Nicklas Holmberg

Head of the Department of Informatics

Business Process and Business Rules Modelling In Concert for e-Service Design and Business Alignment

Author

Nicklas Holmberg
Odd Steen

Summary, in English

Business Rules (BR) and Business Processes (BP) are essential pillars in any Business Information System (BIS) and important areas of BIS design (BISD). Historically, BRs have been overlooked as a part of BISD. The Business Rules Approach (BRA) focuses on concepts and methods to remedy the neglected BR design and management. BRs in this perspective are stateless and concerned with the “what” of a business and are associated with the operational decision logic. A concurrent approach is BP management and modelling (BPM), focusing on workflows and the “how” of a business. Thus, BPs are associated with the operational process logic. Ideally, BRs and BPs should be kept as separate services. However, BRs and BPs are interrelated and should be designed in parallel. In this paper, we argue for why and how this is important with an example from a major development and research project called VacSam. The parallel design of BRs and BPs of the VacSam digital service revealed that stateful events and activities captured in BP modelling had profound influence on stateless conditions in the BRs. Hence, without BP modelling that would not have been revealed and implicated the design of the Business Rules Centric Digital Service VacSam.

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