BRE & BRMS

Introduction to Business Rules!!!
Business rules are the rules by which you run your business. though it sounds simple,
it is not, the reason being. People generally are viewing the tip of an Iceberg here.
There are plenty of rules in the organizations that are in the minds of the executives, not talked about, unknown to many etc.,
These rules are basically due to two things: Company policies and Legal Regulations.
Business rule is a company policy put forward in the form of an expression.

Ignorance of any Business Rule can make the company lose big time. Business Rule Engine(BRE) and Business Rule Management Solutions (BRMS) are the solutions from IT answering this requirement. The main underlying aim of these solutions is to give power to the actual business specialist the power to manage rules all by himself, thereby creating paradigm shift by taking off the requirement of software developers for managing the rules.

Now the question is, why does a company need these solutions?

There are plenty of reasons for which a company should go for these solutions:

1. Business has become very dynamic, rules change frequently
2. Speed is the name of the game!!
3. Preventing Business Mistakes
4. Compliance-Mitigates Operational Risks
5. Reduced time to market
6. Reduced IT costs.
7. Increased Flexibility
8. Ease of management

Now, how to identify the Business Rules of your company:

Put simple, there are 3 ways to do it.

1. Write down every rule, requirement on paper.
2. Use Decision Tables- Decision Table helps you put down every possible scenario of your Business
3. Decision Trees- A methodical approach that brings out everything present in your company to life.

However, I suggest companies to use both the decision tree and Decision table approach for identifying all the Business rules.

Now that you have got your Business rules documented.

Business rules are divided into two categories:
Productive Rules:Rules of the BPM
Reactive Rules:Rules that get triggered on occurance of an event.

Now what to do with them, should you be going for BRE or BRMS.

First of all, lets get introduced to them.

Business Rule Engines

Business Rule Engine is a pluggable software that separates business rules from the application code and increase flexibility.

Generally BREs have environments to design, test and deploy the Business Rules as Services. Now, there are plenty of players in this space, these BREs emphasize on either of these two types of rules, Complex or advanced BREs emphasize on reactive rules than that of Production Rules.

More on BRMS and the factors on which you need to select the BRE\ BRMS in the next post