Consider the business rule: A vehicle must not exceed the posted speed limit. Some of the issues for this business rule are (a) how do you detect a violation and (b) how do you respond to a violation.These issues raise the question, whose process is it? Are we talking about the process of the person driving down the street, or the process of the policeperson operating the speed trap? The two processes are obviously related in some way, but definitely not the same. The cop’s process is best viewed as interrupting the driver’s process. Let me come back to that point in a minute.There are two fundamental kinds of business rules[1]:
Decision rules (or a little more broadly, definitional rules). These are the kind of business rules that expert systems traditionally addressed. It’s the kind you find in decision tasks – e.g., whether someone should be given credit.
Behavioral rules. These are business rules that can be violated – e.g., speeding down the street, or being off-sides in football. For behavioral rules you need cops or referees or whatever to interrupt a more basic process when a violation occurs. It’s just the natural way to do things (if you don’t want anarchy).
Aside: You might say the examples of behavioral rules I’ve cited (speeding and off-sides) are not automatable. Well, I’m less and less sure about that these days. I see a lot of cameras where I live ‘watching’ for cars running red lights. The camera takes a picture of your license plate and the position of the car in the intersection and you get a ticket in the mail. For the record, I haven’t gotten one. But they do make me more careful about yellow lights.In any case, a great many behavioral rules are automatable. They arise as interpretations of some law, act, statute, regulation, contract, agreement, business deal, MOU, business policy, license, certification, warranty, etc. For these kinds of business rules, you need a ‘watcher’ outside the process, standing ready to interrupt the process if a violation occurs. A classic example: The fuel rods in a nuclear power plant must be covered with water. If a process of operating the power plant ever violate that rule, I want an immediate violation response to interrupt the guilty process(!).That business rule is about operating a power plant, but the same idea holds true for business processes in general. Detecting violations of behavioral rules is how you can stitch together dynamic processes in real time.Such dynamic processes cannot be achieved by embedding business rules in either a model of the business process, or the process itself. The ‘watcher’ must be on the outside, protecting the interests of the larger (business) community. Such rule independence is the fundamental idea of business rules, as expressed by the Business Rule Manifesto[2]. R.I.P traditional, hard-wired processes!
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