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Business Rules the Ingredients

What are business rules?

Business rules define acceptable enterprise actions in response to internal and external requirements and events of the organization. In a Business Process Management (BPM) enabled enterprise the business rules grant authority to act while imposing limits and conditions on how the human capital, infrastructure interfaces, and systems interact within their enterprise operations and events. From a human capital view the rules provide validation to task/activities which are assigned. From the infrastructure interface perspective the rules accept or deny human capital event, tasks or activities transitions to the systems. From an systems perspective, the rules define which processes, data, constraints and performance criteria are acceptable. Properly expressed, business rules (BR) are a set of formal enterprise requirements and constraints that guide operations of the organization.

Capture of Business Rules

In a well-defined Enterprise Architecture Plan (EAP) – the business rules are essential artifacts at every level of the plan. They are apart of the “How’s” of the current and future state of the EA plan. Most business rules are inherently known in enterprise by the pure nature of its business. An example is the bank loan approval process to an individual with no employment and no credit history for a request of $100,000.00 cash or an insurance claim payment for repair of a vehicle to which the driver was find negligent in their actions.

In the current to future state of the EAP the enterprise is consistently reviewing, modifying, and deleting business rules. Each BPM element of the enterprise should have the capability of capturing, modifying, and deleting business rules.

As written in “Just in Time (JIT) Business Rules Mining” by Shirley J. Sartin, PMP, we can utilize reverse engineering techniques within BPM architecture to derive our business rules by using the following:

1.  Indentify Features

2.  Determine Functions

3.  Create Context Diagram

4.  Create Functional Decomposition Diagram

5.  Create Event Decomposition Diagram

6.  Create Event-Response List

7.  Analyze Event-Response List for noun and verb actions

As you can see business rules are created based on nouns and verbs.

The BPM – BR Integration

Once the business rules are established we placed them in a repository for use by our BPM architecture. The key components of the BPM architecture that utilize business rules are the “Business Execution” sectors of the BPM structure. The business rules are the decision makers of the BPMN gateway elements.

In Summary 

Business Rules sets the tone of operation of an enterprise by requirements and constraints. They are created in a well-defined EAP, stored in a repository, and are then utilized in the BPM architecture.

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dotNet Framework Solutions Business Processes Architecture Methodology

We architecture business processes utilizing the following core elements and subsets:

Core elements

·  Business Value Chain

·  Business Planning

·  Business Development

·  Business Resources

Subsets of core

o  Execution

o  Management

o  State Status

Flow of the Execution Subset Processes

The “execution” activities/tasks direct the “hows” of the enterprise architecture plans (EAP).  They [execution subsets] receive physical inputs such as raw materials, insurance claims forms, internet reservations, bank loan applications, and others processing types which are then converted into a product and/or service. This conversion may be both internal and external to the enterprise.

The execution subset executes workflow from business rules and logic criteria architected from the EAP.  T he following example is an execution of an internal process which will issue a claim check or denial letter (the product). The process flow illustrated:

The execution subset also outputs “State Status” for validation, monitoring, and inputs to the EAP. The inputs into the EAP allow for review of the processes and modification to the overall enterprise architecture.

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The Essentials ProcessesMost enterprises have four core processes that encompass human, systems (hardware), and applications (software) operations. The four processes are:

·      Value Chain

·      Planning

·      Development

·      Resources

Capturing the Essentials

Most enterprise function on an inept set of these four core processes. Management has the basic understanding that they must find [value chain] vendors to provide raw materials (process inputs) that are used to produce products and/or services (process outputs). This ranges from paper, pencils, etc. to sheets of aluminum to create lets say cloths hangers.

Management must also conduct some form of [planning] to decide what will be produced (the vision). They will have to plan (the how) for the purchasing of supplies to the creation of product. They must generate development plans (the what) to produce the cloth hangers in our hypothetical case.

