Business Rules Oriented IS

BR Oriented IS Development

Instructors: Nicklas Holmberg, Lars Fernebro

Student Name: Mengmeng Li (cherish_chance@yahoo.cn) Student Personal ID: 871016-T Date: 2010-10-24

Abstract

Business rules are widely used and play an important role in modern businesses as they make constraints to guide the behaviour and information. Many methods can be used to do the business rules management. Among these, developing BR oriented information systems is the most reasonable one because it is economical. BR oriented IS is customer-oriented and can reduce time and labour. There are many features, such as the rules in the system, the architecture, the decision trees and tables, backward chaining and forward chaining engine, etc. make BR oriented IS distinctive. The paper also describes the steps to make BR oriented IS and how to evaluate the BR oriented IS after developed.

Student Name: Mengmeng Li Personal ID: 871016-T 1. Introduction

Business rules widely exist in our everyday life. In bookstores, business rules are made to decide whether the customer can enjoy a discount of 20% or 50% off according to the amount and kinds of books he or she bought. In hospitals, business rules may be made to regulate only patients who had made a reservation can receive dentists' treatment. Business rules are also made to require only people who are above 18 can buy intoxicating liquor in Sweden. Steinke and Nickolette (2003, pp.52-63) in their recent research paper suggest that business rules are statements that are made in order to effect or guide behaviour and information within the organization.1 Business rules are quite crucial for modern businesses. People pay attention to business rules management methods, hoping that business rules can be well applied on business, and can make their work be done more efficiently. Graham (2006, p. 8) states that business rules management is to implement systems based on the business rules approach. Though there are many ways available to do the business rules management, to use a business rules management system is the most preferable one because it is economical.2 Thus BR oriented IS development emerges as the times require. More and more people get interested in the development of BR oriented IS as it is an ideal way to aid business performance, not only reducing time but also lowering the labour cost.

2. Why We Make BR Oriented IS Development

Businesses always trying to find new ways to make them perform more effectively and efficiently. As we are in the 21st century, the application of information technology into business area has been heavily emphasized. BR oriented IS development brings good news to today's businesses, because it will be an antidote to heal the wound of wasting time and manpower in companies and organizations.

Standish, (1995; 2004) as sited in Graham (2006, pp.1-2), suggests that as many as around 66% of large US projects fail, and the reasons for why these projects fail are summarized as follows:

 User involvement is insufficient;

 Statements of requirement is not clear;  Project ownership is not created;

 Vision and objectives are unclear; and  Planning is not made.3

To deal with these problems above, BR oriented IS is a perfect choice. Furthermore, BR oriented IS creates languages based on simple conceptual models that can be easily understand by users.4 It is a customer-friendly system that is more competitive in today's world. It is also the initial way to make IT practice satisfy business need.

Earlier research (Bajec and Krisper, 2005, pp.423-443) demonstrated that the value of business rules has been recognized in the area of Information Systems due to their ability to make applications flexible, controllable and easy to change.5

The statement above is really understandable. A BR oriented IS allows the reuse of rules across services, so the rules can be changed quite easily without typing the

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Student Name: Mengmeng Li Personal ID: 871016-T codes. This view has been raised in the work of Graham (2006).6 That means BR oriented IS can make the development and maintenance phase more easier and efficient, no waste of labour and time will be occurred if the BR oriented IS have been well developed.

Kieser and Koch (2008) in their recent research paper found that innovations in organizational rule are needed to let specialists in organizations be able to jointly produce integrated solutions. In addition, in order to line with environmental changes in the organization, organizations need to reformulate or replace rules to change organizational behaviour.7 Both of the two problems can be solved by developing BR oriented IS. For the first problem, BR oriented IS can build a user-friendly platform to let knowledge be shared between specialists within the organization. Regarding to the second problem, as I have mentioned above, rules can be easily changed if we use BR oriented IS. Thus we can rid get of the troublesome of composing codes again and reducing lots of time.

