Alignment of business process management and business rules

Business process management and business rules management both focus on controlling business activities in organizations. Although both management principles have the same focus, they approach manageability and controllability from different perspectives. As more organizations deploy business process management and business rules management, this paper argues that these often separated efforts should be integrated. The goal of this work is to present a step towards this integration. We propose a business rule categorization that is aligned to the business process management lifecycle. In a case study and through a survey the proposed rule categories are validated in terms of mutual exclusivity and completeness. The results indicate the completeness of our main categorization and the categories’ mutual exclusivity. Future research should indicate further refinement by identifying rule