Requirements Modelling and Specification for Service Oriented Architecture

6.2. Business Rules in the Mission Grid

The mission grid may be thought of as a matrix of data about the service oriented enterprise or as a, possibly multi-dimensional, spreadsheet. However, there is another useful simile. The mission grid may be thought of as a circuit board. On the edges of the board are gold connectors, linked together by the business process chips mounted on the board. These chips transform input from the logical rôles on one edge to output customer and internal value propositions on the other edge connectors. Clearly, the process chips may collaborate to achieve this and, furthermore, have constraints imposed on their processing. In other words, there are rules.

We have already seen how business rules are endemic in business process descriptions and it is no different at this level of granularity. Processes can be grouped and there can be interactions among processes. Processes obey - or ought to obey - rules.

There will be rules governing individual processes and rules that cross process area boundaries. As an example of an intra-process rule, we might discover that, within the sales process, all contacts should be recorded and all meetings with prospects minuted, and the minutes kept. Of course, we would also have to say what constitutes a contact and a prospect and, indeed, suggest how long such records should be kept or under what circumstances they might (must?) be deleted. Such rules, if discovered should be recorded in the mission grid documentation. ...