A Lifecycle Approach towards Business Rules Management

Automating business rules management has provided significant benefits including greater control, improved flexibility, and the ability to rapidly deploy business rules across processes, information systems and channels (Web, legacy, wireless and otherwise). These benefits, in addition to trends in service orientated architectures, Web semantics, and business process management, have spawned an emerging business rules engine (BRE) market. Despite these developments, little has been published in MIS journals that examine the management of business rules management systems (BRMS) development and deployments. Making use of structuration research methods, we collect data from leading developers, end- users, researchers and thought-leaders from the industry. Data collection results revealed a business rules management lifecycle inclusive of these steps: align, capture, organize, author, distribute, test, apply, maintain. The contextual influences, actors, inputs, outputs and artifacts are identified in each step. Academic and managerial contributions, as well as recommendations for future research are provided.