The Decision Model: A Business Logic Framework Linking Business and Technology (IT Management)

556 Pages·2009·8.59 MB·English

by  Barbara von Halle

THE
DECISION
MODEL
A Business Logic Framework
Linking Business and Technology
AU2817_Book.indb 1 9/14/09 10:03:56 AM
IT MANAGEMENT TITLES
FROM AUERBACH PUBLICATIONS AND CRC PRESS
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John J. Trinckes, Jr Greg Schulz
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The Decision Model: A Business The Effective CIO
Logic Framework Linking Business Eric J. Brown, Jr. and William A. Yarberry
and Technology ISBN: 978-1-4200-6460-5
Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg
Business Resumption Planning,
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THE
DECISION
MODEL
A Business Logic Framework
Linking Business and Technology
Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg
Boca Raton London New York
CRC Press is an imprint of the
Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
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The authors retain the rights related to US Provisional Patent Application 60/889460 for Decision/Business
Rule Model Creation [38118001] and all patents flowing there from, for the intellectual property represented
in the work, regarding the invention of the Decision Model and software support for the theory. The authors
retain all rights to the patented material which includes flow of usage of the Decision Model, generation or
programming of the Decision Model into software, the latter items referring to the new and useful aspects
delivered by the Decision Model that were not available prior to this patent.
Auerbach Publications
Taylor & Francis Group
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Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742
© 2010 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC
Auerbach Publications is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
No claim to original U.S. Government works
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
International Standard Book Number: 978-1-4200-8281-4 (Hardback)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Von Halle, Barbara.
The decision model : a framework for business logic and business-driven SOA /
authors, Barbara Von Halle, Larry Goldberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4200-8281-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1.  Industrial management--Decision making--Data processing. 2. Business--Decision
making--Data processing. 3.  Business logistics--Data processing. 4. Service-oriented
architecture (Computer science) 5. Decision making--Mathematical models. 6.  Expert
systems (Computer science) I. Goldberg, Larry, 1946- II. Title.
HD30.2.V67 2010
658.4’03--dc22 2009026784
Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at
http://www.taylorandfrancis.com
and the Auerbach Web site at
http://www.auerbach-publications.com
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Contents
Foreword: Business Rules and the Real World ..............................................vii
Preface and Acknowledgments .......................................................................xi
About the Authors .....................................................................................xxiii
Contributors’ List ........................................................................................xxv
About the Contributors .............................................................................xxvii
SeCtIon I the DeCISIon MoDel In Context
1 Why the Decision Model?.......................................................................3
2 An Overview of the Decision Model .....................................................13
3 The Business Value of Decision Models ................................................37
4 Changing the Game: BPM and BDM ...................................................63
5 SOA and the Decision Model ...............................................................91
6 How the Decision Model Improves Requirements,
Business Analysis, and Testing ...........................................................103
7 Getting Started ...................................................................................139
SeCtIon II the DeCISIon MoDel In DetaIl
8 The Structural Principles ....................................................................167
9 The Declarative Principles ..................................................................211
10 The Integrity Principles ......................................................................231
v
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vi ◾ Contents
11 At a Glance: The Decision Model and the Relational Model ..............271
12 The Decision Model Formally Defined ..............................................301
SeCtIon III CoMMentarIeS
13 Enterprise Architecture: Managing Complexity and Change ............319
JOHn ZACHMAn
14 Opportunities in Enterprise Architecture ..........................................329
15 Service-Oriented Architectures ..........................................................359
MIkE ROSEn
16 Specifications, Standards, Practices, and the Decision Model ...........385
17 Integrating the Decision Model with BPMn .....................................421
BRuCE SILVER
18 The Case for the Physical Decision Model .........................................427
DAnIEL J. WORDEn
19 Enterprise Decision Management and the Decision Model ...............441
JAMES TAyLOR
20 Introducing the Business Decision Maturity Model ..........................455
21 The Decision Model and Enterprise 2.0: Enabling Collaboration .....481
BRIAn STuCky
22 A Management Perspective .................................................................493
DAVID L. HASLETT AnD TRACy WILLIAMS
23 Better! Cheaper! Faster! ......................................................................501
DAVID PEDERSEn
Bibliography ................................................................................................507
Index ...........................................................................................................511
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Foreword: Business rules
and the real World
This is an important book: it has important things to say about an especially impor-
tant set of real-world problems—business rules. Clearly, business rules represent
one of the 21st century’s major technological challenges, and if we are to create a
new generation of large-scale information systems that are agile, adaptable, and
predictable, then we must have repeatable methods for developing consistent busi-
ness rules. Here, this book makes a contribution: it describes an approach (theory
and method) that is easy for business users and IT professionals to create consistent
sets of business rules and, at the same time, is easy for them to adapt as market-
places, laws, regulations, and technologies change.
Down the hall from my office there is a law library. It contains national and
state laws, agency rules, and pending legislative issues. Recently, it occurred to me
that this library was not so much a law library as it was a library of business rules:
rules governing taxation, rules governing the construction of roads, rules governing
the support of children and families, rules governing the incarceration of criminals,
etc. The business rules in this library are encoded in an archaic language called
legal English, and despite the enormous amount of money spent on legal fees and
research that goes into the creation and maintenance of this library, the business
