Customer Reviews

Business Rule Revolution: Running Business the Right Way

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book was a major disappointment. Having read good books on business rules by Ronald Ross and Tony Morgan, I expected that this book would provide examples and additional insights into the application of the business rule approach and rule engines in real-life situations. The chapters in this book are a compilation of methodology overviews, application case studies, and disguised vendor brochure material, all with very little substance. It seems that the book's main purpose is to serve as a marketing vehicle for rule methodology consultants and rule engine vendors, providing pseudo-education for IT managers/executives to make ill-informed decisions in this technology area. As far as I'm concerned, buying this book was a waste of money.

The book is a collection of chapters, not necessarily designed to be read in sequence. As a disclaimer, I wrote one of the chapters.
The chapters include:
- A great summary of various rules projects surveyed by KPI showing the focus on agility, consistency, knowledge management, legacy modernization, business control.
- John Zachman has a chapter in which he points out that "markets of 1" means much more complexity and a need for enterprise architecture.
- A chapter that maps this architectural view to rules.
- A chapter on business engineering with a focus on business decisioning and the value of automating judgment.
- A nice description of using a business process approach with business rules
- A really excellent chapter on using business rules to improve process design (among other things). Read this chapter!
- The technical section has a discussion of the role of the rule architect and another on rule architecture more generally as well as a nice one on rule stewardship and governance, another on Equifax and my own on enterprise-wide policy management
- the book wraps up with some nice work on becoming a better user of business rules and a compelling call to action
"Real-world experience proves not only that business rule projects are completed faster, at less cost, and with less risk, but they continue to deliver substantial savings in time and money because rule maintenance is significantly accelerated."

The book gives a framework to work from as your company decides to move towards a formal business rule approach. It gives you this framework in a practical matter, so that your company can plan and budget for what you want to accomplish when adopting a formalized business rule process. Highly recommended reading. I especially loved the real world experiences expressed in chapters written by Brian Stucky and others.

It's a good read and offers some interesting perspectives. However, the actual printing looks like something right out of a basement publisher. The graphics have low resolution and are next to impossible to read, and it reminds me of the quality of the printing one would get on a dot matrix 20 years ago. It really is too bad, because this really does detract from what would be an excellent reference. I do not feel I got my money's worth due to that.