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The introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into public administration has been radically changing the way organizations cooperate and more generally, the way to think about business processes over organizational boundaries. In this paper we describe our approach to combining business processes with business rules in order to integrate effective single units in an inter- or intra-organizational cooperation. Business rules represent the knowledge that an administration has about its business; with regard to this, they can express strategies, contracts and can influence not only staff relations, but finally, citizen relations as well. In other words, business rules are the core of an administration and affect either the business processes or the behaviour of the system participants. They are typically expressed implicitly in business contracts and they are embedded within the source code of many application modules. So a concise and declarative statement of business behaviour is converted into a set of programming instructions, which are spread widely throughout the whole information system. In this way, business rules are difficult to change and keep consistent over time. For this reason, it is necessary to re-engineer the system in order to logically and perhaps physically externalize rules from the application code. In our proposed approach, we describe a co-operation as a collection of tasks combined in certain ways according to the organizational logic specified by business rules.
Our rule-driven methodology has the goal of making the business process design more adaptable to the changes of internal or external environment. In this paper we describe a software prototype that supports the semi-automatic generation of business processes by the specification of macro activities and suitable business rules. These latter constrain the activities execution such as the temporal order.
Keywords:
business rule, business process, end-user approaches and BRAIN
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