[Colloq] [Hiring Talk] Thursday11/29 11:00am 149CN Sol Greenspan

[Rachel Bates]

*****************     FACULTY HIRING TALK    **********************

Thursday, November 29, 11:00 a.m.
Room 149 CN

Business Rules:  A Microcosm of Requirements Engineering
by Sol J. Greenspan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, Management Strategies Inc.


ABSTRACT

Business rules represent policies, procedures and practices of an
enterprise (such as a commercial business, government agency, or
educational institution) that guide and constrain the enterprise's
way of doing business.  To get the full benefits of business rules,
one needs an approach to representing and managing the business rules
through their full lifecycle, from acquisition through deployment and
evolution.  This talk describes a modeling framework and methodology
for modeling an enterprise, its business rules, and the decision
structures involved in business rules analysis and generation.  This
work demonstrates the possibility of automated support of the
business rules lifecycle by automatically generating business rules
from the modeled information along with data representing domain
experience. A business rules development tool was implemented to
illustrate and demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

Business rules can be viewed as special kinds of enterprise
requirements that are characterized by their business orientation and
their propensity for change.  The business rules lifecycle thus
serves as a useful microcosm, or test bed, for studying some very
challenging issues in Requirements Engineering: 1) bridging the
traditional gap between business needs and system requirements, and
2) enabling rapid system modification in response to changing
requirements.

The talk reviews some principles of requirements modeling that carry
over as well to the business rules context, describes the research
trajectory that has led to the work on business rules,  presents the
business rules approach along with examples from industrial
experience, and poses challenges for future research directions.

Dr. Sol Greenspan received his Ph.D. from the University of
Toronto for his work in the intersection of Software Engineering and
Artificial Intelligence, which applies concepts of knowledge
representation to the modeling and analysis of software system
requirements. He received his Masters degree in Computer Science from
Rutgers University, and a Bachelors degree in Mathematics from the
University of Michigan.

Dr. Greenspan has held positions at Bell Laboratories and
Schlumberger-Doll Research, and for the last 14 years he led a
research group at GTE Laboratories in Waltham, which became part of
Verizon Communications last year. He recently left to become Chief
Scientist of Management Strategies Incorporated. Over the years, Dr.
Greenspan has been a consultant to business, industry and various
governments in Canada, the US and Europe. Dr. Greenspan serves on the
editorial
boards of IEEE Communications Magazine, the Journal on Automated Software
Engineering, and the Requirements Engineering Journal, and he is the
chairperson of IFIP Working Group 2.9 on Software Requirements
Engineering. He will chair the upcoming International Conference on
Requirements Engineering which will take place in Germany in Sept,
2002.
      Dr. Greenspan's research interests include information systems
requirements, design and development; architectures for compatible
automated and human systems; designing and working in virtual
enterprises; business process re-engineering; knowledge management;
support for rapid definition and deployment of interactive services;
conceptual modeling; B2B infrastructure; and others.