Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules

How can you put the business' into business analysis? How do you deliver true value to the business?
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 decade, a whole new community of Business Analysts has emerged world-wide. Not all Business Analysts have yet lived up to the business part of their title though. And the community has not yet successfully solved the twin challenges of business alignment and business agility. What should business requirements be about anyway?

This book provides detailed answers and tools. It shows you how to bring together business solutions 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 too.

Business Rules: Learn how harvesting business rules can fit seamlessly with requirements development. Use the concise pattern questions presented in this book, fined-tuned during 15 years of real-life experience, as templates to guide you in identifying business rules. As an added bonus, you will be able to sharpen and simplify your business process models by an order of magnitude or more.

Beyond the basics, the book presents the very latest techniques for analysis of operational business decisions, a powerful new area of business analysis. Get started on the right foot in capturing and encoding decision logic separately from other parts of your business solution.

Business Models: What is a true business model? This book provides the definitive answer. It steps you through each 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 metrics grounded in these models are identified to ensure continuing alignment with business goals.

To engage business people successfully and to meet today's business challenges, business models should be true-to life. In part this means that detecting violations of business rules and responding to the violations appropriately should be woven into the very fabric of the business model. It also means organizing, applying, managing, and retaining know-how as an integral part of the solution. Here's how you can move beyond information systems to design business governance systems.

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 how the business can operate best. That has very little to do with use cases and GUIs.

From the IIBA®
Kathleen Barret, 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, EVP, Community Development, 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 and Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC
Executive Editor, Business Rules Journal
Chair, Business Rules Forum Conference

Ronald G. Ross serves as Executive Editor of BRCommunity and its flagship publication, Business Rules Journal. He is a sought-after speaker at conferences world-wide. He gives popular public seminars through AttainingEdge and in Europe though IRM-UK.

Mr. Ross is recognized internationally as the father of business rules. He has served as Co-Chair of the annual Business Rules 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 OMG standards development, with core involvement in SBVR.

Mr. Ross is Principal and Co-Founder of Business Rule Solutions, LLC. At BRS, Mr. Ross co-develops Proteus®, its landmark business analysis and rules methodology, including the popular RuleSpeak® Mr. Ross is the author of nine professional books. His newest are: Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules with Gladys S.W. Lam (2011, An IIBA® Sponsored Handbook) and Business Rule Concepts (2009), a 3rd edition of his ever-popular, easy-to-read 1998 handbook.

About Gladys S.W. Lam

Co-Founder & Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC
Publisher,

Gladys S.W. Lam is Principal of Business Rule Solutions the most recognized company world-wide in business rules and decision analysis. BRS provides consulting services, methodology, training and publications. Ms. Lam is co-creator of ProteusR, the BRS methodology for business analysis with business rules. Proteus is used by companies world-wide. She is co-founder of BRCommunity.com, a vertical community for professionals and home of 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 and co-presents professional training through AttainingEdge.com. She is also Executive Director of the Building Business Capability (BBC) Conference, which includes the Business Rules Forum and the Business Analysis Forum, the official conference of the IIBA®.