Business rules as the basis of an organizations information systems

Business rules are statements that aim to influence or guide behavior and information in the organization. They are the business policies, the business practices, and business definitions that should be well known and treated as a valuable asset to the organization. They are in essence how the actual business is run. Yet so often these business rules are implicit, assumed in the development of information systems in an organization. They have been buried in code, lived in the business experts heads and sporadically been documented in system manuals. In this paper we examine the value of business rules, compare the thinking of business rule experts and provide guidelines on how to derive and store an organizations business rules.