WHITE PAPER

Understanding
S1000D Business Rules
Avoid costly mistakes and use
Business Rules to facilitate a
successful S1000D implementation
 Table of contents

Introduction -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3

The Basic S1000D Process ------------------------------------------------------------- 4

S1000D Business Rules deined ------------------------------------------------------ 5

The S1000D Business Rules Project ------------------------------------------------- 7

Why S1000D Business Rules Projects fail ------------------------------------------ 10

Ensuring Business Rules Project Success ----------------------------------------- 12

Conclusion --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 13

UNDERSTANDING S1000D BUSINESS RULES 2

Understanding S1000D Business Rules
S1000D - AN EVOLVING SPECIFICATION FOR COMPLEX INDUSTRIES As S1000D has evolved to
If you are working in the ield of aerospace or defense technical publi- support multinational custom-
cations, it’s likely that you’ve been hearing a lot about S1000D in the last ers across both military and
few years. Or maybe you have already begun using this speciication in civil programs, it has become
your organization. In fact, both civil aviation and defense organizations more complex and lexible
worldwide are joining the European defense industry in the adoption of than initially intended. As the
S1000D—an international speciication for the procureme complexity and lexibility have
nt and production of technical publications. grown, it has become neces-
sary to provide guidance for
There are many reasons why the S1000D speciication has been so widely implementing S1000D at the
adopted and extended to include air, land, and sea projects. Because project level. This is where
S1000D is based on XML, the data will support signiicant automation S1000D Business Rules come
as well as being system- and device-independent. Because S1000D into play.
is modular, it facilitates content reuse and seamless data interchange
between organizations. S1000D covers the entire lifecycle of technical This White Paper explains how
documentation: planning and management, production and data S1000D Business Rules are
exchange, and distribution and use. For this reason, S1000D provides a used to facilitate a successful
very effective way to ensure that technical publications procured for a S1000D implementation and
product such as an aircraft or submarine will meet the many and varied provides guidance on how
requirements for that product. to approach Business Rule
development. It explains the
THE PURPOSE OF S1000D BUSINESS RULES difference between Business
However, as S1000D has evolved to support multinational customers Rules and BREX and provides
across both military and civil programs, it has also become signiicantly tips on how to avoid some
more complex and lexible than initially intended. And as the complexity common and costly mistakes
and lexibility have grown, so has the requirement to document and en- when developing your S1000D
force rules to ensure that projects adhere to a deined set of variables for Business Rules.
authoring, interchange, and delivery. Sound, documented guidance for
implementing S1000D within projects is absolutely critical to ensure data
interoperability and consistency, and to support delivery according to
customer requirements. This is the purpose of S1000D Business Rules.

UNDERSTANDING S1000D BUSINESS RULES 3

The Basic S1000D Process
An important key to successful S1000D Business Rule development is
ensuring that everyone on your team understands the basic S1000D pro-
cess for creating, managing, interchanging, and publishing data. This is
often overlooked by newcomers to the speciication, and can result in
false starts and wasted effort.

FIRST STEP
As depicted in the diagram below from the S1000D speciication, the
very irst step in any new S1000D project is to “customize S1000D to meet
customer requirements”. To reiterate, this is the very irst step in any
S1000D project. This means that it should be done before you’ve signed
partner or customer contracts and before you start writing data mod-
ules. Too often projects have
gotten off to a bad start because they failed to understand this concept
and did not follow the process prescribed by the S1000D speciication.

If you are lucky enough to be part of a project that already has some
Business Rules established, you’ll escape much of the signiicant effort
involved with starting an S1000D project from scratch. If you are part
of a larger project or program, coordinate with your partners or parent
organization to get started—they may have Business Rules you will need
to use.

