Now, check out this post on ZDNET Education. It prompted me to check out what goes into Student information Systems, and surprise, I found a whole bunch of Business Rules there!

Now What is a SIS?

SIS are typically student information portals. You can expect to find the following information, facilities in an SIS

1. Enrollment, re-enrollment into courses.
2. Fees, scholarships & financial assistance & related matters
3. Textbooks, news, exam papers & stuff
4. The latest assignments, grades and other nerdy stuff
5. Campus news, extra-curricular activities, jobs etc.

Show me the Rules, dude !

1. Now, Universities offer a large number of courses.Even reasonably large universities might have 10,000 students, and the bigger ones might have anywhere between 30,000 - 40,000, I guess.
2. A student might be eligible to only take certain courses, depending on his area of study
3. His eligibility for a course might also depend on availability with that prof, or his GPA might also be a factor in his getting his course. I was never able to get into operations research at my college, because only the best brains were eligible to get in, and that too only some 20 seats were available.
4. Or again, the course might require a pre-requisite that you might or might not have done. Then, if you do not have the pre-requisite, you cannot choose the course.
5. Or again, the course might not be available this year because the prof has quit, and there is no replacement!
6. The fee depends on the courses that have been chosen, programs you have enrolled in. You have your fee assessment, fee calculation & pricing rules. Of course, service charge assessment will also have to be done
7. Or again, invoice generation, late fee reminders are also rules driven scenarios
8. Now, how would a university share it’s revenue with all its internal departments? Business Rules once again !
9. Your GPA is a formula that will need to be calculated. This formula never changes, of course
10. Now, who says, SIS have to be boring websites. I came across this usecase recently where a University was using a BRMS to personalize content in their student website. So, now you have personalization rules

What ails the current systems?

So, what is the problem with the current systems? Well, here are some that I can think of

1. The systems are typically inflexible and very difficult to change.
2. Changing Fee schedules was an often required change, but that required lengthy wait periods for the change to happen.
3. The Course Eligibility Rules are generally found in the web pages buried in javascript. So, changing them is a buggy process, and there is generally no visibility into what the rules are.
4. The course eligibility rules are really large in number, and managing them is normally an issue!
5. Even simple things like grade calculations go wrong sometimes, and the correction time was large simply because of the IT development process involved

Now, so what if you have found Business Rules?

1. Fee calculations, Assessments, Adjustments are the kind of problems that are best solved using a BRMS. Now, all these are typically Decision Tables, and can be captured in a format that a Business User can easily understand, and even change by themselves
2. Course Eligibility Rules are best captured as Rules and Decision Tables. It would make changing them easier. You would also have the capability to provide ownership of certain Course eligibility rules to concerned departments.
3. Another advantage of externalizing using a BRMS here would be that all these rules become visible to the Policy makers, to the extent of even making their participation in the Systems change process a distinct reality.
4. Externalizing the Policies enables the IT & the College management to ensure that the errors in the system are minimized, and the response time to correct errors is also significantly improved
5. And, of course, the Service satisfaction levels would of course see a significant upward movement
6. ..