Business Rules and Information Systems: Aligning IT with Business Goals

Chapter 6. The Technology Environment

6.1 More about architecture

We now turn to the practicalities of making rules work in a realistic computing environment: the sort found in most organizations of any reasonable size. The first part of this chapter reviews how the major technology elements are orchestrated in modern systems. If you“re familiar with this kind of infrastructure, you probably won“t find anything new, and you can skip to the later sections, which discuss how rules fit into the picture.

Up to now, we“ve simply considered all the apparatus of information technology (IT) as contained in one undifferentiated lump, vaguely called “the system.” Until the mid-1980s, this was often remarkably close to the truth, as corporate computing ...