Business Rules & Processes

The Business  Analysis  Planning  and  Monitoring defines  the  tasks associated with the planning and monitoring of business analysis activities. In addition, this are includes monitoring and reporting on  work  performed  to  ensure  that  the  business  analysis  effort  produces  the  expected outcomes.

Cooperatives are characterised by mutual-benefit coordination mechanisms aimed at the fulfilment of members' participation rights. This paper explores the institutional elements that regulate individual behaviour and outcomes in cooperatives by bringing together new-institutionalism, behavioural and evolutionary economics. Our framework considers four main dimensions of the governance of cooperative firms: (1) the development and application of self-defined rules by the members of the cooperative; (2) the management, and appropriation of common resources and outcomes; (3) intrinsic motivations and reciprocating behaviours; (4) the implementation of suitable incentive mixes based on inclusion and reciprocity, including both pecuniary and non-pecuniary elements. An example is offered in order to highlight possible problems in the governance of cooperative firms, in particular the processes of distribution and appropriation of surplus. The example aims at introducing the discussion of the new framework of analysis.

Iran as the other countries in the world tries to organize customized business incubation processes and support the great number of innovative technological attempts done in this regard by establishing different state-run or private incubators. Iranian "Industrial Development and Renovation Organization (IDRO)" as one the high level governmental authorities in Iranian Industry started a project to organize the customized business incubation process for some institutional business incubation centers called "Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs)", which are resulted from cooperation between IDRO and some prestigious Iranian Universities for supporting high-tech innovations. This paper presents the findings of a study carried out to develop a customized business incubation process for Iranian SBDCs based on a deep benchmarking analysis of different incubators' processes around the world, related literature review and also analyzing the "as-is" situations in Iran regarding the existing opportunities and restrictions.

One of the most important issues on information systems (IS) research is the need to align business with information systems and information technology (IT). Since information systems facilitate the success of business strategies, the importance of business-IT (or strategic) alignment is unquestionable. While organisations address alignment achievement, they are continually suffering from misalignments. These difficulties (the misalignments) encumber the achievement of alignment and lead us to the phenomenon of misalignment. This Ph.D. dissertation deals with the concept of misalignment, with special attention on enterprise architecture (EA)-based analytical potential. In the following study, the problem of business-IT alignment will be translated into the aspects and concepts of enterprise architecture. The main purpose of the proposed research is to analyse strategic misalignment between the business dimension and the information systems dimension. In this Ph.D. dissertation, an analytical solution will be built to approach the topic of strategic alignment from an EA-based perspective. The study aims to accomplish an EA-based, systematic analysis of mismatches between business and information systems. The operation, the correctness, as well as the relevance of the framework will be validated via a case study. The contribution of the proposed study lies in connecting typical misalignment symptoms to relevant EA analysis types along traditional alignment perspectives. The significance of the proposed research is the clear and accurate compound of research methods and implementation instruments to approach EA-based misalignment symptom detection. The results of the proposed research will contribute to alignment assessment by expanding the ways of addressing alignment problems. The proposed research framework has the potential to extend our understanding on assessing the state of misalignment in a complex EA model structure.

1. ABSTRACT Making a business rule extraction more dynamic is an open issue, and we think it is feasible if we decompose the business process structure in a set of rules, each of them representing a transition of the business process. As a consequence the business process engine can be realized by reusing and integrating an existing Rule Engine. We are proposing a way for extracting the business rules and then to modify it at the runtime. Business rules specifies the constraints that affect the behaviors and also specifies the derivation of conditions that affect the execution flow. The rules can be extracted from use cases, specifications or system code. But since not many enterprises capture their business rules in a structured, explicit form like documents or implicit software codes, they need to be identified first, before being captured and managed. These rules change more often than the processes themselves, but changing and managing business rules is a complex task beyond the abilities of most business analysts. The capturing process focuses on the identification of the potential business rules sources. As business logic requirements change, business analysts can update the business logic without enlisting the aid of the IT staff. The new logic is immediately available to all client applications. In current trend the rules are modified or changed in the static time phase. But this paper provides to change the rules at the run time. Here the rules are extracted from the services and can be a changed dynamically. The existing rules are modified and attached to source code without hindering service to the end user which can be achieved with source control systems. When the rules are revised, it provides a path in budding new business logic. This new business logic can be adopted for the efficient software development. 2.

