Far too often these essays are motivated by an observation of, or conversation with, an organization that has gotten itself into some trouble. Their pain becomes a springboard to discuss how things should be done in the world of decision management and provides an unfortunately steady stream of topics for forums like this. That said I am quite pleased to be able to report some generally positive recent experiences with Enterprises that are making great strides as they embrace business rules and decision management. We will use these as exemplars that other similar organizations might look to as they plot their decision management.

During a recent client meeting, we were reviewing the proposed business architecture for a new system. Decision Management will play a crucial role in the application and the rule processing had been nicely delineated in the architecture. While the rules themselves had been fairly well articulated, their “insertion” in the requirements suggested quite a bit of work remained. However, I was generally pleased with the state of the work to date.

While pondering the difficulties still faced by enterprises employing a business rule management system (BRMS) and attempting to fully enable business users, I see yet another wave of standards coming our way. Standards for rules have been attempted in a variety of ways over the years. Each attempt provided some valuable insight but none really answered the call. This got me to thinking about the how far the field has come in terms of approach and execution but not in terms of standardization.

I have been fortunate to be involved with rules long enough to see a tremendous evolution in how the technologies are labeled, presented, integrated, and ultimately utilized. We have truly seen a sweeping move across the spectrum from purely academic research platforms to a boutique niche technology to its current place as a mainstream part of everyday business.

Business rules administration constitutes the core value proposition of any advanced business rules management system (BRMS) solution and, quite often, represents the holy grail of enterprise BRMS implementations. With the promise of propelling IT into an agile, flexible, and faster policy deployment environment, business rules administration capabilities often serve as key drivers for many cost benefit cases. However, less than 60% of these implementations actually leverage the full promise of BRMS offerings, ending up by managing business rules projects much like any other conventional software project. More importantly, business rules are too often not managed by those who should be empowered to manage them – i.e., business owners and stewards. Why does this happen?

Essays I have authored in the past generally focused on various methodologies and technologies revolving around business decision management – business process, business rules and analytics. I’ve always been quite interested in the past, present and likely future of these capabilities and their application in various real world domains.

For the last several years I have been wholly involved with applied decision management in the financial services arena. While there has been an almost unfathomable amount of turmoil in these businesses over the past several years, I was still very surprised to recently hear a loud cry from the mortgage industry that “technology got us into the trouble that we are in today!” 

Several years ago I was asked to be part of a panel discussing business process and business rules at one of the BrainStorm conference stops. The panel included James Taylor – noted thought leader and the man who coined the term “Enterprise Decision Management”. I had had the pleasure of talking with James on several occasions prior to this panel but found myself doing a double-take when he said “the dirty secret is that business analysts don’t really care about the rules”. Blasphemy! Isn’t that why we’re all here? Isn’t that what we do?

As we continue to find more powerful tools and approaches available to us in our efforts to employ Business Decision Management, one last roadblock remains on our quest for agility. Ourselves. We already know effective BDM will be facilitated by a new kind of resource – a hybrid business/technical person that knows the business well and is able to codify that knowledge in a structured fashion. But the organization itself must enable – not inhibit – the collaboration we seek.

Corporate adopters of a business rules approach over the past decade have often been limited to individual projects within an organization. It was not surprising to find disparate (either geographically or functionally) areas of the same company initiating independent efforts often resulting in a completely different methodology for applying business rules – and in some cases with different business rule management software. The latest generation of business rule software has, however, been created with the enterprise perspective in mind.