Building Business Solutions - Business Analysis with Business Rules (2nd Edition)

How can you put the business' into business analysis? How do you deliver true business value? What should you be doing before requirements?

Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules provides a practical, proven, innovative guide to building great business solutions. An IIBA® Sponsored Handbook.

Highly readable, very pragmatic. A must-read for anyone seeking better results with requirements.

Business Analysis: Over the past fifteen years, a vibrant community of Business Analysts has emerged world-wide. Many Business Analysts have yet to live up to the business part of their title though. For many the twin challenges of business alignment and business agility remain unresolved. Is there a proven way forward?

This book provides detailed answers and the requisite tools. It shows you how to develop business solutions working directly with business leads, create blueprints of the solutions, and then use those blueprints for developing system requirements. The techniques described in this book have been applied successfully in hundreds of companies worldwide. Now you can put them to work for you!

Business Rules: Learn how harvesting business rules can fit seamlessly with requirements development. Apply the pragmatic pattern questions presented in this book, fined-tuned during 15+ years of real-life experience, to identify business rules. Find out how by externalizing those rules, you can sharpen and simplify business process models by an order of magnitude or more.

The book also presents the very latest techniques for analysis of operational business decisions, a new must-know area for Business Analysts. Get started on the right foot in capturing and encoding decision logic separately from other parts of your business solution.

Business Architecture: What is true business architecture? How can it help you on your project? This book provides definitive answers. It steps you through each model element one by one, starting with business strategy for the business solution and then through business process models with business rules externalized. It shows how well-grounded business metrics ensure continuing alignment with business goals.

To engage business people successfully and meet today's business challenges, your models should be true-to-life. Increasingly that means organizing, applying, managing, and retaining operational business knowledge as an integral part of the solution. Here's how you can move beyond requirements-taker and system designer.

The authors speak out about current practices ...

Let us warn you, this is not a book about fixing software engineering practices. It's about changing them fundamentally. Current practices probably miss as much as 90% of everything important in running the business!

Business Analysts should not be focused on requirements for information systems, but on creating winning business solutions. That has very little to do with use cases and GUIs.

From the IIBA® ...

Kathleen Barret, formerly President & CEO, IIBA® ... this IIBA-sponsored book provides a robust framework to help BAs identify business solutions to business problems. It's an important milestone in taking business analysis to the next level.

Kevin Brennan, formerly EVP, IIBA® ... Building Business Solutions presents BAs with a cohesive, coherent, and powerful approach to solving business problems, and will help them develop the skills required to change their organizations for the better.

About Ronald G. Ross

Co-Founder & Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC
Executive Editor, Business Rules Journal, wwwBRCommunity.com
Chair, Business Rules & Decisions Forum Conference

Ronald G. Ross serves as Executive Editor of BRCommunity.com and its flagship publication, Business Rules Journal. He is a sought-after speaker at conferences and professional events world-wide.

Mr. Ross is recognized internationally as the father of business rules. He has served as Co-Chair of the annual Business Rules & Decisions Forum Conference since 1997. He was a charter member of the Business Rules Group (BRG) in the 1980s, and an editor of the two landmark BRG papers, The Business Motivation Model: Business Governance in a Volatile World and the Business Rules Manifesto. He is active in standards development, with core involvement in SBVR.

Mr. Ross is Principal & Co-Founder of Business Rule Solutions, LLC. At BRS, Mr. Ross co-develops BABusinessSpeak™, its landmark business analysis and rules methodology, including the popular RuleSpeak® Mr. Ross is the author of ten professional books. His newest are the 2nd edition of Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules with Gladys S.W. Lam (2015, An IIBA® Sponsored Handbook) and Business Rule Concepts (2013), a 4th edition of his ever-popular, easy-to-read 1998 handbook.

About Gladys S.W. Lam

Co-Founder & Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC
Publisher, Business Rules Journal, wwwBRCommunity.com
Executive Director, Building Business Capability (BBC) Conference

Gladys S.W. Lam is Principal of Business Rule Solutions, the most recognized company world-wide in business rules and decision engineering. BRS provides consulting services, methodology, training and publications. Ms. Lam is co-creator of BABusinessSpeak™, the BRS methodology for business analysis with business rules. BABusinessSpeak is used by companies world-wide. She is co-founder of BRCommunity.com, a vertical community for professionals and home of the Business Rules Journal.

Ms. Lam actively consults. She is widely known for her lively, pragmatic style and world-class project management skills. She speaks internationally at conferences and other professional events. She is also Executive Director of the Building Business Capability (BBC) Conference, the official conference of the IIBA®.