When is a Business Architecture a Dumb One?
In a recent discussion on social media I was explaining what I thought would make a business architecture smart. Tom Graves replied that he wasn’t sure what made one smart, but that he did know what makes one dumb. His criteria …
- rigid rule-based boundaries.
- over-reliance on rigid true/false rules.
- attempts to implement most or all of that architecture through automated ‘business-rules engines’ that can only work with rigid true/false rules.
1. The quest for ‘certainty’ in an inherently-uncertain world is futile. Rules of all kinds exist to help human thinking and human judgment, not to act as a substitute for it.
2. The software vendors … are frankly not far short of committing fraud with many of the claims they make as to the efficacy and validity of their ‘business-rules engines’.
The term business rule unfortunately has been hijacked by software vendors to mean something very different from the original concept. For example, production rules[1] (the basis for the majority of current product offerings) are not business rules. Full stop. This distorted view of business rule needs to be rectified. Don’t let yourself be sucked into it! For real business rules there are three (optional) supplemental specifications for each business rule statement[2]:(1) level of enforcement
(2) violation (breach) response
(3) violation (breach) message.
It is through these specifications that the richness of behavioral coordination can arise.a computer program typically used to provide some form of artificial intelligence, which consists primarily of a set of rules about behavior
Production rule systems are a class of platform whose rule format and operation are aimed toward developers. According to Wikipedia:“A production system provides the mechanism necessary to execute productions in order to achieve some goal for the system. Productions consist of two parts: a sensory precondition (or ‘IF’ statement) and an action (or ‘THEN’). If a production’s precondition matches the current state of the world, then the production is said to be triggered. If a production’s action is executed, it is said to have fired.”
Tags: breach questions, business architecture, business rule engine, definition of business rule, dumb business architecture, enforcement level, enterprise architecture, intelligent architecture, intelligent business architecture, level of enforcement, production rule systems, production rules, rule engine, rule violation, smart architecture, smart business architecture, true/false rules, violation message, violation response, violations, violations of rules
