Information Systems ] (]]]]) ]]]–]]] A methodology and tool support for managing business rules in organisations $ Marko Bajec à , Marjan Krisper Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Trzaska 25, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia Received 3 May 2001; received in revised form 14 April 2004; accepted 26 May 2004 Abstract Businessrulesareevidentlyimportantfororganisationsastheydescribehowtheyaredoingbusiness.Theirvaluehas also been recognised within the information system (IS) domain, mostly because of their ability to make applications flexibleandamenabletochange.Inthispaper,weproposeamethodologythathelpsbusinesspeopleanddevelopersto keep business rules at the business level inline with the rules that are implemented at the system level. In contrast to several existing approaches that primarily focus on business rules in the scope of an application, our methodology addresses the entire IS of an organisation. The paper also describes requirements for a tool support that would be appropriate to support the methodology. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Business rule; Business rule management; Enterprise modeling 1. Introduction In the last decades, business rules have become popular in the information system (IS) community mostlybecauseoftheirabilitytomakeapplications flexible and amenable to change (e.g. [1-7]). Both, researchers and practitioners are convinced that since business rules are very sensitive to business changes they require explicit treatment during IS development to ensure the IS agility. Otherwise many problems may occur. For example  Since not acquired systematically and comple- tely,businessrulesdonotreflectrealconditions of the business environment. Consequently, applications are developed that do not meet business needs.  There is a lack of documentation on business rules.  Business rules are buried into program code. It is not clear, what kind of rules govern an application, when the rules are triggered and how they are implemented. ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/infosys 0306-4379/$-see front matter r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.is.2004.05.003 $ Recommended by P. Loucopoulos à Corresponding author. Tel.: +386-1-476-8814, fax: +386- 1-476-8705. E-mail address: marko.bajec@fri.uni-lj.si (M. Bajec).