The major challenge when integrating information systems in any
domain such as e-Government is the challenge of Interoperability. One can
distinguish between three aspects of Interoperability; technical, semantic, and
organizational. The technical aspect has been widely tackled especially after the
ubiquity of internet technologies. The semantic and organizational aspects deal
with sharing the same understanding (semantics) of exchanged information
among all applications and services, in addition to modeling and re-engineering
governmental processes to facilitate process cooperation that provision seamless
e-government services. In this paper, we present the case of the Palestinian
Interoperability Framework ‘Zinnar’, which is a use case of using ontology in egovernment
(i.e., data and process governance) to tackle the issues of semantic
and organizational interoperability. The followed methodology resulted in a
success story within a very short time and has produced a framework that is
intuitive, elegant, and easy to understand and implement.

Keywords: Interoperability, Data Integration, e-Government, Ontology, Data
Governance, Process Governance, Business Process Modeling.

While traditional approaches in business process modeling tend to focus on “how” the business processes are performed (adopting a behavioral description in which business processes are described in terms of procedural aspects), in goal-oriented business process modeling, the proposals strive to extend traditional business process methodologies by providing a dimension of intentionality to business processes. One of the key difficulties in enabling one to model goal- oriented processes concerns the identification or elicitation of goals. This paper reports on a case study conducted in a Brazilian hospital, in which we obtained several goal models represented in i*/Tropos, each of which corresponding to a business process also modeled in the scope of the study. We found NFR catalogues helpful in goal elicitation, uncovering goals that did not come up during previous interviews prior to these catalogues’ use.

For some decision processes a significant added value is achieved when enterprises’ internal Data Warehouse (DW) can be integrated and combined with external data gained from web sites of competitors and other relevant Web sources. In this paper we discuss the agent-based integration approach using ontologies (DSS-MAS). In this approach data from internal DW and external sources are scanned by coordinated group of agents, while semantically integrated and relevant data is reported to business users according to business rules. After data from internal DW, Web sources and business rules are acquired, agents using these data and rules can infer new knowledge and therefore facilitate decision making process. Knowledge represented in enterprises’ ontologies is acquired from business users without extensive technical knowledge using user friendly user interface based on constraints and predefined templates. The approach presented in the paper was verified using the case study from the domain of mobile communications with the emphasis on supply and demand of mobile phones.

Motivation for arranging business rules is not confined to efficient processing of rules, as in case of traditional rule bases, but to aid in decision making as well. Efficient processing and ease of decision making, therefore, are the twin objectives behind arranging and grouping of business rules as envisaged by business rules approach to system development. This paper strives to make a beginning to realize these objectives. Six types of rule groupings have been proposed in this paper. Examples from industrial domain have been taken to elucidate the rule groupings.

Rule based traffic management is a methodology for dynamic traffic management that is a joint development of the different road authorities in the Netherlands. The approach tackles operational issues by disentangling problem detection, problem solution and conflict handling for each element in the road network. Each element in the road network follows the same generic rules and defers the traffic problem to other roads in the network that have less priority. This way traffic is distributed across the road network and congestion is prevented.

Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Systems have become a leading edge capability for the Joint and Combined Forces Commander. The 21st century battlefield is characterized a varied level of threats, weapons and missions. These include large force conventional operations, special operations, counter-insurgency operations, anti crime operations and natural disaster relief. The threats run the
gamut from well equipped conventional forces to poorly equipped insurgents; from terrorists equipped with weapons of mass destruction to disease brought on by natural disaster and famine. The commander must plan for this new battlefield with weapons, command and control and information. Much of this
information, especially that received and exploited in near real time, comes from ISR assets. Unfortunately, ISR assets are both high demand and low density. No single nation can afford to provide all the ISR the commander needs. As a result, the commander must rely on a coalition of ISR systems to provide this benefit. But there are problems, information security, system interoperability, communications limitations and variable capabilities and limitations within ISR system classes conspires to reduce the overall system’s effectiveness for use in near real time across a broad coalition. The Coalition Aerial Surveillance and Reconnaissance (CAESAR) project serves as the primary model for this experimentation. This paper will address some of these issues and provide potential solutions based upon experimentation with multinational ISR systems in a coalition environment. The data and information detailed in this paper are based upon an operational view of technical capabilities to disseminate ISR data across a multinational coalition.

