^4 and 10^6 rules of this kind, depending on the precise nature of the business.

Note the use of scientific notation rather than the numerals "10,000 and 1,000,000" - gives one a sense of the audience.

It is also worth noting that their sense of business rule includes anything and everything that has to do with computers, the database, data validations, processing instructions, the whole nine yards. They must because that is the only way that they could arrive at an estimate of 10,000 to 1,000,000 business rules for a 'typical organizations'. A more austere definition of business rules only goes so far as to include those rules that make a vital difference to success or failure of the business - a large company might have a few hundred real, rip-snorting business rules.

Nonetheless, the rest of the article seems to use more a standard, business-oriented definition of the word and is quite good. It must have been a slip of the pen.

For a detailed, almost painstaking description of MDA by business rules veteran Stan Hendryx read Model-Driven Architecture and the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules.