Business rules are just everywhere. They are in marketing and sales strategies, customer relationship management practices and service offerings, just to name a few examples. As a practical example, companies can create Web sites that intelligently interact with prospective and existing customers. Business rules are a prominent means to personalize interaction with partners.

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In the age of e-commerce we need to find ways to adapt business rules quickly and easily to an ever changing business environment. To gain and maintain a competitive advantage, organizations must be able to immediately respond to new and changed requirements of their business partners. As an organization proactively discovers new areas to enhance business, it must be able to exploit new opportunities in a flexible way. Also, initiatives and actions of competitors often require immediate action.

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IT departments feel the pressure to make systems more adaptable to changes in business policy. Organizations can no longer afford to wait weeks until a policy change is implemented. Effective ways need to be explored how to make adaptive systems a reality.

There is widespread agreement that business rules should be separated from the application. The question is, how to achieve this goal in the light of different application architectures. For example, we have "traditional" applications with a "traditional" GUI as frontends and Web-based applications with HTML-frontends. The challenge we are faced with is finding a way to integrate multiple application architectures in a uniform way.

Business rule tools have been available for a number of years. As there are no public standards to follow, tools vary widely in terms of functionality. On the one side there are tools that just provide a shell with no support for business rule design. They require a developer to express business rules in a hard-to-understand spezialized rule language. On the other side there are sophisticated tools that cover a substantial portion of the business rule life cycle and allow a non-technical user to develop business rules. There might be no other software domain where functionality differences are bigger.

Are business rule tools comparable to database management systems?

In general, there are many analogies to database systems. Whereas a database system separates the storage and management of the data from the application, a rule engine separates the business logic from the application. Also, a rule base (i.e. the business rules in the repository) is sharable across many applications, as is a database.

Why is it important to select tools with considerable care?

Business rule languages are proprietary. This statement applies not only to the native rule languages but also to the natural-language like rule languages. Tools to convert business rules from one vendor-specific language into another are not available. As a consequence, once applications have been developed a conversion is labour-intensive and requires substantial financial resources. After a tool is acquired you stick to it. Therefore, it is always beneficial to invest in a thorough tool selection.

What do I get?

The Business Rule Tool Software Selection Criteria Schema provides you with a means to identify business rule tools that are suitable to your requirements. It helps to save a significant portion of valuable time, thus speeding up the selection process.

The Business Rule Tool Software Selection Criteria Schema comes as a Microsoft Word document. It makes use of the Word comments feature to convey additional criterion information. A 4-pages fragment of the Microsoft Word document is available for download.

Please note that the schema can be tailored and customized by editing. With more than 200 criteria the schema covers the whole business rule life-cycle. Each criterion encompasses several attributes, such as requirement type, description, purpose statement, quality measure statement and annotation. You just delete criteria that are not relevant to your specific goals and requirements. On the other hand, of course, you can add additional selection criteria.

After editing, the criteria schema can be distributed among tool vendors, requesting them to provide information in the ‘realization’ column if and to what degree requirements are met. As a quality measure is specified for each criterion, it will be easy to perform a rating of products after vendors have responded. Alternatively, the criteria schema can be used for an internal product rating with minimum vendor involvement.

A business rule tool evaluation guide accompanies the selection criteria schema. It provides background information on business rule tools and contains an evaluation scenario.

Additionally, an excerpt of our Software Selection Criteria Schema is also available as a PDF file for download. To view the PDF file you need Acrobat Reader (version 3 or higher). Please note, that it contains only a subset of information from the XML source document (only 4 columns have been printed to make information fit in one line).

The downloadable files contain only fragments of the Business Rule Tool Software Selection Criteria Schema. However, you can download the complete list of criteria groups and subgroups as a PDF file.