Externalization of Business Rules

After the two preceding chapters detailing the Master Data Management and Business Process Management parts of a utopic information system, this chapter will end with the third and last part of such an ideal system, which is the Business Rules Management System (BRMS). We have already discussed briefly business rules in the previous chapters because the data referential may contain some validation rules that are associated with a given business entity, and the business process may also embed some business rules to orient the workflow and decide which branch of the process should be executed, depending on the context. But in the perfectly ideal system that we envision, a centralized system should be responsible for all the business rules, and that is the subject of this chapter.

We will start by explaining in more detail what a BRMS is and what implementing such a solution requires in terms of business rules management, deployment, and architecture...