Facts also proved that it is necessary to advocate BR oriented IS development. Earlier research conducted by Nelson, Rariden, and Sen (2008) showed that the BRE ( business rule engines) market has increased to a half billion U.S. dollars in annual product sales. It is really a large profit. This growth is resulted from the benefits enabled to organizations with effective BREs including improved interoperability, greater flexibility and control over deploying BRs, improved quality of BR updates, reduced cost and greater speed of making rule updates.8 BR oriented IS development really brought benefits to these businesses that adopt the method to manage their business.

3. Features of BR Oriented IS

What makes BR oriented IS different? These followings are some of the key features of BR oriented IS.

A) The Rules Within the BR Oriented IS:

Recent research (Graham, 2006, pp. 99-108) found that rules in BR oriented IS are non-procedural. They just indicate what is true, what is false other than how to calculate something. Formulae in a typical BR oriented IS should can be stored in other places instead of storing in the rules in the repository; thus calculations can be made in conventional source code, which is more efficient.

Business rules in BR oriented IS can interact; facts involved in these rules can also interact. We can infer some fact from the relationships between the rules. That means besides rules and facts, BR oriented IS also make automatic inferencing possible.

Business rules are likely to use the \"must or must not\" form as expressions other than if/then statements that usually appear in other kinds of information systems.9 B) The distinctive architecture:

In BR oriented IS, business rules and business data are structured separate from each other, the boundary between the rules and data is quite clear.

The knowledge kept in BR oriented IS is stored according to whether it is rule base or knowledge base.

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Student Name: Mengmeng Li Personal ID: 871016-T The BR oriented IS is composed by four elements. The first one is the environment which is shared by all computer systems and it is supportive. The second one is the knowledge base, which involves ways of access and representation. The third one is the interference engine, which can group the rules together and make conclusions. The last one the the repository, it is where the rules are kept and possibly be controlled, viewed, shared, etc. (Graham, 2006, pp. 99-108)10 Figure 1 below explains the BR oriented IS architecture and how every parts of the architecture interacts with each other.

Figure 1 (Graham, 2006, p. 103)17

C) Decision Trees and Decision Tables:

Decision trees are the pictorial forms to describe the rules, which put the rules into a tree structure. Decision Tables are tabular formats of representing the rules. Both of decision trees and decision tables work as aids to help users and developers to debug and communicate between each other. (Graham, 2006, pp. 99-108)11 D) Backward Chaining and Forward Chaining:

Backward chaining and forward chaining are most well-known of inference engine to apply knowledge to data. Backward chaining, which is also called goal-directed reasoning, is the strategy very popular used in systems of selecting products and giving advices. Forward chaining, which is also called data-directed inference, is typically used for controlling process and scheduling applications. (Graham, 2006, pp. 99-108)12

4. How to Make BR Oriented IS Development A) Knowledge Acquisition:

Graham (2006, pp. 143-147) suggests that knowledge acquisition is one of the most difficult and important problems in the process of developing BR oriented IS. Knowledge acquisition is the procedure of identifying and recognizing knowledge as asset within the organization. Refer to the knowledge acquisition techniques, they can be divided into two types.

One is informal. Informal knowledge acquisition techniques include informal but structured and focused interviews, presentations by experts, verbal protocols, observational studies, questionnaires, simulation and prototyping, introspection, background reading, and becoming an expert yourself.

The other one is formal. This kind of knowledge acquisition techniques involves

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Student Name: Mengmeng Li Personal ID: 871016-T probes, teachback, Kelly grids, data mining, and workshops.13 B) Analysis:

It is important for analysts to analyse how the rules will be implemented and how well the problems can be solved when building the BR oriented IS. Kardasis and Loucopoulos (2005) in their recent research paper showed that there are three analysis phases that need to be undertaken: the intentional analysis phase, the operational analysis phase and the IS architecture analysis phase. The intentional analysis phase aims at identifying expectations and needs from different stakeholders in the project, and getting views from these stakeholders on business constraints that should be taken into well consideration. The operational phase is the next phase to transfer the unstructured business constraints that are made in the previous phase to formal business rule statements. Thus the organization that is targeted can be described structurally. In the third phase (IS architecture analysis), the task of adding implementation information to the BR oriented IS should be completed.14

Graham (2006, p. 147) claims that analysis of the BR oriented IS can be classified into these following types or steps: classifying problems, assessing suitability, monitoring, diagnosing pitfalls and problems, and repairing.15

5. The Evaluation of BR Oriented IS

After we built a BR oriented IS, we may wonder whether we have built one that is good enough. Graham (2006, pp. 110-111) states the criteria to evaluate the BR oriented IS as follows:

 Rules in the BR oriented IS should be created and modified by business analysts.  The repository of the systems should be fully-featured.  Backward chaining technique should be available.

