What is a Business Rule?
Business rules guide the everyday decision-making within businesses by outlining the relationships between objects, such as customer names and their corresponding orders. Business rules provide the foundation for automation systems by taking documented or undocumented information and translating it into various conditional statements.
Why it matters
For example, when conducting a purchase order, there may be a different approval process depending on the cost. Tools and services under five thousand USD may only need manager approval, but as costs get higher, they may require approval by the C-suite. Business rules formalize this process by setting thresholds under which invoices are sent to upper management vs. first line managers. Conditional statements like these are applied across a number of business processes — making business rules the backbone of scalable, consistent decision automation.
See how Diwo operationalizes Business Rule.
Read the decision-intelligence playbooks that put this concept to work at Fortune 50 scale.
Related concepts
Intelligent automation (IA), also called cognitive automation, is the use of automation technologies — artificial intelligence (AI), business process management (BPM), and robotic process automation (RPA) — to streamline and scale decision-making across organizations.
A decision flow is a diagram that helps make the decision between alternative courses of action that will lead to and effect a business decision.
Decision intelligence is a data-driven process that enables you to rapidly make faster, more accurate fact-based decisions rather than relying on intuition or gut feel. The approach combines decision-making techniques with AI, ML, contextual intelligence, and automation to generate actionable business recommendations. Rather than replacing human judgment, Decision Intelligence augments human ability to make better and more consistent decisions.
Contextual Intelligence is a form of AI which leverages a business context graph to understand the business intent of analytics efforts. Contextual Intelligence applies the business metrics and business logic of a use case to uncover areas of improvement and propose specific actions, with a much higher degree of relevance and personalization to an end user. It generates a recommendation to improve performance against a specific metric and identifies the impact of proposed actions on the metric in order to predict the butterfly effect associated with a potential action.