James Taylor's Decision Management

Reading ebizQ today, as I do every day of course, I saw Zygmunt Jackowski's article Bridging the IT-Business Gap With BPM and SOA (Part I). I don't disagree with Zygmunt that neither BPM nor SOA is going to be a silver bullet for getting the business and IT to collaborate. Indeed I don't think there is a silver bullet for this problem. I do think but business rules technology can help cross the chasm though, especially when it comes to the automation of critical business decisions.

Good business rules management systems allow IT to do the critical plumbing that allows decisions to be made using data already in systems and allows the decisions to be fed back to the transactional systems that need them. They will also allow the IT department to bound the changes the business can make, allowing some business users to make dramatic changes to the rules and others, perhaps, only to change the occaisional parameter. By defining the rules about rules in this way IT can ensure that business users can make the changes they want to the things they understand without allowing them to get themselves in trouble in other areas. What IT does not do, though, is make itself the gatekeeper for these kinds of changes. Instead it empowers the business to make their own changes.

I believe this has two positive impacts on the relationship between IT and the business. Firstly it reduces the frustration the business feels at waiting for IT to make competitive or market-driven changes to running systems. By empowering the business it allows them to respond to change much more quickly. This also has the added benefit of using less IT resources to make these changes, allowing IT to do more of the things the business users want which also improves the relationship. Secondly, however, it also shows the business why changes can be hard and why they need to be considered carefully by putting them directly into the process. Instead of just tossing a requirement for change over the fence they become part of the team that's making the change. That in turn makes the business more aware of what IT does and that should improve the relationship and thus the level of collaboration.

I have blogged a couple of times on this before - Business and IT collaboration and
Different Perspectives.