Happy New Year and Business Rule Books

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, March 21, 2006 @ 1:35 pm

Well, it's time for me to get back to writing some business rules content. My new years resolution is to stop pleading busy and start posting.

So in that spirit I've decided to play a little game with business rule books. All you need is Amazon and a starting list of important BR books. For each book, you find out on Amazon that "customers who bought this book also bought..." a bunch of other books. You take those new books and repeat the process until either no new books show up or you run out of patience and disk space. Then you put your results, a so-called directed graph, into a file and load it up in the nice and free graph analysis tool, Pajek, to see what sort of structure you can discern.

Of course you could do it all by hand, but why kill yourself? I took the opportunity to upgrade my old Perl screen-scraping code into a nice Java GUI that took advantage of the new Amazon web services. Ah, so nice.

I've been doing this network analysis for some years with all sorts of knowledge domains, from Military History to Knowledge Management. Knowledge management was particularly interesting. First, you ran out of new books fairly fast, i.e. people who bought Knowledge Management books tend to buy other Knowledge Management books. Second, the books tended to cluster into four distinct subject areas:

1. Prescriptive KM, i.e. imposing structure on a repository through librarians. At the core of this cluster are the Harvard Business Review books on KM.
2. Descriptive KM, i.e. tacit knowledge acquisition through collaboration tools and automatic classification and search technologies. There were quite a number of Japanese thought leaders in this cluster.
3. E-Learning, i.e. how one actually uses all that knowledge to improve one's human capital. See E-Learning: Strategies for Delivering Knowledge in the Digital Age by Marc J. Rosenberg for an excellent example.
4. The Practitioners, i.e. authors who didn't get into the philosophical debates about what KM was but that showed you how to build a KM system. Never mind that you don't know what KM is or what you are building it for.

I expected to find something similar in the domain of Business Rules. After all, we all know who the big authors are and we can point to different schools of thought in the BR world, right? So I expected to get a quickly converging set of books and a few distinct book clusters.

Think again. I found a few interesting things:

• The network blows up. Fast. After four iterations, you're into Knowledge Management, Data Warehousing and Blogging. Business rules people are not as focused in their reading habits as KM folks.
• Only two generations in, however, you begin to see that discipline of Business Rules doesn't sit in isolation as a domain unto itself. It sits at the junction of data modeling, formal requirements gathering, business process analysis, object modeling and traditional application and database design. It is a part of larger solutions, not a solution in of itself.
• Ronald G. Ross is a really important figure in the world of business rules.
• Business Process Management is really, really important to business rules. This seems to affirm my contention that Rules Power and Pega Systems -- the two vendors that integrate BPM and BR -- may be on the right track.
• Artificial Intelligence, which spawned Rete and so much of the production rule machinery responsible for the renewed interest in BR, is nowhere to be found.

What you see above is the directed graph (think of it as a recommendation network) for the Business Rule domain after two iterations, starting with the following list of books:

1. The Business Rule Book: Classifying, Defining and Modeling Rules, Version 4.0 by Ronald G. Ross
2. Principles of the Business Rule Approach by Ronald G. Ross
3. Business Rules and Information Systems: Aligning IT with Business Goals by Tony Morgan
4. Business Rules Applied: Building Better Systems Using the Business Rules Approach by Barbara Von Halle
5. What Not How: The Business Rules Approach to Application Development by C. J. Date
6. Business Process Management: Profiting From Process by Roger Burlton
7. Principles of the Business Rule Approach by Ronald G. Ross
8. Business Rule-Oriented Conceptual Modeling (Contributions to Management Science) by Holger Herbst

The full list of books in the network can be found here.

You can analyze this data until the cows come home, but to keep things simple, I've taken an approach very similar to the one used by Google: hubs and authorities. In simple terms, authorities are the books that all the other ones point to, and hubs are the books that point to a lot of authorities. (See here for details.) We'll leave aside whether it's better to be a hub or an authority; let's just agree that it's good to be either. In the graph above, the yellow nodes are authorities, the red nodes are hubs, and the green node is both. I've pulled together the "important" nodes below:

1. Principles of the Business Rule Approach by Ronald G. Ross
2. Business Process Management: Profiting From Process by Roger Burlton
3. How to Build a Business Rules Engine : Extending Application Functionality through Metadata Engineering by Malcolm Chisholm and Ronald G. Ross
4. Enterprise Integration Patterns : Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf
5. Workflow Modeling: Tools for Process Improvement and Application Development by Alec Sharp and Patrick McDermott
6. Business Process Management (BPM): The Third Wave by Howard Smith and Peter Fingar
7. Business Process Change: A Manager's Guide to Improving, Redesigning, and Automating Processes by Paul Harmon
8. Business Process Mapping: Improving Customer Satisfaction by J. Mike  Jacka and Paulette J.  Keller
9. Service-Oriented Architecture : A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services by Thomas Erl
10. Enterprise Service Bus by David Chappell
11. Workflow Management : Models, Methods, and Systems (Cooperative Information Systems) by Wil vanderAalst and Kees vanHee
12. Loosely Coupled: The Missing Pieces of Web Services by Doug Kaye
13. Next Generation Application Integration: From Simple Information to Web Services by David S. Linthicum
14. Workflow Handbook 2004

Notice how "business process" keeps cropping up, along with supporting technologies like enterprise middleware and web services.

It's easy to get carried away with this analysis, and I don't mean to suggest that I've pegged the nature of the BR reader or consultant. Still, I hope this post stimulates your thinking about business rules and that you might have found a good book or two by browsing the list.

business rules

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