Identifying Challenges in Business Rules Management Implementations Regarding the Governance Capability at Governmental Institutions

As the number of BRMS-implementations increases, more and more organizations search for guidance to design such solutions. Given these premises, more implementation challenges experienced from practice become evident. In this study, we identify the main challenges regarding the governance capability as part of BRM, in the Dutch governmental context. To be able to do so, we utilized a four-round focus group and a three-round Delphi study set-up to collect our data. The analysis resulted in eight implementation challenges experienced by the participants. The presented results provide a grounded basis from which empirical and practical research on best practices can be further explored

Business Rules Management and Decision Mining - Filling in the Gaps

Proper decision-making is one of the most important capabilities of an organization. Adequately managing these decisions is therefore of high importance. Business Rules Management (BRM) is an approach that helps in managing decisions and underlying business logic. However, questions still arise if the decisions are properly improved based on decision data. Decision Mining (DM) could complement BRM capabilities in order to improve towards effective and efficient decision-making. In this study, we propose the integration of BRM and DM through a simulation using a government and a healthcare case. During this simulation, three entry points are presented that describe how decision-related data should be utilized between BRM capabilities and DM phases to be able to integrate them. The presented results provide a basis from which more technical research on the three DM phases can be further explored

Responsible AI and Power: Investigating the System Level Bureaucrat in the Legal Planning Process

Numerous statements and pamphlets indicate that governments should increase the transparency of ICT-implementations and algorithms in eGovernment services and should encourage democratic control. This paper presents research among civil servants, suppliers and experts who play a role in the automation of spatial policymaking and planning (e.g. environment, building, sound and CO2 regulation, mobility). The case is a major digitalisation programme of that spatial planning in the Netherlands. In this digital transition, the research assumption is that public and political values such as transparency, legitimacy and (perceived) fairness are difficult to validate in the practice of the design process; policy makers tend to lose sight of the algorithms and decision trees designed during the ICT -implementation of eGovernment services. This situation would implicate a power shift towards the system level bureaucrat. i.e., the digitized execution of laws and regulations, thereby threatening democratic control. This also sets the stage for anxiety towards ICT projects and digital bureaucracies. We have investigated perceptions about ‘validation dark spots’ in the design process of the national planning platform that create unintended shifts in decision power in the context of the legal planning process. To identify these validation dark spots, 22 stakeholders were interviewed. The results partially confirm the assumption. Based on the collected data, nine validation dark spots are identified that require more attention and research

The Decision Transparency Framework: A framework and key transparency indicators to measure the business decisions and business logic transparency

Business decisions and business logic are an important part of an organization’s daily activities. In the not so near past they were modelled as integrative part of business processes, however, during the last years, they are managed as a separate entity. Still, decisions and underlying business logic often remain a black box. Therefore, the call for transparency increases. Current theory does not provide a measurable and quantitative way to measure transparency for business decisions. This paper extends the understanding of different views on transparency with regards to business decisions and underlying business logic and presents a framework including Key Transparency Indicators (KTI) to measure the transparency of business decisions and business logic. The framework is validated by means of an experiment using case study data. Results show that the framework and KTI’s are useful to measure transparency. Further research will focus on further refinement of the measurements as well as further validation of the current measurement