In conversations with my friends and mentors, Barbra Von Halle and James Taylor, we sense the term ‘Business Rules’ has become outdated or wrong. I think I recall Larry Goldberg once describing the expression as ‘unfortunate’. What the industry and practitioners are striving for has broader ambitions than defining constraints or guidelines for enterprise behavior. A business rule is an atomic outcome to a formal mind-set, or way of thinking. You can create business rules without a business rules approach, but there might be little ‘agility’ benefits, if they are not connected with business strategies and cross-referenced with other stakeholders.

The term ‘Business Rule’ also has a certain baggage. It is associated with relational database thinking or ‘use cases’ that are data or information oriented. They cannot be expressed as objects. The apprehension that arises here is that application development often absorbs business rules into rigid code. Or, as Ismael Gimili likes to say it, business rules are ‘baked into the code’. Business Rules also implies a certain type of programming style advocated by projects such as ‘Drools‘ or Mandrax. So when you meditate on the term business rules, it is very difficult to point to a single idea.

We would love a simple term, such as decision management, or enterprise decision management, that would encompass the idea that firms adopt a business rules approach to their corporate policies.
What we are supporting is a firm-wide approach to all policies or decisions that touch or influence resources. James Taylor’s deeper variation on this, ‘Enterprise Decision Management‘ is that decisions should be recorded, analyzed and improved. My variation on this is that decisions should be connected to processes and distributed as services.

We need to be honest here. Many firms look to business rules to solve a project’s particular problem, yet there are few firms that are committed to enterprise-wide business rules approaches. Yet this will be critical to future strategic management. When you cross-reference the works of the business thinkers (See ‘Enterprise Architecture as Strategy‘ and ‘The Business Rule Revolution‘) you might see that advancing business components as a configurable collection of services is a critical to agile business strategies. Business Rules and Business Process Management are the leading way of doing this. (Some would point to MDA, but this seems to be a very technical approach that is strongly motivated by software methodologists).

The source of strategic failures in corporate (and government) governance occurs when each business unit or operation is treated as a banlieue. A killer attitude at the C-level can be summed by the phrase ‘I have good people that manage that for me’.

We need a new catch phrase. I like decision governance. From James Sinur’s view policies are Meta-rules that guide decisions. Decisions are the outcome of multiple business rules. Decision governance is the management practice of formalizing all decisions affecting resources across all lines of business..