FIGURE 1 - BASIC S1000D PROCESS

UNDERSTANDING S1000D BUSINESS RULES 4

LEARN FROM OTHERS
If your project does not have any Business Rules, see if you can build off
existing efforts in your industry. Join S1000D user groups and learn from
others who have previous S1000D experience. Rather than risk an expen-
EXAMPLES
OF S1000D
sive false start, consider professional consulting from an industry expert
USERS AROUND
who has developed S1000D Business Rules before and can help you do it
THE GLOBE
right the irst time.
BAE Systems, Delta Airlines,
Cargotec, Saab AB, Boeing,
Airbus, Mitsubishi, Grimaldi
Business Rules Deined Group, RSK MiG, MAN Diesel,
RAF, Raytheon, multiple
As deined by S1000D, Business Rules are decisions made by a project or military and defense logis-
organization about how to implement S1000D. These decisions cover all tics organizations such as
aspects of S1000D and are not limited to authoring and illustrating. This German MoD, Danish DLO,
means that Business Rules can also address issues that are not deined Norwegian DLO, Finnish
in the S1000D speciication—for example, rules related to how S1000D Navy, US Army, US Navy and
interfaces with other standards and business processes that are related numerous others. And the list
to its implementation. keeps growing!

S1000D BUSINESS RULES RATIONALE

The creation of Business Rules serves as a focal activity for an integrated
design team involving documentation, development, usability, graphic
design, and other groups. The purpose of Business Rules is to describe
the guidelines, standards and methods for ensuring consistency across all
members of an S1000D project, therefore ensuring consistency across the
entire product and content delivery.

Business Rules also serve as a useful training resource for new members of
a technical publications team. Like a style guide, Business Rules provide
all the rules for content creation, management, publishing and delivery,
so a wise publications manager will require every new author to read the
entire set of Business Rules before writing their irst piece of content.

Finally, Business Rules can be referred to in a project’s contractual doc-

umentation to establish the “rules of engagement” between project
partners and customers. Using well-written S1000D Business Rules, every

?
part of the documentation project is well understood and there’s nothing
left to interpretation. BREX
BUSINESS RULES
BUSINESS RULES VS. BREX
These two key terms are often misunderstood and confused by newcom-
ers to S1000D, so some clariication and explanation is needed here.

Business Rules are simply a document that is written to capture decisions

UNDERSTANDING S1000D BUSINESS RULES 5

(and your rationale for those decisions) made in respect to your S1000D
implementation. The Business Rules document is often lengthy and
sometimes consists of multiple documents, depending on the method
you choose for organizing your Business Rules.

In fact, Business Rules documents aren’t really a new concept. They con-
tain the same type of information that was traditionally captured in:

 Technical Publications plans

 Author’s style guides
 Graphics guides
 Presentation and publishing guidelines
 QA and in-process review guides
 Customer acceptance documents and protocols
 Document management plans
 Publication type speciications

BUSINESS RULES
On the other hand, a BREX or Business Rules EXchange is an S1000D Data
SOURCES
Module encoded in XML and used as a method to formally specify and
exchange project-speciic Business Rules between parties. The BREX often S1000D Business Rules docu-
resides in your CSDB (Common Source Data Base) and is used to aid in ments contains information
the validation of your XML content. It can contain: from various plans and guides.

 speciications of the S1000D Standard Numbering System

 speciications of XML elements and attributes that must or
must not be applied to XML content
 deinitions of which values are allowed/used for speciied
elements and/or attributes and how those values are inter-
preted
 descriptions of the purpose of markup elements and attri
butes
A project or organization must decide if it needs to develop project spe-
ciic Business Rules and, if applicable, develop its own BREX data module.
Once a project BREX has been developed, every S1000D data module BUSINESS RULES
must contain a pointer back to the BREX for that project. EXCHANGE
The BREX provides your CSDB with the means to enforce some, but not BREX is an S1000D Data Mod-
all Business Rules during authoring and/or check-in to the repository. For ule encoded in XML used to
example, a Business Rule such as, “The attribute releaseEvent shall not specify and exchange Busi-
be used” can be enforced by a CSDB; but a Business Rule such as, “Any ness Rules between parties.
combination of control settings that will create a hazard to personnel
shall be preceded by a warning” cannot be enforced by a CSDB. This
is because the latter Business Rule requires a human to determine what
constitutes a hazard to personnel while the former simply precludes the
use of an XML attribute.
UNDERSTANDING S1000D BUSINESS RULES 6
The S1000D Business Rules Project
BUSINESS RULES PROJECT TEAM
The irst step in Business Rules development is to select stakeholders who
can contribute in substantive and political ways. As with any project,
consensus building is as important as technical expertise. When selecting
members of the Business Rules team it should be made up of the follow-
ing skill sets:

