Business rules, decisions and processes: five reflections upon living apart together

Information Systems must provide flexible support for business processes, which should be compliant to the (intra-organizational) business policies and procedures, to regulations and to imposed protocols. Some separation of concerns, i.e. making the imposed constraints explicit, has been observed in order to comply with this dual objective of flexibility and compliance. In this paper, a list of five reflections is used to examine the coexistence and the relationship between business rules, decisions and processes. These considerations will be useful when evaluating how to become less dependent on rigid process models containing large parts of business and decision logic.