Live from Brainstorm (almost): The role of business rules in Enterprise Architecture

Larry Goldberg, of KPI, gave a presentation on the role of business rules in Enterprise Architecture, leaning on both the Rule Maturity Model KPI has developed and the Zachman Framework.

Larry spent quite a lot of time on the various frameworks and how/why to use business rules in them - you can contact him or read the materials for more - but a couple of key points I wanted to make here:

• Business rules are orthogonal to data, network, function, process etc.
  They must be linked and thought of together but managed as their own "dimension"
• Source rules, the kind of near-natural-language statements generated by business executives, do not map 1:1 to technical rules suitable for being implemented in a business rules management system.
• There is no good way to classify business rules into static/dynamic or centralized/decentralized that does not cause problems with specific types of rules.
• Patterns on developing rules services and on managing them are needed but still nebulous.

Interesting stuff. Clearly we have work still to do in terms of how rules fits into an Enterprise Architecture but it is good to see that Larry (and some of the folks in the blogroll below) are thinking about it.