Business rules as organizational policies

Abstract

Business rules are an important concept in the requirements definition process of computer based information systems. They have been used by information technology professionals and by database modeling, but few researchers in requirements engineering are studying them. From our point of view, business rules must be seen as very generic statements about the organization. As such, we have made the traditional distinction, used in business administration, between policy and procedure, We focus on policies and as such bring more stability to the business rules. On the other hand, we tie the business rule to our requirements baseline, making it possible to analyze changes from the viewpoint of organizational policies, which are better understood by mid and upper managers. We use the meeting scheduler IWSSD case study to illustrate our ideas.