To integrate or not to integrate - The business rules question

Abstract

Due to complex and fragmented enterprise systems and modelling landscapes, organizations struggle to cope with change propagation, compliance management and interoperability. Two aspects related to the above are business process models and business rules, both of which have a role to play in the enterprise setting. Redundancy and inconsistency between business rules and business process models is prevalent, highlighting the need for consideration of integrated modelling of the two. An important prerequisite of achieving integrated modelling is the ability to decide whether a rule should be integrated into a business process model or modelled independently. However, in the current literature, little guidance can be found that can help modellers to make such a decision. Accordingly, our aim is to empirically test factors that affect such decisions. In this paper, we describe 12 such factors and present the results of an empirical evaluation of their importance. Through our study, we identify seven factors that can provide guidance for integrated modelling.