THE TEAM
 Subject Matter Experts (SME) representing your various content
types
 S1000D Business Rules project manager
 Graphics experts
 Web delivery team
 Project partners and suppliers

These stakeholders will serve as evangelists for the Business Rules and the
process for ensuring consistency.

TACKLE CRITICAL ISSUES FIRST

For a whole range of reasons, Business Rules can be very complex—so it
is imperative that they be deined and agreed upon, preferably before
any content is produced. Unfortunately, this isn’t always realistic, so at
least try to cover the most critical items irst. These important items might
include:
CRITICAL
ITEMS !
 Which Issue of S1000D will we be using?
 Have we registered all of our MOI codes?
 What SNS structures will we use? Do we need to modify/
create our own?
 What Information Codes will we use? Are there Informa-
tion Codes missing?
 What Data Module types will we use?
 What is our end deliverable? Will we deliver IETP, Paper,
XML?
 How do we intend to use applicability?
 What are our graphics formats and will we create 3D?

These high level Business Rules decisions can go a long way toward help-
ing your writers, coordinators, partners and suppliers reduce the anxiety
associated with a new S1000D project.

UNDERSTANDING S1000D BUSINESS RULES 7

BUSINESS RULES DOCUMENT ORGANIZATION
Once your Business Rules project team is assembled, you will need to
decide how to organize your Business Rules and determine how many
documents you’ll need to fully describe your decisions. The two basic
approaches are described below: HEADINGS
AND
1. S1000D Headings and Structure STRUCTURE
Create a set of documents that mimic the chapter breakdown in S1000D. With a logical chapter break-
These provide a logical breakdown and provide an easy way to nav- down you can easily navigate
igate both the Business Rules and S1000D since they are organized in both the Business Rules and
exactly the same way: S1000D.

Chapter 1 Introduction to the speciication

Chapter 2 Documentation process
Chapter 3 Information generation
Chapter 4 Information management
Chapter 5 Information sets and publications
Chapter 6 Information presentation/use
Chapter 7 Information processing
Standard numbering systems, infor-
Chapter 8
mation codes and learn codes
Chapter 9 Terms and data dictionary

BUSINESS RULES
2. Business Rule Categories CATEGORIES
S1000D now includes a concept called Business Rule categories. Group-
Group your Business Rules in
ing your Business Rules into these categories helps with standardization
categories and ease the stan-
and scope:
dardization and scope.

BR category 1 General
BR category 2 Product deinition
Maintenance philosophy and Con-
BR category 3
cepts of operation
BR category 4 Security
BR category 5 Business process
BR category 6 Data creation
BR category 7 Data exchange
BR category 8 Data integrity and management
BR category 9 Legacy data
BR category 10 Data output

UNDERSTANDING S1000D BUSINESS RULES 8

BUSINESS RULES DECISION POINTS
Whichever approach your project decides to use, the next step is to DECISION
comb through the S1000D speciication to determine which decisions POINTS
need to be made. To do this, you will focus on the S1000D Business Rule
Use the S1000D speciication
Decision Points or BRDPs.
as a guide when determining
which decisions need to be
These BRDPs are documented primarily in Section 3 of the S1000D spec-
made.
iication although they can appear anywhere a decision of some sort
needs to be made. When one or more Business Rule decisions are re-
quired, you will see the words “Business rule decisions” followed by a
description of the decision(s) that need to be made. If a Business Rule
Decision Point has not been identiied for a given section, it will state:
“None identiied”.