Business ethics without metaphysics is essentially the attempt to provide normative rules for business practice and behavior which require few if any explicit metaphysical commitments about ultimate reality.  The encyclopedia is open access here: https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-319-23514-1

The adoption of business processes to design business activities is becoming a reality to a significant number of companies. In addition, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is being used in diverse situations for the execution of business processes using computational resources. In this context, the need of business process automation appears with high relevance. In this work, we present a solution named BPA-SOA, which aims to automate SOA-based business processes, specified in BPMN, into WS-BPEL executable processes. In BPA-SOA, business and service information can be specified at the business level, translated into executable artifacts, deployed in execution-level resources and enforced at runtime. An illustrative scenario is presented to better illustrate and showcase the proposed solution.

A shift from mass to personalized marketing, and thus also to personalized offers, brings firms an advantage for building customer relationships. The article introduces an artefact in the form of a method for creating personalized offers, focused on companies engaged in e-commerce. This method is based on mining association rules using the GUHA method. The association rules are converted into business rules and then combined with other manually defined business rules. The application of the method in practice is illustrated on customers' data from the e-shop of a company doing business in navigation systems, for the purpose of selecting personalized offers for an e-mailing campaign. The practical illustration uses a combination of the data mining system LISp-Miner and the business rule system JBoss Drools, which are freely available tools. The advantages and limitations of the proposed method, in connection with creating personalized marketing strategies in e-commerce, are discussed. The purpose of this practically oriented article is to address marketing and account managers and the issues connected with the personalization of marketing activities.

Business rules have attained a major role in the development of software systems for businesses. They influence the business behavior based on the decisions enforced upon a wide range of aspects. As the business requirements are subjected to frequent amendments, new business rules have to be evolved to reinstate the previously formed ones. Business analysts count on the assistance from the IS developers for this accomplishment. As business rules are set and owned by the business, provisions must be enforced for business rule management by the business analysts directly. In order to get a clear picture of what the current policies and terms in the business are, business users utilize the document as a valuable tool. Unfortunately, documents are not updated as per the modifications in the source code. Moreover, as the software becomes larger, documents become increasingly large and hence difficult to understand and maintain. Thus they turn out to be a non-useful resource in such conditions. With a motive to resolve the above issues, several tools for extracting the rules from the business program code have been developed. In this paper, a robust architecture for an extraction engine to isolate rules from the base source code has been proposed. This suggested model involves slicing of code segments which results in easy identification of domain variables which in turn would result in extraction of business rules, validating them and exchanging them with the newly formulated business policies. This is a new research dimension which paves waves for efficient and quick business rule management strategy.

This paper describes a conceptual framework for the development, integration and employment of network enabled information  technology based on operational and technical requirements.  For this paper an architecture model based on the NATO Architectural Framework (NAF0 is used to assess and validate organizational IT system requirements prior to acquisition.

A published article in the NATO Joint Air Power Competence Centre (JAPCC) Journal.  The focus of the article is the need to maintain and apply business rules and processes to systems that are technically capable of " cutting corners" to improve efficiency.  In essence the article is a treatise on the trade-offs associated with the application of advanced technology to decision making processes.

Nowadays, rules make part of any software system including real-time applications and games, meanwhile an event can trigger many different rules according to the conditions controlling these rules. Although rules are core part to many kinds of systems, its maintenance and update are not easy without affecting the whole application. Hence, many systems have presented rules as a separate layer from the application; such as: SAMOS, Sentinel, Snoop, SnoopIB and CCPN. CCPN is a model that was used in an Amplified CDBB-500 architecture; which is a system supporting active database within its architecture. In this paper, we propose some extensions on CCPN to be able to present rules as a separate layer from the application, to support time-based events, and to add other important features which were agreed and implemented in other systems such as: Snoop and SnoopIB.

