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Course Name: Business Intelligence
Year
: 2009
Business Rules
12th Meeting
Source of this Material
(2).
Loshin, David (2003). Business Intelligence:
The Savvy Manager’s Guide. Chapter 7
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The Business Case
Sometimes business rules are applied by a data analyst sitting in front of a
database front end, and sometimes rules have been documented as program
logic. A business rules system is designed to capture the knowledge of all the
assertions, constraints, guidelines, policies, regulations, etc. that drive a
business process and manage that knowledge as a corporate asset. What
follows are some of the major advantages of implementing business process
using a business rules system.
• Encapsulation of Successful Business Logic
• Componentized Development
• Speed of Implementation
• Ease of Modification and Rapid Response to Change
• Reuse
• Persistence of Encapsulation of Business Knowledge
• Augmented Capabilities
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The Business Rules Approach
The business rules approach takes into consideration the encapsulation of
business logic for the purpose of identifying or highlighting entities or events
within a system. In essence, a business rules approach is meant to capture and
subsequently automate the repetitive operations that have been properly vetted
in term of business value so that analyst resources can be engaged in
discovering new opportunities for improvement or adding value. A business
rules approach integrates the following:
• Technology
• Workflow
• Information
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What is a Business Rule?
•
•
•
According to the business Rule Group, a business rule is a directive
intended to command and influence or guide business behavior, in support
of business policy that is formulated in response to an opportunity or threat.
From the information system perspective, a business rule is a statement
that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. It is intended to
assert business structure or to control or influence the behavior of the
business.
From a practical standpoint, a business rule asserts a statement about the
state of a business process or a directive describing changes in the state of
a business process. More simply, a business rule dictates what happens
when a sequence of inputs is applied to one or more well-described
scenarios.
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What is a Business Rule? (cont…)
•
Rule Basics
In business system, rules form the programmed representation of business policies
and practices. A rule is a statement that assert some truth about the system, along
with optional actions to be performed, depending on the assertion’s truth value.
•
Definitions and Specifications
In system o rules, there must be a well-defined, agreed-upon “vocabulary” for rule
specification; we can then enumerate the participants within the system along with
the descriptive “nouns” and “verbs” that are used in describing the business process.
•
Assertions
Assertions are statement about entities within the system that express sensible
observation about the business. Assertions describe relationships between entities
and activities within the framework.
• Constraints
Constraints express unconditional conformance to a business statement; compared
to a constraint, a data instance either conforms to that constraint or violates it.
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What is a Business Rule? (cont…)
•
Guidelines
A guideline expresses a desire about the state of the system or a warning about a
potential change in the system. A violation of a guideline may indicate a change in
business process that requires attention.
•
Actions
An action is any operation that changes the system state, typically as a result of the
violation of some constraint or guideline.
•
Triggers
A trigger specifies a collection of conditions and the initiation of an action contingent
upon the condition’s value. Triggers may combine constraints or guidelines with
actions.
•
Inference
An inference specifies a collection of conditions establishing a fact that becomes true
a by-product of changes within the states of the system. An inference is essentially a
new piece of information derived from the system state; when an inference rule is
executed, that new piece of information must be integrated into the system state.
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What is a Business Rule System?
A business rules system encapsulates sets of environment states, environment
variables, and formally defined rules that reflect business policies, preferences,
guidelines, triggers, etc. and how the environment is affected based on those
rules. A business rules system incorporates the following components.
• A rule definition framework
• A persistent rule base
• A rule engine
• An execution framework
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What is a Business Rule System? (cont…)
•
Rules Definition
All rules-based system employ some kind of rules language as a descriptive
formalism for describing all the aspects of the business process, including the system
states, the actors, the inputs and events, the triggers, and the transitions between
state. A rule language is a framework for describing sets of rules.
•
Rule Engines
A rules engine is an application that takes as input a set of rules, creates a framework
for executing those rules, and acts as a monitor to a system that must behave in
conjunction with those rules. Rules engine work together with a rules languages.
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Source of Business Rules
There are many sources for rules, such as conversation with people, design
documents, laws, regulations, and program codes, to name a few. Each of
these source may be rich in business rules, but because of the peculiarities of
each source, the extraction of rules from each requires different skills.
• People
Conversation with SMEs are likely to yield a treasure trove of business rules,
especially when these conversations are prompted as a result of previous iterations
of analysis.
•
Documentation
Documentation is a rich source of business rules, because documentation frequently
does not remain synchronized with what is being documented. Descriptive text is rich
with rules.
•
Regulations
Organizations that are bound by a governing a board’s set of regulations may find
that regulations are an excellent source of business rules. Laws and regulations,
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Source of Business Rules (cont…)
directives, and even suggestions by governing organizations or industry consortia are
good sources for business rules.
•
Program Code
One stickier problem in rule discovery is extracting business rules from existing
application programs. Alternatively there have been some suggested tools to perform
what could be called “code mining”.
•
Turning Language into Rules
A major benefit of the business rules approach is that analyzing a business process,
provides a mechanism for extracting BI from program logic and allowing it to be
treated as content. The rule analysis process leads toward the ability not just to
isolate intelligence rules, but also to identify terms, facts, and assertions about the
business entities that typically modeled in a database.
•
The Value of Subject Matter Experts
Having business-savvy staff or SMEs on the team will ease that process.
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Management Issue
When deciding to develop a system using the business rules approach,
consider what the system should look like after it is built, and enumerate all the
rules that specify our expectations about how that system works. These
expectations are the seeds of our business rules.
• Political Issues
Similar to other components of a BI program, a big roadblock to a successful
business rule implementation is a social issue, not technical one, for a number of
reasons.
 Risk Assessment
 Turf Concern
 High Expectations
•
Limitations of The Approach
There are of course limitations to the use of business rules.
 Detail Management
 Inflated Expectations
 Programmers are not eliminated
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End of Slide
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