Business rules are means by which Strategic management is implemented. The rules tell an organization what it can do in detailed tactics, while the strategy tells it how to focus the business at a macro level to optimize results. Put differently, a strategy provides high-level direction about what an organization should do. Business rules can provide the tactical detail about exactly how a strategy will translate to actions.
Business rules exist for an organization whether or not they are ever written down, talked about or even part of the organization’s consciousness. However it is a fairly common practice for organizations to gather business rules in at least a very informal manner.
Organizations may choose to proactively describe their business practices in a database of rules. For example, they might hire a consultant to come through the organization to document and consolidate the various standards and methods currently in practice.
More commonly, business rules are discovered as part of a formal requirement gathering process during the initial stages of a project. In this case the collecting of the business rules are coincidental. Projects, such as the launching of a new product, might lead to a new body of business rules for an organization, i.e. this new product would require the employees to conceptualize about what the purpose of the organization is in a new way. This practice of coincidental business rule gathering is vulnerable to the creation of inconsistent or even conflicting business rules within different organizational units, or within the same organizational unit over time. Business Rules Methodology is the process of capturing business rules in natural language, in real-time while empowering users to manage rules with a few simple steps.
Gathering business rules is also called rules harvesting or business rule mining. The business analyst or consultant can extract the rules from Use cases, system code or by organizing SME workshops/Interviews etc. Software technologies designed to capture business rules through analysis of legacy source code or of actual user behavior, can accelerate the rule gathering process.