Data modeling is an approach to model data by mapping operational tasks iteratively, while associated guidelines are either partly mapped in the data model or expressed through software applications. Since an organization is a collection of business processes, it is essential that data models utilize such processes to facilitate data modeling. Also, data models should incorporate guidelines for completing operational tasks through the concept of business rules. This paper outlines a unified framework on database modeling and design based on business process concepts that also incorporates business rules impacting business operations. The paper focuses on the relational database and its primary mode of conceptual modeling in the form of an entity relationship model. Concepts are illustrated through Oracle's database language PL/SQL and its Web variant PL/SQL Server Pages.

Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems provide key capabilities to the Joint Forces/Combined Joint Task Force Commander (JFC/CJTF) for intelligence collection and battle management. ISR systems cover the full range of joint operations, supporting multiple commanders simultaneously with planned and dynamic collection and exploitation requirements.

Ontologies in nowadays are widely used in the process of development of modern information systems (IS), since they are suitable to represent application domain knowledge. However, some aspects of ontology-based IS required to be developed. We propose a formal method for ontology axioms transformation into application domain rules, making them an important and integral part of each application domain and used to constrain or direct different aspects of business. Such rules can be consecutively transformed into an executable form and implemented in a software system of an IS. We propose to use the Z notation for formalisation of previously authors’ introduced ontology-based semi-formal method for development of application domain rules.

We present GREAT (GRaphical tool for rules Editing and AudiTing), an approach and a tool for graphical business rules management that we designed and developed. This collaborative Web-based application with rich user interface enables easy creation and editing of business rules. Relevant features are (1) the ability to define templates of business rules with various levels of granularity and of rule elements, which can be further reused; (2) the ability to create configurable user profiles from a broad range of permissions, which combined with business rules templates, suits the tool to users with different goals and levels experience; (3) the automatic versioning of business rules. We validated our approach with real- world business rules provided by a telecommunications company. The easy to use graphical environment empowers the business experts to create the rules themselves, rather than having to resort to Information Technology professionals.

Visual business process representation languages such as BPMN are a useful tool for specification of business processes. However, practical verification and execution of Business Process Models is a challenging task. One solution to this problem is integration of business processes with business rules, which provides a flexible runtime environment. This chapter concerns Business Process Models as a visual inference specification method for modularized rule bases. To provide the background for this approach, selected analysis and execution methods for Business Processes, such as BPEL and BPMN tools, are presented. Business Processes can be supported with Business Rules as executable logic. Rule-Based Systems have well-established methods for verification and optimization. This chapter presents selected rule-based solutions, such as Drools and XTT2 - a novel visual rule specification that provides formalized analysis - as well as their integration with BPMN as a visual method for inference specification. The proposed BPMN+XTT2 solution combines flexible business process modeling provided by BPMN with verification and execution features of XTT2.

The improvement of business processes, to date, primarily focuses on effectiveness and efficiency, thereby creating additional value for the organization and its stakeholders. The design of processes should also ensure that its result and the value obtained compensates for the risks affecting this value. In this paper the different kinds of risk affecting a business process are introduced, after which solutions to the problem of risk mitigation are discussed, resulting in a proposed framework to mollify these risks by incorporating a class of riskmitigation rules into business process development.

While traditional approaches in business process modeling tend to focus on "how" the business processes are performed (adopting a behavioral description in which business processes are described in terms of procedural aspects), in goal-oriented business process modeling, the proposals strive to extend traditional business process methodologies by providing a dimension of intentionality to business processes. One of the key difficulties in enabling one to model goaloriented processes concerns the identification or elicitation of goals. This paper reports on a case study conducted in a Brazilian hospital, in which we obtained several goal models represented in i*/Tropos, each of which corresponding to a business process also modeled in the scope of the study. We found NFR catalogues helpful in goal elicitation, uncovering goals that did not come up during previous interviews prior to these catalogues' use.

The Dutch governmental Sociale Verzekeringsbank (SVB) recently completed a project on business modeling. The aim was to develop business models that express the strategic goals of customer event orientation, integrated customer services as well as improved agility. An approach was chosen to combine event definition, dynamic process modeling and business rules. In this paper we present our findings. Main conclusion is that, although we used some best practices and common techniques, we had to invent our own ways to combine event definitions, dynamic processes, object models and business rules.

