From IPAPI

Business Rules exist in every organization. Business rules can be explicit (clearly documented), undocumented, or implied. They are used to offer choices, make decisions, reduce errors, and control the flow of work of the processes in our organizations.

IPAPI Definition

Business Rules – Are process design requirements, whether implied or explicit, that dictate the actions of one or more of the process actor(s) of the process.

Overview

Business Rules are those things that cause our people and our processes to behave in a particular way. Whether they are documented or not, behind every behavior within an organization there exists a business rule. Oftentimes rules are created for specific circumstances that may come to pass, circumstances that appear to require the organization to behave in a different way than it had in the past.

Business Rules have a very high incidence of contextual relevancy - in fact, rules often exist to address a specific context that may only exist for a very short time. Business Rules can exist for many different reasons and for many different purposes. In many cases business rules tend to aggregate over time, and this leads to increased complexity (and increased causes of work).

Business Rules in Process

If we think about it, any process we are engaged in that has a substantial number of business rules within it requires us to have significant knowledge of the rules of the process in order for us to “navigate” the process to the desired or intended outcome.

Because business rules commonly seek to control process behavior based on a static “now” snapshot in time, they are highly prone to becoming obsolete in a very short time frame. Sometimes rules set out to direct the activity of people or systems and having created them we forget about their existence. Rules can also innocently develop from a set of behaviors and become “the way we do stuff around here.”

Business rules are one of the three main process diagnostics used during process analysis when seeking to eliminate causes of work and process points of failure. The other two process diagnostics are Moments of Truth and break points.