Factors Affecting Business Process and Business Rule Integration

Information systems architectures are becoming increasingly complex and fragmented. As a result, organizations struggle to cope with change propagation, compliance management and interoperability, to name a few. Two major components in current information system architectures are business process models and business rules. In practice, redundancy and inconsistency in business rule and business process models exists, highlighting the need for integrated modelling of business processes and business rules. An important pre-requisite of achieving integrated modelling is the ability to decide whether a rule should be embedded into a business process model or modelled independently in a rule repository. In current literature, little guidance can be found that can help modellers make such a decision. We identify this gap as a shortcoming that contributes to fragmented information system architectures and argue that to understand such a decision process, one needs to first identify the factors that can affect the decision. Accordingly, in this paper, we embark on a systematic review of process modelling and business rule modelling literature to identify such factors. Our work uncovered twelve factors and is a stepping-stone to developing a decision framework for business process model and business rule integration, and towards improved information system architectures.