Have you ever been confused about why you were not allowed to do what you tried to do? Been judged or evaluated in a way you didn’t expect? Stumped by the result or decision a business system produced?
If so you are a ‘why victim’. In today’s business world all of us are why-victims more and more often. The remedy is business rules. Not technical rules masquerading as business rules, but real business rules expressed of, by, and for the business represented purely in business terms.
The solution is Why Engineering. This article introduces Why Engineering and its basic principles, along with the Why Button. Find out what it takes to be an effective at Why Engineering in today’s business environment.
The Why Button
Business rules are all about answering the question why?. Why things are disallowed. Why specific judgments or evaluations are made. Why certain decisions are reached.
Imagine you had a Why Button handy whenever you encountered some disconnect in day-to-day business operations. Hit the Why Button and presto – answers appear in the form of relevant business rules.
Not technical rules but rather business rules you can read and understand no matter whether you’re a business manager, business product developer, operational worker, or IT professional. A single representation accessible to all audiences.Representation that is:
What would that do for your business? For one thing it would keep know-how from walking out the door – i.e., make your business logic explicit, not tacit, so you can retain it.
For another it would eliminate semantic silos – people using the same words, but not really communicating. Overall it would mean stepping up to do business intelligently in the knowledge economy.
The Who of Why Engineering
To achieve this vision you need to become a Why Engineer™.
A Why Engineer is not a knowledge engineer in the sense of expert systems and nota technical wizard in ontologies. Rather, a Why Engineer is someone who uses rigorous discipline to capture, represent and communicate business rules based on carefully engineered business vocabulary. A Why Engineer is someone who:
What can a Why Engineeroffer your requirements process? Business rules provide the ‘why’ – the basic rationale – for business requirements and elements of system design. They provide a solid basis for motivating each part of the solution you envision.
Today’s system-driven approaches result ina lot of arm-wavingabout the motivation for business requirements. A great many pages of generally formless documentation are often produced no one really reads.
All that is far from harmless noise. It detracts from delineating:
How have requirement methodologies strayed so far from the very know-how that keeps you in business?! The Why Engineer puts things back on track.
The What of Why Engineering
Why Engineering is based on three fundamental principles:
Principle 1. The same complete, intelligible, unambiguous, deployable meanings (business rules and definitions) should be presented to all key audiences in a business – managers, business product developers, operations, and IT professionals.
Principle 2. A Why Button should be part of every architecture and business solution.
Principle 3. The same form of “why” answers (business rules) created originally should bere-used and provided to each audience in identical form whenever the Why Button is hit.
Obviously, answers should be available only to those duly authorized – but authorizations are simply more business rules.
Why Engineering is engineering in the fullest sense of the word.All engineeringstrives to produce something useful for people or their organizations. InWhy Engineering that product is business rules, explicit business logic.
In general, engineering requires two things: source material and structural principles.For Why Engineering:
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The source material is literally words – or more accurately the concepts and meanings behind the words.
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The structural principles indicate how business logic can be represented in an unambiguous, anomaly-free form that is free of any IT or system-design artifacts or bias.
Why Engineering is engineering at its best.
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As in all goodengineering the product of Why Engineering is highly re-usable. What you develop as business logic is directly re-usable as the answers produced by the Why Button in operation. Nothing more is required. It is exactly the same stuff – unified and re-used with pinpoint accuracy.
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Good engineering is also always concerned with sustainability of the product. Point-in-time (“bandaid”) solutions areavoided. In Why Engineering, sustainability can be achieved by business-level rulebook management.[1]
Learning and Applying Why Engineering
Why Engineering really has nothing to do with IT directly. It can be (and has been) used even where no automated system is being built. It’s a very pure form of business analysis.
In a sense Why Engineering is simply about highly precise business communication. Is that a skill every business analyst or IT professional possesses naturally? Unfortunately no – not even close. Itmust be learned.
Fortunately, effective techniques for Why Engineering are available and have been proven in practice. They consist of structured natural language tools such as BRS ConceptSpeak™, RuleSpeak® and TableSpeak™.[2] These notations – really thinking tools – are based on a rich standard, SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules) [3], developed over many years by world-class experts in formal logic, linguistics, and software engineering. SBVR itself is based on ISO terminology standards.
Is Why Engineering hard? Yes and no. The organizing principles and thinking tools can be readily learned. As for any engineering discipline, however, there’s a definite learning curve. It takes diligence and practice to become really good at it.
Actually, the hardest part of Why Engineering is getting at the buried assumptions and know-how in people’s heads – or lost in the jumble of legacy systems. The thinking tools of Why Engineering simply offer professionals the essential means for discovery, representation and validation.
The ultimate prize – common understanding in explicit form – is something theWhy Engineermust still work hard to achieve. If it were easy, everyone would already be doing it!
Author: Ronald G. Ross, Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC http://www.brsolutions.com/
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®. Mr. Ross serves as Executive Editor of BRCommunity.com and as Chair of the Business Rules Forum Conference. He is the author of nine professional books, including his latest, Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules with Gladys S.W. Lam (2011, http://www.brsolutions.com/bbs), and the authoritative Business Rule Concepts, now in its third edition (2009, http://www.brsolutions.com/b_concepts.php). Mr. Ross speaks and gives popular public seminars across the globe. His blog: http://www.ronross.info/blog/ . Twitter: Ronald_G_Ross
[1]. “What Rulebooks, Rulebook Management and GRBS Are About”, http://goo.gl/iBwsrE
[2]. http://www.brsolutions.com/b_ipspeakprimers.php
[3]. Refer to the SBVR Insider section on www.BRCommunity.com.