About RuleArts

RuleArts was conceived in November, 2004 at the Business Rules Forum Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. The Forum, begun in 1997, was bigger and better than ever that year. Hearing how people have used business rules to bring about real change for their companies is always highly energizing.

Ron Ross chairs the annual Conference, and through his books, talks and consulting work has played a central role for many years in promoting this new paradigm. Ron is co-founder of Business Rule Solutions, LLC (BRS) with Gladys S.W. Lam, also Executive Director of the Forum. Since 1996 they created and applied methodology to capture, write and manage clear, unambiguous rules in structured English. Their work, highly successful in hundreds of companies, has also played an important role in standardization.

Silvie Spreeuwenberg and Rik Gerrits of LibRT, B.V. are prominent speakers at the Forum every year, and have themselves organized various events on rules across Europe. Silvie and Rik are known for a life-long commitment to rule quality, as well as tooling and consulting to support it.

At Silvie's suggestion, the four found time to share a lovely dinner during the Conference that year. It was actually not their first. Rik had developed a habit of "grilling" Ron (Rik's term) about developments in business rules, and why innovations were not happening faster. All four shared a strong belief that technology-independent business rules should be owned by the business - not exactly a mainstream idea in IT circles.

Over dinner, the four came to the realization that vendors who deliver development environments for creating rule-based applications were not likely to fill this need any time soon - if ever. People struggling to bring business-driven rulebook management to their companies were left in the lurch. If a tool were to be built any time soon, they would have to do it themselves.

They also realized they had the right combination of skills and experience to pull it off. Rik is a world-class software architect. Both Rik and Silvie have deep theoretical and practical knowledge about rule quality. Ron is active in standardization efforts, especially for multi-language business vocabulary. Ron and Gladys had partnered to create RuleTrack (a predecessor of RuleXpress), which BRS had used extensively in their consulting practice since the late 1990s. And finally there is “the Gladys test” (Ron’s term) – an exceedingly low tolerance point for anything not eminently practical and workable in the real world. They all understood the need for an enterprise-capable, multi-user tool to support large-scale work in organizations of size.

Out of the discussion that night, a new independent organization, RuleArts, was born. Development of RuleXpress began shortly thereafter. RuleArts has been especially fortunate to have had great customers right from the start. These customers have played a vital and vigorous role in shaping the product. Now RuleXpress has many customers across North America and Europe, with more added every month. It was the clearly the right idea, at exactly the right time.

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