With existing products redefining themselves as business rule tools and with new entrants in the field, I decided that the business-rule marketplace is mature enough to warrant serious investigation. A business rule is a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. It is intended to assert business structure or to control or influence the behavior of the business. By focusing on the business rule, an organization can manage itself at its most basic level, the individual policies that it puts in place as a guide to accomplishing its goals. By manipulating its business rules, an organization can fine-tune its activities to be more responsive to a changing business environment.
Vendors take on a lot of responsibility when claiming to support business rules.
In this column, I'll provide you with a framework by which to judge tools claiming to support business rules. Incorporate a strong change-management facility so that the introduction of new or evolving business rules occurs only after the appropriate level of impact analysis has been performed. Let you enforce business rules in the applications that support the organization's operations. When these types of products are integrated into an application's architecture, business rules are held separately from the database and processing code. An inference engine , which serves as the repository of executable business rules, is consulted to determine whether any special considerations exist that affect the behavior of the current business transaction.