James Taylor's Decision Management

There was a nice write up on business rules in Computer Business Review - The importance of business rules - and I thought I would highlight some of its key points for those of you perhaps less familiar with business rules and their value proposition.

Essentially business rules are the language for making an organization's strategy actionable. Business rules differentiate a company's services from its competition, make it easier to manage what decisions were made when and provide "intelligence" to your systems and processes.

Why is this good? Well, complex rules are not only difficult to code into applications, they are also a nightmare to maintain using traditional coding. Likewise if you have lots of rules, rules that change often or rules that require domain expertise to understand then writing traditional code can be a big problem. Write rules in Java or C# and you are just creating tomorrow's legacy code, even if you do embed it in a service.

That said, implementing rules has to be accompanied by organizational change management, where both sides accept the balance of power. You are moving from an environment where the business "throw requirements over the wall" to IT, to a collaborative one where they work together. As the CIO of Egg, a UK-based online bank that has implemented BRMS technology from Fair Isaac, said

"The biggest single issue we faced was that of ownership: convincing the technology community that business rules could be treated much the same as content and managed by the business users and not IT"

The other key factor and this is really the point of the whole blog, is to think about business rules management systems as part of a universal decisioning backbone for an enterprise, not as just another programmer productivity tool. Only by focusing hard on operational decisions and figuring out how and why to automate them can you maximize your return.