Business Rules – May 2010 by Ronald G. Ross
Rustling Up Good Definitions: There’s a Lot Less and a Lot More to It Than You Think
How long should a good definition be? Should definitions include specifications about business functions and/or constraints? How should these kinds of specifications be handled? This issue’s column takes an in-depth look at the long and short of definitions.

Business Rules – February 2010 by Ronald G. Ross
Interview with Ron Ross
In this interview, Ron Ross emphasizes the importance of understanding the value of data quality in the context of being able to make high-quality decisions in the day-to-day operations of the business.

Business Rules – November 2009 by Ronald G. Ross
You Need Verbs, Not Just Nouns: About Fact Models
Data models and class diagrams have never much focused on verb concepts. That omission is a harmful one. A well-organized business vocabulary not only has noun concepts as represented by terms, but also verb-ish connections between those noun concepts as represented by wordings. These verb-ish connections give structure to basic business knowledge – that is, they represent fundamental connectives in the operational business you need to know and talk about, especially in expressing requirements and business rules. A graphical fact model aids in visualizing these semantics, providing a multi-purpose blueprint to the inherent structure underlying your company’s data and data designs.

Business Rules – August 2009 by Ronald G. Ross
You Need Structured Business Vocabularies, Not Just Data Models
Creating a shared business vocabulary is an important up-front cost of doing business effectively in today’s ever more knowledge-intensive world. The business benefits, however, are substantial. Managing, operating, and interacting based on agreed vocabulary is basic not only to improving business communication, but to retaining core business ‘know how’ as well. These are hardly luxuries in a world where staffs are ever more volatile, self-service is rapidly becoming the norm, and delivery platforms are forever evolving.

Business Rules – May 2009 by Ronald G. Ross
RuleSpeak Sentence Forms: Specifying Natural-Language Business Rules in English
What matters above all else is in capturing and expressing business rules is effective business communication. Sticking to that perspective sometimes proves difficult for those responsible for technical implementation. They may want to get to the IT versions directly. But doing that will not help with capturing the business rules succinctly from the business perspective. The purpose of the RuleSpeak Sentence Forms is to ensure that written business rules are more easily understood. They also help ensure that different practitioners working on a large set of business rules express the same ideas in the same way.

Business Rules – February 2009 by Ronald G. Ross
Are Integrity Constraints Business Rules? Not!
Data professionals are prone to equating “integrity constraint” with “business rule.” Are they the same? Probing deeper, it’s generally accepted that any integrity constraint can be violated – indeed, the reason you define them is to prevent that very thing from happening. Can all business rules be violated? Is violating an integrity constraint the same as violating a business rule? This column examines these and related questions.

Business Rules - November 2008 by Ronald G. Ross
A Personal Insurance Saga: The Economics of Business Rules
In this month’s column, Ron recounts a real-life personal tale of woeful business rule deployment. You be the judge – are your company’s uncoordinated business rules causing this kind of economic loss and operational churn?

Business Rules: In the Know - August 2008 by Ronald G. Ross
New Ideas on the ROI of Data and Business Rules, Part 2 - The Latency of Decisions
This article asks what good does it do to spend big bucks on improving the quality, timeliness and analysis of data if the resulting insights cannot be deployed quickly into the operational business.

New Ideas on the ROI of Data and Business Rules, Part 1 by Ronald G. Ross
The Value of Decisions
Cost-justifying IT initiatives relating to data quality or business rules has always been problematic. Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) provides new and exciting ideas for this important problem area.

The Business Rule Approach: Changing the Face of Data Models, Part Three by Ronald G. Ross