The challenges confronting organizations with managing BRs are growing in complexity as well as the need for real-time, distributed and consistent decision making across systems, geographies, and channels rise. The study collected data with the use of structuration research methods, and conducted interviews with leading end-users, developers, researchers and thoughtleaders from the business rules (BR) industry. The findings suggest that a lifecycle has indeed emerged in business rules management and it is one that is distinct from the traditional knowledge management lifecycles. Based on synthesizing results from the study, the business rules management lifecycle (BRMLC) was found to include three high level environments. These are - align, rule management and implementation, that are decomposed into eight steps (plan, capture, organize, author, distribute, test, apply, and maintain). The primary effects of the BRMLC approach include separating the rule management from the implementation environment, the use of an independent rule repository, shifting control of rule authoring and updates from IT to business staff, and alignment of BR deployments with similar enterprise-wide initiatives.