Professional
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When you decide to get serious about using the Business Rules Approach, you'll soon realize that documenting business rules in a Word document just isn't going to cut it. There are so many business rules, and you want to know so much about them. Who's responsible for them? Why were they put in place? What business processes do they control? How have they changed over time? Where in the application portfolio have they been implemented? And so much more.
To answer these questions, you need a business rules database where you can capture business rules and cross-reference them to your business environment, customizable to do it your way. Enter BRS RuleTrack Version 1.0.7, a business rule capture and management facility developed by Framework Software Inc. (www.frameworksoft.com) and marketed by Business Rule Solutions LLC (www.brsolutions.com).
BRS RuleTrack
provides a complete environment for managing business rules. You can use the
product simply to capture and organize business rule statements. But the power
comes when you define your enterprise's business environment to the tool and
place your business rules within a business context, allowing you to track their
impact across the organization from both the business and technology
implementation perspectives.
Entering a business rule is as simple as entering the business rule statement. No other information is required to set up a rule. However, a lot of additional details about a business rule can be captured, such as the Business Topic to which the rule pertains, the parties (people and organizations) associated with the business rule, and what information systems or databases implement the business rule. In fact, BRS RuleTrack supports seven different categories of details about business rules. (See Table 1.)
The Rule Vocabulary
facility, which you use to build the term catalog, is the most impressive
feature of the tool. After you enter the business statement, you start linking
terms to the business rule. The "Show Possible Terms" button
highlights in green any existing terms used in the statement. To create new
terms in the catalog, simply highlight one or more words in the statement and
select the "Make Term" button. Finally, the "Possible Term
Wizard" lets you link the existing terms to the business rule. After you
complete this operation, terms used in the statement are highlighted in red.
The user can search
for business rules by their ID, name, text in the rule statement, or by rule
topic, using the standard Microsoft Access wildcard search facilities. A search
legend displays the valid type of wildcard characters and what they are used
for. I know I'm always forgetting what the wildcard searching characters are and
it's nice to have a handy reminder.
|
Basic |
The actual business
rule statement, its name, any alias names, associated terms, and rule
management information such as versions, related change efforts, and
milestone dates throughout the business rule's life cycle. |
|
Business Information |
Information about the
business rule's relevance within the business, such as the jurisdiction to
which it applies, its primary focus and purpose, and influences that
motivated the creation of the business rule. This section is also used to
link a business rule to the associated reference material, such as apolicy
manual, system documentation, or even a specific law or regulation. |
|
Context Information |
Provides the cross
reference into the business systems, including business workflows and the
systems and databases within the applications portfolio that support the
business rule. |
|
Categories |
Allows the business
rule to be classified using a variety of categorization schemes, for
example, enforcement level, type of regulatory rule, and system aspect
type. |
|
Relationships With
Other Rules |
Cross-references two
business rules for a variety of reasons, for example one rule replaces,
conflicts with, or is a component of the other rule. |
|
Parties to Rules |
Identifies all the
parties involved with the business rule and the roles assumed (such as
authorizer, business sponsor, enforcer steward , or implement. |
|
Evaluation |
Metrics used to
quantify specific characteristics about the business rule, for example,
its volatility, the confidence level in it, its sensitivity, or its
effectiveness. |
Table 1 BRS RuleTrack supports seven different
categories of details about business rules.
To truly manage business rules, you must understand how they fit into your enterprise. BRS RuleTrack provides the "Six Questions" facility for this purpose. The six questions correspond to the columns in the Zachman Enterprise Architecture Framework: what, how, where, who, when, and why. Through these questions, you describe the topics, terms, reference documents, events, tasks, applications, databases, jurisdictions, parties, change efforts, and rationales about why the business rules are established that provide the business context in which business rules operate. These business context aspects can be cross-referenced with one another to provide a complete picture of the enterprise's business environment. Once established, individual business rules can be linked into the relevant business context aspects.
You use the Type Maintenance and Business Context facilities in conjunction to customize BRS RuleTrack to reflect your unique environment. The tool supports more than 30 different Type properties used to define business rules and the business context. Although you can't add more Type properties or change the names of those that are provided, you can customize the set of values that each property can assume. Furthermore, you are not required to use any of the Type properties. I wanted to record a Business Rule Type that was compatible with those specified in the Business Rule Group's standard classification scheme. So I selected a Type property that I felt was not useful to my project and assigned values to it that corresponded to the classification scheme that I wanted.
Although you can add
new types and business context aspects on the fly when entering their
connections to other components in BRS RuleTrack, I think a safer approach is to
design your type and business context scheme before releasing the product to
your business rule analysts. You will probably want to establish a central
administration team to ensure that your enterprise is defined consistently for
all projects.
The software provides
a basic business rule versioning facility. When you click the "Archive
Rule" button, it creates a new version of the business rule. You can view
prior versions' rule statements from the "Version" tab. It appears
that BRS RuleTrack retains only the business rule statement for prior versions,
not the entire state of the rule when it was archived. If other aspects of the
rule change, such as related parties or what systems the rule is associated
with, there is no way to view those prior connections. In addition, there is no
revert function that can restore a prior version of the business rule.
BRS RuleTrack captures a lot of essential data about a business rule and its interactions within the business environment. Unfortunately, getting that data out again as meaningful information is not an easy proposition. This tool does not have a query or report writing facility. Reporting is limited to a few predefined formats. It does provide some selection capabilities for each report, but none of the ones I tried provided the full view of a business rule that I wanted. No "slicing and dicing" is available through the tool, either.
However, the tool's
database is available directly through Microsoft Access. So, you could create
your own reports outside of BRS RuleTrack.
However, remember
that any time you go around a tool's back to access its database directly, you
don't want to change any of the underlying tables and records directly through
Access.
BRS RuleTrack is incredibly easy to learn. Within minutes, I was entering business rule statements. After viewing the Visual Tour presentation, I was entering the business rule details, defining my business context, and was soon ready to customize the Type properties. A Quick Tour document filled in gaps that the Visual Tour left in detailing the tool. The greatest barrier I encountered was in understanding the terminology that the product is based on, which comes from the Business Rules Solutions' BRS Business Rule Methodology. I am not familiar with this methodology, so the terms were foreign to me. The program doesn't provide a help facility. When I pressed F1 on the keyboard, I got Microsoft Access help, not BRS RuleTrack help. There was no way to position the cursor on a type property name and ask, "What is this?" - basic functionality that I expect to find in any product.
My dilemma was solved
in other documentation that accompanies the product. While the tool's metamodel
is available complete with underlying database metamodel, entity, and attribute
definitions, I found the most useful metamodel presentation to be the one that
provides an in-depth description of the Type properties.
BRS RuleTrack
provides a robust, well-conceived environment for capturing and maintaining
business rules. It's easy to learn and to use; I was able to grasp the
fundamentals of its approach and was populating my business rules within four
hours. Few products can make that same claim. If you want to rapidly get up and
running with a business rule management environment, you should give serious
consideration to BRS RuleTrack.
Terry Moriarty, president of Inastrol, a San Francisco-based information
management consultancy, specializes in customer relationship information and metadata
management. She authored Enterprise View (originally the Repository Report and later the
Data Architect) column for Database Programming & Design. You can reach her via
email at terry@inastrol.com.
Copyright © 2001 Terry Moriarty ALL RIGHTS RESERVED