The Business Rules Approach - Application in practice

Abstract: Business agility is emerging as an essential organizational characteristic due to the changing macro environment. The accelerated change has resulted in a substantial deployment of IT. However, the preconceived idea of ISD may be flawed. The final product of ISD is rarely aligned with the business needs. The historical review emphasizes a prominent attempt of increasing the level of business user inclusion through agile project management. However, there is a continued disconnect between business users and IS developers. A recent approach proposed to close the chasm through business user empowerment is the Business Rules Approach, BRA. At the core of the approach exists the business rules manifesto containing ten articles, the key notions of the BRA. The purpose of this study was to explore which key no-tions were applied in practice with emphasis on business user empowerment and business agility. Six semi-structured interviews were conducted at a single organization. The application of the key notions was found to be limited. However, the manifesto is dependent on the use of a BRMS which the organization had removed. Business agility was found to be the primary objective of adopting the BRA while business user inclusion was accentuated rather than business user empowerment.