My Bios | Long

About Ronald G. Ross

Co-Founder and Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC
Executive Editor, Business Rules Journal
Chair, Business Rules & Decisions Forum Conference

Ronald G. Ross is Co-Founder and Principal of Business Rule Solutions, LLC. BRS provides workshops, consulting services, publications, and methodology supporting:

• Business rules

• Business analysis

• Business vocabulary

• Decisioning

• Business governance

• Product re-engineering

• Rules management

Mr. Ross actively participates in BRS consulting engagements, as does his Co-Founder in BRS, Gladys S.W. Lam.

Mr. Ross is recognized internationally as the "father of business rules." He is one of the world's leading experts on best practices relating to business engineering and IT development. Mr. Ross is a frequent speaker at conferences and other professional gatherings world-wide. Mr. Ross has served as Co-Chair of the annual Business Rules & Decisions Forum Conference since 1997.

Highlights of Mr. Ross's past activities related to business rules include:

• Publishing the first book on business rules in 1994 (The Business Rule Book, First Edition), culminating ten years of research and featuring the notion that 'business rules should be the error messages.'

• Serving as a charter member of the GUIDE forerunner of the Business Rules Group (BRG) in 1989, and being a central contributor to the BRG's seminal paper on business rules in 1995.

• Editing the BRG's landmark work product Business Rule Manifesto (2003), now translated into more than twelve languages (www.BusinessRulesGroup.org).

• Participating heavily in SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules), an OMG standard released as 1.0 in December, 2007. Mr. Ross served as one of five Governing Board members of the elite consortium that originally created SBVR (2003-2005).

• Editing the BRG's "The Business Motivation Model: Business Governance in a Volatile World" (2000, revised 2005, 2007), an OMG standard also released in 2007.

The popular public seminars given by Mr. Ross were the first on business rules (starting in 1996) and are the longest-running in the field. In North America they are given through AttainingEdge (www.AttainingEdge.com), and in Europe through IRM-UK (www.IRMUK.co.uk). The seminars created and presented by Mr. Ross since 1984 have provided a consistent focus on the business from an independent point of view. They have been highly regarded wherever they have been presented. Thousands of professionals have attended his public offerings

At BRS, Mr. Ross co-develops Proteus®, its landmark business analysis and business rule methodology, which features numerous innovative techniques including the popular RuleSpeak® (www.RuleSpeak.com) first introduced in 1996. RuleSpeak provides guidelines for natural language expression of business rules, now also available in Dutch, German and Spanish. These are the latest offerings in a 35-year career that has consistently featured creative, business-driven solutions.

He was co-architect of the industry's first business-oriented rule management tool released in 1999, and co-architect of RuleXpress™, a second-generation tool released by RuleArts (www.RuleArts.com) in 2005. RuleXpress is the world's premier tool for business vocabulary coordination and business rule management, also including business-level quality analysis.

Mr. Ross serves as Executive Editor of BRCommunity and its flagship on-line publication, Business Rules Journal, since 2000. He is a regular columnist for the Journal's Commentary section which also features Roger Burlton, Terry Halpin, John Zachman, and others. BRCommunity.com is a vertical community for professionals working with business rules, enterprise decision management (EDM), and related areas. Mr. Ross was formerly Editor of the Data Base Newsletter from 1977 to 1998. During that time the Newsletter received widespread professional acclaim for its in-depth coverage and pioneering leadership.

Mr. Ross has written nine professional books, starting in 1977, which have been read by tens of thousands of professionals worldwide. His newest works are:

• Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules with Gladys S.W. Lam (2011, An IIBA® Sponsored Handbook).

• Business Rule Concepts: Getting to the Point of Knowledge, 3rd Edition (2009, first published in 1998) providing an easy-to-read, non-technical explanation of business rules.

• Principles of the Business Rule Approach, published by Addison-Wesley (2003), featuring the business rationale and opportunity for business rules.

Other recent works are:

• The Business Rule Book (1994, 1997) presenting a revolutionary formal approach to categorizing business rules and innumerable examples.

• Resource Life Cycle Analysis (1992) featuring a value-chain approach to business modeling and strategic planning for IT systems.

Earlier writings, starting in the mid 1970s, focused on the emergence and application of database technology and on data modeling. His book Data Dictionaries and Data Administration, which appeared in 1981, was the first published on this important new area and is widely regarded as the classic in the field. It was the first comprehensive discussion of metadata in the industry.

Mr. Ross has received several industry awards, including DAMA International's Individual Achievement Award for 1995. Mr. Ross received his M.S. in information science from Illinois Institute of Technology, and his B.A. from Rice University.