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THE DATA ADMINISTRATION NEWSLETTER – TDAN.com |
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Business Rules – August 2009
You Need Structured Business Vocabularies, Not Just Data Models
Published: August 1, 2009 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.
Excerpted from Chapter 1, Business Rule Concepts: Getting to the Point of Knowledge (Third Edition), by Ronald G. Ross, July 2009. ISBN 0-941049-07-8,
http://www.brsolutions.com/publications.php. Reprinted with permission.
Ask managers and workers in the business what they mean by requirements for developing software systems, and typically you get answers centered on functions to be performed, or on the look-and-feel of user interfaces. Maybe use cases, hopefully data models. The answer “business vocabulary” (or “shared business vocabulary”) is almost never among the responses. Nonetheless, a shared, well-structured business vocabulary is indeed a kind of requirement – perhaps the most fundamental requirement of all. Without such a vocabulary, you cannot provide real meaning or coherency (sense) to all the others, especially to business rules. A shared, well-structured business vocabulary literally provides meaning (semantics). This meaning, of course, is abstract. It might not be as obvious as what a system does or how the system looks on the outside. Just because something is less obvious, however, does not mean it is any less important. The problem is by no means limited to communication of requirements between business workers and IT. Indeed, in many organizations today, business workers from different parts of the organization often have trouble even talking to each other. Or to say this more accurately, they talk to each other, but they are not really communicating. They live in different semantic silos. A well-managed, well-structured business vocabulary should be a central fixture of business operations. We believe it should be as accessible and as interactive as, say, spellcheck in Microsoft Word. So you will need appropriate business-level platforms to manage your business vocabulary. Developing and managing a shared, well-structured business vocabulary means capturing business knowledge from the business-side workers and managers who possess it. The skills involved with distilling that business knowledge are essential. Those skills go beyond data modeling, no matter how technically proficient. About Noun Concepts and Terms that Represent ThemA term is a noun or noun phrase that workers recognize and use in business communications of all kinds – for example, in agreements, procedure manuals, schedules, directives, training, instructions, and so on. Requirements for IT systems, and the documentation and help or guidance messages in operational IT systems, are additional forms of business communication. So are business rules.A term carries a particular meaning for the business, which should be unambiguous given a particular context of usage. Some examples:
Customer Prospect Shipment Order Invoice Employee name Delivery date due Manager Gender Status Date High-risk customer Employee Line item Quantity back-ordered Our meaning of term comes straight from Webster’s. Note the key words precisely limited meaning in this definition.
Term: a word or expression that has a precisely limited meaning in some uses or is peculiar to a science, art, profession,
trade, or special subject
Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary [MWUD] The particular noun or noun phrase selected as a term represents merely the tip of the iceberg with respect to meaning. More fundamental is the business concept for which the noun or noun phrase stands. This concept must be defined. That is, the concept a term represents should never be taken for granted. As one practitioner put it, “The more self-evident the meaning of a term is, the more trouble you can expect.” As an example, another practitioner from a medium-sized company rattled off six different (and conflicting!) definitions of “customer” from different parts of his organization. To communicate requirements and business rules effectively, a precise definition for each term should be given explicitly in business-oriented fashion, free of any IT jargon (and business rules). Every use of the term will depend on this meaning. Here is an example of a definition, again from Webster’s.
Customer: one that purchases some commodity or service; especially, one that purchases systematically or
frequently The core terms in the business vocabulary – those typically depicted in a graphical model – should satisfy these three tests:
Basic: A term should represent something fundamental to business – that is, the term should be one that cannot be derived or computed from any other
terms. Any term that can be derived or computed should be specified as the subject of a business rule. Countable: A term should represent a thing whose instances are discrete – that is, whose instances can be counted. A term that has an aggregate or mass sense (e.g., merchandise, personnel, inventory, and so on) should be broken down into its countable constituents (e.g., product, employee, item, etc.). Those are the core concepts of the business vocabulary.
Non-Procedural: A term should always represent a thing we can know something about, rather than how something happens. In other words, a business vocabulary is
about knowledge, not about the actions, processes, transforms, or procedures that produce or use that knowledge. A business vocabulary, for example, might
include the terms customer and order, but it would not include any action for takingcustomer orders. Core terms in a business vocabulary represent types or classes of things in the business, rather than instances of those classes. For example, a business might have 10,000 customers, but they are represented by the single term customer. Incidentally, since the term refers to the class rather than to all the instances, the term’s singular form is preferred in the business vocabulary (that is, customer rather than customers). Business rules generally address classes rather than instances. But business rules can addresses instances too – for example, a business rule might apply to one country, say The Netherlands, that does not apply to another country, say Belgium. The collection of all terms and definitions that satisfy the tests above are the core part of a business vocabulary. Basing all business requirements, business rules and your data model(s) or class diagram(s) on a shared business vocabulary is the way to avoid a “Tower of Business Babel” when organizing business operations or developing IT systems to support them. Actually, the same is true for just about any day-to-day work product you could write. Here then is a fundamental (and obvious) principle: We will inevitably work more effectively if we all speak the same language! Copyright 2009. Business Rule Solutions, LLC. All rights reserved. 1 Excerpted from Business Rule Concepts: Getting to the Point of Knowledge (Third Edition), by Ronald G. Ross, 2009. ISBN 0-941049-07-8. http://www.brsolutions.com/publications.php Go to Current Issue | Go to Issue Archive Recent articles by Ronald G. Ross
Ronald G. Ross - Ronald G. Ross is recognized internationally as the “father of business rules.” He is Co-founder and Principal of Business Rule Solutions, LLC, where he is active in consulting services, publications, the Proteus® methodology, and RuleSpeak.® Ronald serves as Executive Editor of BRCommunity.com and as Chair of the Business Rules Forum Conference. He is the author of eight professional books, most recently Business Rule Concepts (2009). He speaks and gives popular public seminars across the globe. You can read his blog at: http://www.ronross.info/blog/
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