روش شناسی و ابزار حمایتی برای مدیریت قوانین کسب و کار در سازمان

Business rules are evidently important for organisations as they describe how they are doing business. Their value has also been recognised within the information system (IS) domain, mostly because of their ability to make applications flexible and amenable to change. In this paper, we propose a methodology that helps business people and developers to keep business rules at the business level inline with the rules that are implemented at the system level. In contrast to several existing approaches that primarily focus on business rules in the scope of an application, our methodology addresses the entire IS of an organisation. The paper also describes requirements for a tool support that would be appropriate to support the methodology.

In the last decades, business rules have become popular in the information system (IS) community mostly because of their ability to make applications flexible and amenable to change (e.g. [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] and [7]). Both, researchers and practitioners are convinced that since business rules are very sensitive to business changes they require explicit treatment during IS development to ensure the IS agility. Otherwise many problems may occur. For example • Since not acquired systematically and completely, business rules do not reflect real conditions of the business environment. Consequently, applications are developed that do not meet business needs. • There is a lack of documentation on business rules. • Business rules are buried into program code. It is not clear, what kind of rules govern an application, when the rules are triggered and how they are implemented. • Business logic is hard to maintain as rules are distributed across the application logic. • Business rules are hard to control, since there is no common and single purpose store for them. The aforementioned problems have initiated a lot of research in academia and industry. As a result, a variety of tools and approaches can be found today that provide IS developers with facilities for managing business rules in IS development [8], [9], [10], [11] and [12]. Business rules, however, do not pertain to IS or to its application software. Business rules are set and owned by the business and have to be therefore managed by the business. In the paper, we emphasise that business rules may not just serve as a mechanism for making applications flexible, but could also be used as a bridge that helps to keep the entire IS of an organisation aligned with its business. As the main contribution, we propose a methodology and requirements for a tool support that facilitates business people and developers with a support for keeping business rules at the business level inline with rules at the system level. The methodology defines all the necessary activities that have to be performed within IS development in order to establish the link between an implementation of a business rule (e.g. trigger in database, method in program code, etc.) and its sources in business environment. When changes occur at the business level, the methodology and tool assist in finding the applications and their components (no matter what kind of technology they use) that are influenced by the changes. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 gives a brief history of business rule related research, discussing contributions from different research areas. In Section 3, we provide a motivation for business rule management in enterprises and give a brief explanation of our research approach. Section 4 proceeds with the discussion on the business rule management process, examining the activities that are required to manage business rules for an overall organisation. In Section 5, the requirements for building an appropriate tool support for the business rule management process are discussed. Finally, a discussion is provided on related work.

We have presented an approach for business rule management in organisations, which presents another attempt towards greater business agility. The key concept of the approach is that there must be an explicit link between each business rule instance as exists in business environment and its implementations in one or several application systems. If such a link is established, then it is much easier to maintain IS in a condition that really reflects the organisation's requirements. In the paper, we have described a scenario that comprises the activities essential for the business rule management process. The experiences which we have acquired while using the scenario and supporting prototype in practice have helped us to improve the process and to define the requirements of an appropriate tool support. The development of a tool support, which is in progress, is part of a real project aimed at establishing the continuous business rule management environment. We are aware that the establishment of an environment in which business rules at IS level are connected to their sources at business level requires extensive work, for which organisations may not have enough motivation. In our future work we will address this issue by examination of how the activities from the scenario can be performed in conjunction with the processes that deal with business analysis, such as strategy planning, business process reengineering, IS renovation, etc.