In this excerpt, Ron Ross, author of Business Rule Concepts: Getting to the Point of Knowledge, discusses how business rules and the governance of an enterprise are inherently and inextricably linked. The implication is that the better your company gets at business rules—and business rule management—the better it can become at the nuts and bolts of governance. Ross also discusses what the governance process of a company involves and how it should be supported. The goal is smart governance.

Given increasingly large, distributed, and heterogeneous application and infrastructure landscapes, standardization is getting particular attention from enterprises and their enterprise architecture management (EAM) initiatives. It has become even more essential in today’s economic times, where enterprises are forced to cut costs wherever possible. For these challenges to be overcome in an enduring way, EAM needs to build upon a defined process for managing a standards portfolio.

Standards Management: An Integral Part of EAM

Nowadays, there is a lot of talk about creating “sustainable” organizations, meaning those that produce value—not only financially (the old way of thinking) but also environmentally, ethically, socially, and so on. But how often do we talk about creating organizations that are productive from the perspective of human capital—in which people not only feel safe to say difficult things but also are encouraged and rewarded for doing so?