Now that management has conducted its planning, they are now prepared for the [development] of our hypothetical cloths hangers. The development of the cloth hangers will have inputs from the [value chain] and [planning] processes to provide and direct respectively how the cloth hangers will be produced.

Lastly, management requires internal and external humans, systems, and applications [resources] to provide our cloths hanger to the market.  

Placing in Actions

We have just written a draft of business process management (BPM) for the production of cloths hangers.  As you can see there are nouns (executions) and verbs (management) that makeup the functions taken to create our cloths hangers. We can take these nouns and verbs and model them into notations (BPMN) of functionality and procedures thus capturing the business process.

At many enterprises, a first useful step toward the goals of BPM is the formation of teams that includes top management, stakeholders and IT, as well as users or user representatives chosen by users. Also, be advised, it is unwise, if not impossible to capture every piece of information about every preformed activity/task (the lowest function of a process) by the enterprise. BPM should be incorporated and integrated with the use of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Customer Relations Management (CRM) to produce a closed loop methodology that then takes the enterprise on a journey and not a destination.

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BPMN (Business Process Management Notation) captures your processes and presents them in a graphical form.  BPMN is a standard defined by the Objects Management Group (OMG). BPMN provides many symbols to represent events, activities, tasks and others.Events:
 

Activity/Task:

Gateways:

Connecting:

A simple notated process: How would BPMN present the vision of the enterprise? Let’s view a hypothetical enterprise vision of making glowing cloths hangers. This vision would be the starting [Event] to a Business Planning Process. Within the Business Planning Process the glowing cloths hanger would move through multiple [Gateways] and [Activity/Task] notations.

Example: What color should the hanger have – a Gateway Method that flows to green or red?The receiving [Task] notation would then process the chosen color. The flow would continue in processing the vision of creating the glowing cloths hanger until the [End] [Event] occurs which would present a graphical representation similar as presented above.There are now tools available to presents a higher level of presentation then the representation presented here. For the executive team theses graphical presentation and statuses would provide great value to the course of the business by allowing for implementation of what-if scenarios that would be feed into a simulation processes thus returning visual results of the enterprise modification to the vision.

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The definition of a business process is defined by inputs, activities, tasks, relationships, status, and outputs to accomplish a defined objective. An example would consist of actions required to purchase raw materials [business value chain process] to produce plastic clothes hanger. The process might run as such:

1. A directive is given from the business planning process to locate plastic vendors for hanger production  – Input of process
2. Locate vendors of plastic for molding hanger – activity/task of process
3. Initiate purchase request for the business resource process – activity/task, and relationship of process
4. Update required procedures and close process – status update and output of process

A sound business processes architecture will defined a core set of reusable processes for the enterprise. Business knowledge and logic shall be consumed to create business process patterns (BPP) for the core processes.

Thus we can create four core processes that will fit any enterprise. They are as follows:       1. Value Chain
      2. Future Capabilities
      3. Planning
      4. Resources

I will now outline the coverage of theses processes. The Value Chain processes implements the production of good and services as defined by the enterprise vision. It handles all activities/tasks of customer request to satisfactory delivery. The Future Capabilities processes perform activities/tasks to produce new capabilities, product and/or services, and infrastructures to enhance the enterprise competitiveness.  The Planning processes define plans, projects, programs, and strategies for the enterprise growth. The Resources processes manage the resources required by the enterprise to function such as financial, human, infrastructure, and others.Within these core processes are three primary sub processes of functionality. They are:

      1. Execution
      2. Management
      3. Status

The Execution sub processes activities/tasks transform inputs into a “product(s) and/or service(s).”  The Management sub processes activities/tasks gathers requirements to direct Execution sub processes by means of plans, projects, programs, and resource assignments to produce the defined objectivities. The Status sub processes activities/tasks gather results and information from the Execution and Management sub processes to update and feedback status to related core processes.
As you can see this business process architecture may be applied to any enterprise thus enabling the enterprise to become more agile and competitive.

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