Foraging for corporate gold? If you haven’t paid heed to business rules, you’re burying your head in the sand. These rules need tending like any other company asset.
At their most basic level, business rules are the tenets that reside in the management brain trust. In their finished form, business rules can be a line of code such as “Value=Qty*Price*(1- LOOKUP Order Discount)” on a database server, credit-limit guidelines on a server in the sales department, or commission structures housed on the old PDP-11 at corporate headquarters.
Given the complexity of client/server environments, companies can no longer afford to have these rules scattered throughout an organization. One solution: a three-tier architecture that splits the rules apart from the application logic and hands developers more flexibility in managing these new resources.
“When you begin to build systems, it’s key to think of business rules as the building blocks,” said Hugh Ryan, director of new-age architectures for Andersen Consulting Inc., in Chicago.