Below are two examples of what you will ind when looking for BRDPs in
the S1000D speciication:

FIGURE 2 - CHAPTER 3 BRDP EXAMPLE

FIGURE 3 - NONE IDENTIFIED BRDP EXAMPLE

Continuing to use the S1000D speciication as a guide, your Business Rules

Project Team can now document each decision according to the orga-
nization scheme you’ve selected. You are now on your way to having a
set of S1000D Business Rules for your project!

UNDERSTANDING S1000D BUSINESS RULES 9

Why S1000D Business Rules Projects
Sometimes FaiL - 3 Common Mistakes
There are three common mistakes we see when organizations begin
implementing S1000D and developing Business Rules:

MISTAKE

#1
INSUFFICIENT PRIORITIZATION FOR
BUSINESS RULE DEVELOPMENT
WATCH OUT!
More often than not, S1000D projects fail because organizations haven’t
Avoid the common mistakes
dedicated adequate staff time to the project and fail to make Business
and make your S1000D Business
Rules development a priority. Some technical publications managers
Rules project a success.
incorrectly assume that Business Rule development is something that can
be done during downtime or only once in a while. Key team members
continue to work on their “daytime jobs” and no one gives their full at-
tention to the project. When this happens, inconsistent data and missed
deadlines are often the result.

This is a common scenario because the S1000D Business Rules project

team is going to be made up of people who are also important to your
current documentation production processes. For this reason, it’s import-
ant that S1000D Business Rules development be given a high priority with
time carved out on a daily or weekly basis to work on them. The frequen-
cy and duration of your Business Rule development activities will be whol-
ly dependent on your internal schedule for S1000D production—but it’s
important to avoid long periods of inactivity. Business Rule development
requires focused activity, otherwise project momentum and direction is
lost and it becomes necessary to continually review the development
process and previous decisions that were already documented. This can
result in a painfully slow development process and can cause your team
to lose focus and motivation.

MISTAKE

#2
INCORRECTLY SCOPING THE BUSINESS RULES
DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITY

Another common mistake made by Business Rules project teams is failing

to properly scope the effort to develop a comprehensive set of S1000D
Business Rules. If you go through the speciication and look at the BRDPs,
it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that Business Rules can be devel-
oped in a matter of several weeks. After all, there are a inite number of
decision points and it seems entirely reasonable to think each of these
decisions can be made in a matter of minutes.

But the fact of the matter is that most Business Rules are going to take

UNDERSTANDING S1000D BUSINESS RULES 10

discussion and compromise, some more than others. Certain decisions
may take many hours or even days to make. In some organizations, deci-
sions will be hard-fought. Sometimes a decision isn’t accepted by a team
member who continues to raise it for examination again and again. In
this case, it may be necessary to develop rules of engagement for the
Business Rules team to ensure that forward progress is made.

As you can see, this effort is actually much larger that it seems. In fact,
we have found that the average amount of time to successfully develop
a comprehensive set of S1000D Business Rules is between 4 and 8 months,
depending on the frequency and duration of your development activi-
ties.

By understanding the Business Rule development process and scoping it

correctly, you will save yourself and your team a great deal of frustration
and avoid a delay on one of your irst milestones toward adopting the
S1000D speciication.

MISTAKE

#3
NOT ENSURING YOUR S1000D BUSINESS RULES PROJECT TEAM
UNDERSTANDS THE SPECIFICATION

Finally, the third common mistake made by many S1000D Business Rules
Project Teams is thinking that S1000D is just another guidance document WWW.S1000D.ORG
or publishing speciication. If this was the case, it could be used ade- This is where you download the
quately as a reference document during the documentation production S1000D speciication. Make sure
process. your team understands it. Get
help if necessary!
But trying to use S1000D this way is setting your team up for failure. This is
because S1000D brings a fundamental change to the way we manage,
write, publish and deliver information. It requires a great deal of planning
and forethought to implement S1000D properly and if decisions are being
made by members of a project team with a weak understanding of
S1000D, they will have a long-lasting negative effect on your project for
years to come.

