Compliant and Flexible Business Processes with Business Rules

When modeling business processes, we often implicity think of internal business policies and external regulations. Yet to date, little attention is paid to avoid hard-coding policies and regulations directly in control-flow based process models. The standpoint of this analysis is the role of business rule modeling in achieving business process flexibility. In particular, it is argued that flexible business process models require business rules as a declarative formalism to capture the semantics of policy and regulation. Four kinds of business rules can be used as a starting point to generate less complex control-flow-based business process models. It is shown that these different kinds of business rules relate to different perspectives in the taxonomy of business process flexibility. 1 Motivation and Methodology Socio-economic factors like globalization and liberalization have made business environments ever more complex and prone to change. Change and complexity are often mutually inductive couplings such that companies that embrace change in their business policies are often compelled to bring in extra complexity and vice versa. For instance, companies that want to adapt to ever changing market conditions often have to bring in the complexity of customer-tailored service offerings on a massive scale [1]. But change also comes from the regulations imposed by different kinds of stakeholders. In this case the complexity stems from the increasing pressures on companies not only to comply but also to guarantee compliance with legislation and quality norms. To foster change and to guarantee compliance, companies often automate their business processes. This setting imposes a myriad of business requirements for flexible business process support. Against this setting, it is useful to consider the smallest unit of business change: a business rule change. Business rules are atomic, formal expressions of business policy and regulation that define or constrain some aspect of business. In this paper, we argue that business rule modeling plays an important role in achieving business process flexibility. In fact, business rules and business processes are two sides of the same coin: whenever the rules change, processes may change accordingly. We often implicitly think of business policy and regulation when we model business processes. However, because we lack an explicit, declarative formalism to capture the semantics of regulation and policy, business processes are difficult to change. The contribution of this paper is a framework for business process modeling based on business rules, called EM-BRACE: Enterprise Modeling using Business Rules, Agents, Activities, Concepts and Events. Business policy and regulation are internalized and made explicit in terms of the BRACE building blocks. In this paper we indicate how four kinds of business rules can be used as a starting point to generate less complex control-flow-based business process models. In the working paper prepared for the BPMDS’06 workshop, Regev et al. suggest a taxonomy of flexibility in business processes [2]. This taxonomy is depicted in Fig. 1. Regev et al. define business process flexibility as the capability to implement changes in the business process type and instances by changing only those parts that need to be changed and keeping other parts stable. The methodology of the EM-BRACE framework leads to more flexibility in business processes: business policy and regulation become traceable in terms of business rules such that companies can more easily manage complexity and keep track of change. Because the methodology does not hard-code the logic of policy and regulation, control-flow-based process models in languages such as the UML Activity Diagram or the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) are less complex and more fit to change.