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By Ronald G. Ross & Gladys S.W. Lam · 2015

Business Analysis with Business Rules

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Second Edition304 pagesPaperbackISBN 0941049159
Building Business Solutions — front cover

How can you put the “business” into business analysis? How do you deliver true business value? What should you be doing before requirements?

Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules provides a practical, proven, innovative guide to building great business solutions. An IIBA Sponsored Handbook. Highly readable, very pragmatic. A must-read for anyone seeking better results with requirements.

Building Business Solutions

Business Analysis with Business Rules provides a practical, proven, innovative guide to building great business solutions. An IIBA Sponsored Handbook. Highly readable, very pragmatic. A must-read for anyone seeking better results with requirements.

Business Analysis

Over the past fifteen years, a vibrant community of Business Analysts has emerged world-wide. Many Business Analysts have yet to live up to the business part of their title though. For many the twin challenges of business alignment and business agility remain unresolved. Is there a proven way forward?

This book provides detailed answers and the requisite tools. It shows you how to develop business solutions working directly with business leads, create blueprints of the solutions, and then use those blueprints for developing system requirements. The techniques described in this book have been applied successfully in hundreds of companies worldwide. Now you can put them to work for you!

Business Rules

Learn how harvesting business rules can fit seamlessly with requirements development. Apply the pragmatic pattern questions presented in this book, fined-tuned during 15+ years of real-life experience, to identify business rules. Find out how by externalizing those rules, you can sharpen and simplify business process models by an order of magnitude or more.

The book also presents the very latest techniques for analysis of operational business decisions, a new must-know area for Business Analysts. Get started on the right foot in capturing and encoding decision logic separately from other parts of your business solution.

Business Architecture

What is true business architecture? How can it help you on your project? This book provides definitive answers. It steps you through each model element one by one, starting with business strategy for the business solution and then through business process models with business rules externalized. It shows how well-grounded business metrics ensure continuing alignment with business goals.

To engage business people successfully and meet today’s business challenges, your models should be true-to-life. Increasingly that means organizing, applying, managing, and retaining operational business knowledge as an integral part of the solution. Here’s how you can move beyond requirements-taker and system designer.

The authors speak out about current practices … Let us warn you, this is not a book about fixing software engineering practices. It’s about changing them fundamentally. Current practices probably miss as much as 90% of everything important in running the business!

Business Analysts should not be focused on requirements for information systems, but on creating winning business solutions. That has very little to do with use cases and GUIs.

Praise

What early readers are saying.

Amazed to find that policy, regulations, requirements and data can all be viewed through the same lens.
This IIBA-sponsored book provides a robust framework to help BAs identify business solutions to business problems. It's an important milestone in taking business analysis to the next level.
Kathleen Barret
Building Business Solutions presents BAs with a cohesive, coherent, and powerful approach to solving business problems, and will help them develop the skills required to change their organizations for the better.
Kevin Brennan
Inside the Book
Building Business Solutions
Business Analysis with Business Rules
Second Edition · 2015304 pagesPaperbackBusiness Rule Solutions, LLCISBN 0941049159
Preface
Introduction — Business Analysis with Business Rules
Alignment — What’s Really Needed to Align Business and IT
Architectural Scope — The Scope Lists
Strategy for the Business Solution — The Policy Charter
Business Rules — Basic Principles and Pattern Questions
Business Processes — Better with Business Rules
Business Rules From Business Process Models — Pattern Questions
Structured Business Vocabulary — The Fact Model
Business Rules from the Fact Model — Pattern Questions
Business Milestones — The Life of Operational Business Things
Business Rules from Business Milestone Models — Pattern Questions
Decision Analysis — Capturing Decision Logic
Modeling Decisions — Q-Charts
Modeling Know-How — True-to-Life Business Models
More on Business Rules and Their Enforcement — Final Areas of Analysis
Metrics — Measuring Business Performance
Understanding Business Requirements — Business Model vs. System Model
Developing Business Requirements — Ability Statements
Smart Systems — Ability Statements for Know-How
Rulebook Management — Now the Life Cycle of Business Rules Begins
Annotated Glossary
References
Index
About
The Author
Ronald G. Ross

Ronald G. Ross

Co-Founder, Business Rule Solutions, LLC

Ron is one of the world’s foremost authorities on both structured and unstructured data. He is Co-Founder and Principal of Business Rule Solutions, LLC (BRS). At BRS, he has helped create concept models at hundreds of companies and government bodies.

Ron is Chair of Building Business Capabilities (BBC), the official conference of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®). He is best known for his industry-leading work on business rules, and before that, for his contributions in the field of data design and database. He was a founder and is a principal in standards work at OMG on SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules), the ground-breaking standard behind concept models.

Ron has keynoted dozens of conferences and given seminars to many thousands of people worldwide. He is currently Executive Editor of BRCommunity.com and its flagship on-line publication, Business Rules Journal. Ron is recognized internationally as the ‘father of business rules.’

Ron is the author of ten professional books including the first on data dictionaries and data administration in 1981. Books on business rules include the classic Business Rule Concepts: Getting to the Point of Knowledge 4th ed. (2013) and Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules 2nd ed. with Gladys S.W. Lam (2015). He is co-author with John Zachman and Roger Burlton of the 2017 Business Agility Manifesto.

Ron received DAMA International’s Individual Achievement Award for 1995. He was formerly Editor of the Data Base Newsletter from 1977 to 1998. Ron holds an M.S. in information science from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a B.A. from Rice University.

rross@brsolutions.combrsolutions.com
Gladys S.W. Lam

Gladys S.W. Lam

Co-Founder, Business Rule Solutions, LLC

Gladys is a world-renowned authority on business design and project management. She is Co-Founder and Principal of Business Rule Solutions, LLC (BRS), where she leads consulting and mentoring in business analysis methodology, business rules, and decision management.

Gladys has managed large-scale projects focused on the capture, analysis, and management of business rules and decisions for organizations worldwide. She is co-author with Ron Ross of Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules 2nd ed. (2015), the foundational text on business rules methodology and an IIBA-sponsored handbook.

Gladys is a frequent speaker and workshop leader at industry conferences including Building Business Capabilities (BBC). She brings deep expertise in bridging the gap between business strategy and practical implementation, helping organizations translate complex business knowledge into clear, actionable rules and decisions.

glam@brsolutions.combrsolutions.com

Ronald G. Ross & Gladys S.W. Lam are Co-Founders, Business Rule Solutions, LLC.

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