You might think you will save on costs if you have your team just “read
the speciication”. This is important and necessary (the S1000D spec-
iication is available for download at www.s1000d.org and it’s highly
encouraged that you download and read it) but many people are not
able to read and understand this complex 2,759-page speciication
without some sort of formal instruction to support their understanding.
Furthermore, without having exposure to a CSDB (Common Source Data
Base), some of the concepts and processes involved with S1000D can be
dificult to work through.

UNDERSTANDING S1000D BUSINESS RULES 11

Ensuring Your Project Success
To ensure that your S1000D Business Rules planning, production, and
implementation go as smoothly as possible, we offer the following recom- ENSURE
mendations: SUCCESS
Follow our recommendations
 It cannot be said too many times: Make sure that everyone
and you are well on the way
on your project is familiar with the S1000D speciication.
towards a successful S1000D
That means that there is some reading to do; and probably
Business Rules implementation.
some training to budget.
 Deine and share competencies between different players
on the Business Rules Project Team; apply the expertise you
have in-house to the task of developing Business Rules for
your project.
 Network with others in your industry and leverage any Busi-
ness Rules that may already exist for similar projects.
 Deine Business Rules as early as possible to avoid rework.
 Update Business Rules as often as necessary.
 Test Business Rules by using “test exchanges” before they
are authorized and put into effect.
 Involve all known and affected parties in the review and
approval of the Business Rules.
 Authorize and enforce your Business Rules.
 Deine acceptance and rejection criteria for partners on
your projects. At what threshold will you accept or reject
data that does not conform to your Business Rules?
 Create and exchange Business Rule checklists that can be
used by members of your project for S1000D implementa-
tions.
 Exchange expertise with other organizations within the
S1000D community. Many organizations and individuals
provide mentoring and guidance in the context of user
groups and industry working groups.
DON’T STRUGGLE
ASK FOR HELP Selecting an experienced
Finally, don’t be afraid to obtain outside help. Consider assistance at S1000D consultant will help your
the irst sign that your team is struggling, but be careful who you choose. team stay on track.
Select a consultant who is not only an expert in S1000D but who has also
worked extensively in your industry. Ensure that the consultant you work
with understands your product(s), the regulatory environment(s) you work
in, and the business challenges you face, so you can be guided effec-
tively to a successful S1000D implementation.

UNDERSTANDING S1000D BUSINESS RULES 12

Conclusion
Carefully-designed Business Rules are vital to the success of your S1000D
project. Good business rules will facilitate seamless interoperability
between all the members of your team and ensure that your delivered DO IT RIGHT
documentation meets the needs of your customer. THE FIRST TIME!
Learn, plan, and communicate!
Make sure your S1000D Business Rules Project Team reads and under- And schedule resources!
stands the S1000D speciication. Obtain S1000D speciication training if
needed.

The process for developing S1000D Business Rules is simple: Make the most
critical decisions irst, such as identifying the S1000D Issue your project will
use, which Data Module types will be needed, how Applicability will be
set, and so forth. Then decide how you will organize your Business Rules
and begin going through the S1000D speciication. As your team locates
each of the Business Rule Decision Points, their decisions are documented
in your Business Rules document. This is the methodology typically used to
develop S1000D Business Rules for any organization, whether an industry
body such as the Air Transport Association or USSMG Sea Working Group,
an airframe or engine OEM, an OEM supplier, or a defense or civil avia-
tion operator.

As simple as this process may be, the actual effort to develop S1000D
Business Rules is anything but easy. Business Rules can address extreme-
ly complex issues and involve clariication, discussion and compromise.
Make sure you consider this when scheduling resources to this important
activity.

Finally, here are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to S1000D
Business Rules:

 The more thorough your planning is, the more effective your
implementation will be
 Communication between all team members is absolutely vital
to the success of your S1000D Business Rules project
 While good Business Rules will facilitate data compatibility and
conformance, bad Business Rules are a waste of time and
money
 It’s much easier to do it right the irst time

UNDERSTANDING S1000D BUSINESS RULES 13

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