Now, this is a sequel to Speeding up your projects & defeating complexity with Business Rules, which was in response to The Business Rules approach

I was speaking to our Professional Services Manager here, and he gave me a thoughtful angle on this subject.

Read this out!

1. Now, rules are pretty well organized intrinsically
2. Business Policies are never the result of random efforts. They are generally well thought out.
3. The way the policies are formulated itself would be in a pretty structured fashion
4. Now, where things get cluttered is with implementation. You would need one hell of a super-programmer to implement all the complex business policies in a structured, clean, maintainable, understandable, bug free and easy-to-change fashion.
5. But using a business rules management system to implement the policies would in itself be a way of documenting the policies
6. If you have old systems that have rules embedded in cobol or legacy java/COM/DCOM code,sophisticated rule extraction tools can help, but I am not sure how good these products themselves are
7. But if rules are already available in product brochures or underwriting guidelines then starting from there would be better than to try to extract from existing systems

The only final statement is that you need a business rules approach to write systems that need to make business decisions based on rules, policies.