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Barbara Von Halle is a true pioneer in the discipline of business rules. She started with a series of important articles about business rules in Database Programming and Design magazine in the early 1990s and then just kept going. She founded Knowledge Partners International in 1996.

She wrote what is perhaps the best single text on business rules, Business Rules Applied: Building Better Systems Using the Business Rules Approach.

Do business rules need to be rigidly enforced ?

Advances in information technology in the last 20 years have made it easier to purchase products and services.  Although the impact of information technology has been stunning, I doubt if many customers would assert that technology has made it easier to deal with rigid customer support policies and processes, quite the opposite.  It can take months to correct a business process or system processing error.  This is often the result of overly constrained systems that cannot adapt to changing customer requirements or circumstances.

Updated: April 5 2008

The Grand Daddy of business rules sites is Business Rule Community, run by Ron Ross. They make you sign up in order to see most of their articles, but it's well worth the time to sign up. The content is excellent. They send you a newsletter about once a month - no big mailing lists, no spamming.

A terse refutation of the 10 top reasons given for not using a business rules approach, not necessarily good reasons of course.

The usual suspects include such classics as "it didn't run fast on our 486 66Mz computer in 1988" and "our rules are too complex for a rule engine [ god help'em ]" and eight other great excuses for procedural determinism.

Actually, it's not ten reasons, only nine - see item #6.

Humble Beginnings

From humble beginnings in the 1990s, business rules technology evolved into commercial-grade platforms capable of driving big and complex systems for Fortune 500 companies. Some technical infrastructures cost millions of dollars to implement and deploy. Business rules technology has become essential to the functioning of core business processes. Every day, many millions of business transactions pass through rule-based customer ordering systems, ATM and credit card verification systems and an endless variety of business applications.