Business Rules and Information Systems: Aligning IT with Business Goals

Chapter 9. A Wider View

9.1 Marshaling intellectual resources

In this chapter, we step back a little from the specifics of defining, building, and managing information systems to look at how business rules and models link to a wider set of ideas. All industry sectors have a growing awareness of the need to make better use of the intellectual resources on hand. Such resources are sometimes described as an organization“s intellectual capital, partly to emphasize their value alongside more conventional capital resources, such as buildings, plant, and machinery.

We can say the same thing in a more down-to-earth way. What differentiates two companies in the same sector often boils down to the quality and the application of their know-how. Successful ...