rules found there are only generally consistent with one another. And each year
new cases and new laws arise that make even the most learned jurists’ heads swim.
To resolve this enormous set of new or inconsistent laws, regulations, etc., society
has found it necessary to create a legal system made up of lawyers, law clerks, pros-
ecutors, judges, appeals courts, and supreme courts. You would think with all the
smart people and sophisticated technology involved, society could do better—this
book suggests that they could.
But as useful as this approach will be in helping people developing computer
systems, this book is not really about technology. This book is really about consis-
tent rules that govern how an enterprise acts under specific situations. This book is
vii
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viii ◾ Foreword: Business Rules and the Real World
about a common, consistent language and method for defining rules that can be
used by either humans or computers. In the end, the approach described here can
help both the users and the computer folks.
There are some things that computers do better than people and some things
that people do better than computers; the trick is knowing which is which. Given
the right set of consistent business rules, computers can come up with the same
answer time after time, and do so not in months or years (or sometimes decades),
but in microseconds. Clearly, one of the reasons that computer systems have become
so important in advanced organizations everywhere is this ability to get the right
answer instantly. But getting the right answer is only possible if one has a consistent
way to define and implement business rules within an organization. Anyone can
develop a simple business rule or a small set of business rules; as the number of rules
and decisions grows, the problem gets exponentially more difficult.
What about the method itself? Well, for one thing, it is elegantly simple. This
is vitally important because in today’s fast paced world, it is particularly important
that organizations and enterprises be able to define large bodies of business rules
in a manner that is at the same time clear, concise, minimally redundant, and also
easy to modify. This, as we’ve learned, is by no means a simple task. Indeed, busi-
ness rules are perhaps the most important unresolved problem facing business and
IT professionals today. One of the reasons that business rules remain a problem is
that developing consistent business rules involves both knowledge of semantics and
logic, as well as a deep understanding of business and of communication skills. And
for large business rule bases, it demands an organized method.
There are a great many approaches to developing business rules, but too much
of this writing is a rehash of logic programming or expert systems. Because these
approaches were largely developed by and for programmers, they don’t really pro-
vide business professionals and business analysts a usable methodology for devel-
oping a large business rule base. The reason is simple: the key knowledge needed
for defining business rules almost always resides in the minds of a wide assort-
ment of nonprogrammers—business managers, lawyers, accountants, engineers, and
scientists.
Like the law library, today’s large organizations have tens of thousands of busi-
ness rules expressed in hundreds of different ways. These business rules fall into any
number of major categories: national and international legal restrictions, company
policies, privacy and security rules, rules for computing key formulas, and so on.
Like the law library, these rules are expressed (locked up) in dozens, sometimes
hundreds, of obscure documents, formulas, and drawings. History suggests that
coming up with a common formal set of business rules from all of this encoded
information is a very tough chore indeed.
The world of business rules today is not unlike that of a database 40 years ago.
In the late 1960s a large number of different approaches to database design were
competing for recognition when Ted Codd and his associates at IBM Research
came up with what we now call relational database theory. Codd, a mathematician
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Foreword: Business Rules and the Real World ◾ ix
by training, was able to develop a rigorous, consistent approach for defining sets of
relational tables that would provide the requisite answer sets, were internally con-
sistent, and were minimally redundant.
Codd and his associates conceptualized a way of looking at that data that was
not only mathematically consistent, it was also maximally flexible and scalable.
Codd’s approach made possible the complex systems that exist today. Because it
was so straightforward and simple, it greatly aided the communication between
different systems and different databases. Even though relational database theory
is being challenged by other forms of data storage and manipulation approaches
today, it still provides the gold standard upon which a database is judged.
One of the secrets of Codd’s great success was his focus on elegant simplicity
along with mathematical rigor. What Barb and Larry have done is to come up with
an analogously elegant and simple approach for defining large sets of business rules
that has mathematic rigor as well. Then, starting with this compelling conceptual
model, they have been able show how to build a broad methodology for capturing,
analyzing, and using those business rules, whether for a small departmental appli-
cation or for an entire line of business.
One of the most important characteristics of the model presented here is that it
is truly a logical model, i.e., it is technology independent (or technology agnostic, if
you will). It leverages technologies, but it doesn’t require them. Over time this will
pay off because the history of computing over the last half century has shown that
logical models have a much longer life than technology-based ones. This has been
true of database modeling and design, it has been true of workflow modeling, and I
think that time will show that it is equally true of business rule modeling as well.
One of the obvious advantages that good, logical models have is that they are
clearer and more consistent, they make it easier to define large problems, and, at the
same time, to recognize broad, logical business patterns. Too often business rules are
buried in complex, unintelligible language or complex flowcharts of complex code.
In addition, it makes it particularly difficult to make sense of the underlying rules.
Moreover, this complexity makes it difficult to understand the rationale (semantics,
ontology intent) behind the rules. Clarity improves our ability to quickly see a rule
and understand whether it is correct and consistent. This kind of insight is after all
often one of the most valuable byproducts of well run business rule projects.
The authors should be complimented on their ability to specify how their
business rule methodology fits together with the whole complex of other major
business/technology concerns, including business decision modeling, business pro-
cess management, SOA, and requirements definition. This is especially important
because business rules occur in a variety of shapes and sizes: business process rules,
data rules, computation rules, application rules. The book shows how, for example,
using business rules located in common evaluation modules can greatly simplify
a business process model and make it far easier to modify these models when the
business rules change.
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