 Rule engine can work in the system or service can be got within larger

applications.

 Target at business rules management problems other than just focus on workflow

problems.

 Facilities to generate good report should be provided.

 Examples of successful commercial applications that are made by using this IS

should can be provided.

 Can be compatible with either a component-based or a service-oriented

architecture.

 Commercial-standard professional support should be provided.16

6. Conclusion and Outllook

Business rules are a key element that can effect business performance to a large degree. BR oriented IS is built to manage business rules. It is necessary to realize the importance of developing BR oriented IS. There is still a long way for BR oriented IS development. As the figure 2 shows, there is still and gap between business rules requirements and what IT thinks are requirements. What we are looking forward is to develop better BR oriented IS that can make BR and IS cooperate well and perform more spontaneously.

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Student Name: Mengmeng Li Personal ID: 871016-T Figure 2 (Steinke and Nickolette, 2003)

Reference List

1. Steinke, G. & Nickolette, C. (2003): Business rules as the basis of an

organization's information systems, Industrial Management & Data Systems, vol. 103, no. 1, pp. 52-63.

2. Graham, I. (2006): Business rules management and service oriented architecture: a pattern language, John Wiley, Chichester, England, ISBN 9780470027219

3. Graham, I. (2006): Business rules management and service oriented architecture: a pattern language, John Wiley, Chichester, England, ISBN 9780470027219

4. Graham, I. (2006): Business rules management and service oriented architecture: a pattern language, John Wiley, Chichester, England, ISBN 9780470027219

5. Bajec, M. & Krisper, M. (2005): A methodology and tool support for managing business rules in organisations. Information Systems, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 423-443.

6. Graham, I. (2006): Business rules management and service oriented architecture: a pattern language, John Wiley, Chichester, England, ISBN 9780470027219

7. Kieser, A. & Koch, U. (2008): Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning Based on Rule Changes. Management Learning, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 329-347. 8. Nelson, M. L., Rariden, R. L. & Sen, R. (2008): A Lifecycle Approach towards Business Rules Management, Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii

International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2008), pp. 1-10.

9. Graham, I. (2006): Business rules management and service oriented architecture: a

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Student Name: Mengmeng Li Personal ID: 871016-T pattern language, John Wiley, Chichester, England, ISBN 9780470027219

10. Graham, I. (2006): Business rules management and service oriented architecture: a pattern language, John Wiley, Chichester, England, ISBN 9780470027219

11. Graham, I. (2006): Business rules management and service oriented architecture: a pattern language, John Wiley, Chichester, England, ISBN 9780470027219

12. Graham, I. (2006): Business rules management and service oriented architecture: a pattern language, John Wiley, Chichester, England, ISBN 9780470027219

13. Graham, I. (2006): Business rules management and service oriented architecture: a pattern language, John Wiley, Chichester, England, ISBN 9780470027219

14. Kardasis, P. & Loucopoulos, P. (2005): A roadmap for the elicitation of business rules in information systems projects. Business Process Management Journal, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 316-348.

15. Graham, I. (2006): Business rules management and service oriented architecture: a pattern language, John Wiley, Chichester, England, ISBN 9780470027219

16. Graham, I. (2006): Business rules management and service oriented architecture: a pattern language, John Wiley, Chichester, England, ISBN 9780470027219

17. Graham, I. (2006): Business rules management and service oriented architecture: a pattern language, John Wiley, Chichester, England, ISBN 9780470027219

18. Steinke, G. & Nickolette, C. (2003): Business rules as the basis of an

organization's information systems, Industrial Management & Data Systems, vol. 103, no. 1, pp. 52-63.

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