Top Ten Business Rule Repository Strengths

 

Building and maintaining a business rule repository can be crucial for your business. First, your business rules might differentiate you from your competitors’ business rules, thus being competitive advantages.

 

Actually business rules in combination with your processes are what make your business unique.

 

Being able to quickly adapt to changes in your business environment and implement new/changed processes and/or new/changed business rules is crucial in order to keep your competitive edge. To be able to do that you need access to your business rules and the business rules need to be up-to-date, traceable, atomic, identifiable, searchable and correct. Using a business rule repository.

 

Using a system as the business rules repository has some clear advantages:

1. Most business rule repository systems has some kind of visual rule specification enabling you to describe your rules visually
2. A business rule repository will provide you with a degree of access control enabling you to control who has access to view and edit the business rules
3. Some business rule repositories provide you with the possibility of designing approval workflows for creation and modification of rules
4. Most business rule repository systems implements automatic versioning control of rules and changes
5. Most business rule repository systems provide implements audit trail of changes so you can always see what changes has been made and by whom
6. Traceability. Most business rule repository systems implements traceability between applications ßà requirements ßà business rules ßà Business rule versions
7. Most business rule repository systems enables hierarchical relations with many-to-many relationships between rules
8. Most business rule repository systems provide you with search functionality enabling you to find and access your business rules fast
9. Some business rule repositories provide you with the possibility of generating new executable code from your business rule changes, speeding up the business rule change process
10. Most business rule repositories provide you with the possibility of sharing business rules between projects without introducing redundancy.