Capturing Business Rules:
What You Need to Know

Dallas, October 21-23, 1997
Toronto, December 2-4, 1997

About This Seminar

This seminar describes the emerging business rule approach in depth. It explains what business rules are, and why they are crucial to your company.

The business rule approach seeks better ways to communicate with end users about the business. It represents a revolutionary new approach to defining requirements. Business rules are also key to making your company and its information systems more adaptive in the face of rapid change.

This seminar offers practical hands-on techniques for capturing, defining and modeling business rules and examines the latest techniques for modeling data, rules, and scripts (use cases). Key concepts are reinforced by numerous examples and exercises.

Rules offer breakthrough innovations for building better information systems. This seminar provides a leading-edge look at what the opportunities are and how you can exploit them. Finally, the seminar introduces the exciting new ideas of rule independence and rule normalization and examines breakthrough insights into procedural re-usability.

What's Happening

Business rules encompass the terms, facts and rules that underlie business operations. They represent basic knowledge the business holds in common across applications, users and platforms.

Many business rules can be addressed successfully at the implementation level by databases, and triggers and stored procedures, or rule engines. However, these technologies fail to address that ‘how-to’ of requirements gathering, analysis, and design. Also, they do not address these activities in platform-in-dependent fashion.

Triggers and stored procedures offer one approach for supporting business rules; rule engines offer another. Rule-based software generators are beginning to appear; active database systems are on the horizon. The business rule approach offers a comprehensive "front-end" for all these technologies.

Over the next five years, people will also recognize that OO is really a programming discipline, with little or no connection to the knowledge that managers use in running the business (i.e. there really is more to life than messages and methods!). The business rule approach will fill the void. It also has convincing things to say about the problems of business adaptability and the accelerating rate of change-problems that OO is not measuring up to in the larger sense.

This seminar provides answers. The innovative ideas it presents will enable your company to become more adaptive by means of a business rule approach. This will permit it to achieve accelerated rates of change-a business imperative for this decade and beyond.

*Attendees receive a 20% discount on Ronald G. Ross' "The Business Rule Book: Classifying, Defining, & Modeling Rules."*

What Makes This Seminar Unique

This is the only seminar available on business rules. Through this seminar, you will acquire in-depth knowledge which will help position your company as a leader in this important new area. Attendees will have the opportunity to gain practical, hands-on experience for capturing, defining and modeling business rules.

Benefits of Attending:

• Understand where business rules fit with business strategy, to ensure IS projects stay on track
• Use business rules to discover events, to ensure consistency in the editing and validating of data
• Enhance your IS methodology, to capture and develop requirements more effectively
• Discover breakthrough innovations for building better information systems

In this seminar, you will learn how to. . .

• Make your information systems and your business more adaptive through a business rule approach.

• Express, classify and model business rules, so that you can initiate a business rule approach at your company.

• Capture business rules in English, to enhance communication with end users.

• Develop data models, rule models, and scripts(use cases) in seamless fashion, in order to avoid the gaps and pitfalls plaguing methodologies today.

• Understand the limitations of objects for business database applications, so that you can decide how best to use them.

• Model user interactions where relational database is a "given," so that you can avoid the object-relational disconnect many practitioners face.

• Use business rules to discover events, so that triggers and/or rule servers can be used properly.

• Apply business rule ideas to BPR and workflow, opening up exciting new opportunities for streamlining and usability.

• Re-Tool your data modeling practices for type hierarchies, objects, and scripts(use cases), to keep your professional skills current.

Who Should Attend

• Analysts responsible for developing business requirements for information systems.

• System Designers responsible for developing platform-independent models for information system requirements.

• Data Modelers, DBAs and Database Designers responsible for database design, including triggers and stored procedures.

• Project Leaders and Consultants responsible for selecting, developing and/or using IS development methodologies.

• Rule Analysts responsible for specifying, managing and implementing rules using rule servers or other techniques.

Seminar Outline

Part I. The Business Rule Approach

1. Business Rules: The New Approach
   1. The business challenge
   2. What are business rules?
   3. What makes up basic business knowledge?
      
2. Rules: The New Idea
   1. What are rules?
   2. The Declaration of Rule Independence
   3. Business Rule Automation
      
3. Developing and Modeling Business Facts
   1. How to get from ramblings to facts
   2. Building the data model based on facts
   3. Asking the right questions
   4. What makes a good business rule
   5. Predicates and more predicates
   6. Advanced data modeling ideas and pitfalls

   Exercises

4. The Business Rule View of Business Events
   1. Point-in-time vs. Points-over-time
   2. Modeling business events in data
   3. Time-Tunnel Vision
   4. The business rule view of current state

   Exercises

Part II. Specifying Rules

1. Where Rules Fit
   
2. Journey Into ISA
   1. Type hierarchies and inheritance
   2. Applying rules
   3. Subtypes and states
   4. Static vs. Dynamic types

   Exercises

3. Modeling Rules
   1. Basing rules on facts
   2. Normalizing rules
   3. Modeling rules graphically
   4. Sample rules

   Exercises

4. Developing Rules
   1. Getting the rule
   2. Getting the whole rule
   3. Getting nothing but the rule
   4. What makes a good rule
   5. Exceptions to rules

   Exercises

5. Objects Under the Microscope
   1. A better model of reality
   2. Responsibility-driven
   3. Objects for knowledge

Part III. Putting the Business Rule Approach into Motion

1. The Mechanics of Business Rule Systems
   
2. The Business Rule View of Update Events
   1. Rules-to-update-events is M:N
   2. Decomposing rules

   Exercises

3. Rules in the Business Rule Approach
   1. Rule enforcement options
   2. Rules vs. Inference
      
4. Developing Scripts for User Interaction
   1. The cast of actors
   2. Modeling flow
   3. The rate of rules

5. Business Rules and BPR
   1. Business Rule Re-engineering
   2. Challenging the Rules
   3. Allocating responsibility

   Exercises

6. Business Rule Methodology
   1. The Sponsor's view
   2. Business strategy and rules
   3. Facilitation
   4. Getting started
      
7. New Horizons
   1. Rule mining
   2. Test-drive your business rule
   3. "Smart" and "Brilliant" scripts

About Your Instructor

Meeting Site and Hotel Information

Dallas, October 21-23, 1997
Arlington Hilton
(817) 640-3322

Toronto, December 2-4, 1997
Royal York
(416) 368-2511

Register Now!

Capturing Business Rules : What You Need to Know
by Ronald G. Ross

$1195.00

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