Accroissement de la complexité des décisions dans un contexte de prolifération des règles Résumé Cet article décrit comment la prolifération des règles impacte la complexité en prise de décision. Bien que ce phénomène soit connu, peu de chercheurs ont étudié la prolifération des règles et son impact sur la prise de décision. Ainsi, bien des décisions managériales sur les règles sont basées sur des connaissances communes plutôt que sur des connaissances scientifiques. Le modèle illustre la complexité de la prise de décision en examinant les coûts de recherche, les coûts de calcul et les coûts de complexité à différents niveaux de complexité de prolifération des règles. Il conduit à une série de propositions pouvant être testée empiriquement. Le modèle permet aux dirigeants de comprendre comment la prolifération des règles interagit avec la prise de décision et intensifie la complexité.

Motivation for arranging business rules is not confined to efficient processing of rules, as in case of traditional rule bases, but to aid in decision making as well. Efficient processing and ease of decision making, therefore, are the twin objectives behind arranging and grouping of business rules as envisaged by business rules approach to system development. This paper strives to make a beginning to realize these objectives. Six types of rule groupings have been proposed in this paper. Examples from industrial domain have been taken to elucidate the rule groupings.

Rule based traffic management is a methodology for dynamic traffic management that is a joint development of the different road authorities in the Netherlands. The approach tackles operational issues by disentangling problem detection, problem solution and conflict handling for each element in the road network. Each element in the road network follows the same generic rules and defers the traffic problem to other roads in the network that have less priority. This way traffic is distributed across the road network and congestion is prevented .

For some decision processes a significant added value is achieved when enterprises' internal Data Warehouse (DW) can be integrated and combined with external data gained from web sites of competitors and other relevant Web sources. In this paper we discuss the agent-based integration approach using ontologies (DSS-MAS). In this approach data from internal DW and external sources are scanned by coordinated group of agents, while semantically integrated and relevant data is reported to business users according to business rules. After data from internal DW, Web sources and business rules are acquired, agents using these data and rules can infer new knowledge and therefore facilitate decision making process. Knowledge represented in enterprises' ontologies is acquired from business users without extensive technical knowledge using user friendly user interface based on constraints and predefined templates. The approach presented in the paper was verified using the case study from the domain of mobile communications with the emphasis on supply and demand of mobile phones.

Abstract Iran as the other countries in the world tries to organize customized business incubation processes and support the great number of innovative technological attempts done in this regard by establishing different state-run or private incubators. Iranian" Industrial Development and Renovation Organization (IDRO)" as one the high level governmental authorities in Iranian Industry started a project to organize the customized business incubation process for some institutional business incubation centers called" Small ...

Business  analysis  is  the  set  of  tasks  and techniques  used  to  work  as  a  liaison  among stakeholders  in  order  to  understand  the structure,  policies,  and  operations  of  an organization,  and  to  recommend  solutions that  enable  the  organization  to  achieve  its goals.
In particular, business analysts often play a central role in aligning the needs of business units with the capabilities  delivered  by  information  technology,  and  may  serve  as  a  “translator” between those groups.

The improvement of business processes, to date, primarily focuses on effectiveness and efficiency, thereby creating additional value for the organization and its stakeholders. The design of processes should also ensure that its result and the value obtained compensates for the risks affecting this value. In this paper the different kinds of risk affecting a business process are introduced, after which solutions to the problem of risk mitigation are discussed, resulting in a proposed framework to mollify these risks by incorporating a class of risk-mitigation rules into business process development.

New modeling approaches appeared in the last decade based on the premise that process structures in data-intensive landscapes are pushed by data-driven events. However, since emergent approaches, as artifact-centric, data-driven, product-based and document-based modeling, cover reduced subsets of all data-related needs, they have a limited practical impact . This work structures the set of requirements to model responsive data-intensive systems, studies the emergent objectcentered approaches to retrieve a set of principles and, finally, defines a solution direction, centered in expressive object models and in model transformations, for the support of the introduced principles.