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I have been thinking about this for a while, ever since I saw Wayne Allen's post on the same topic. I increasingly find myself thinking that the only real way to do this is to focus on the processes and decisions that the business must execute and tie those directly to the software development process.

In practice this means modeling and implementing processes as Business Processes and modeling and implementing decisions as Decision Services. This in turn almost certainly means using a BPMS to manage the process definitions and a BRMS (Business Rules Management System) to manage the rules in the decisions. Separating out processes and decisions will also allow the business to identify its performance metrics, and measure against those, at a more granular level. For instance, what percentage of transactions should make it through the process without manual intervention or what should be the risk profile of customers to whom we decide to give a loan. This focused measures might otherwise be hidden in overall system objectives.

Of course, the business needs to know what it's goals are for this to work but here's the other reason this combination of BPMS and BRMS works so well. Both kinds of technology allow business users to be more engaged in the definition and maintenance of the system's behavior. Combine that with performance management tools that allow the business to change its metrics and the business can evolve all three as it learns what it wants.

Your business users could, for instance, define a basic process with a simple set of decisions and metrics for both. With the necessary additional plumbing you can build a fairly simple system. As they use it they will see that they need to change the process (add new branches to handle exceptions or subsets of transactions for instance), evolve the rules for the decisions (to make better decisions or handle more of the transactions), and change their definition of success. Instead of all this change driving the developers crazy, the business can make most if not all of these changes themselves.

The post talked about 3 different types of value - New opportunity, Staying open and Cost reduction. It also made the point that opportunity cost - the cost/value of not doing something - can be critical. Managing processes and decisions externally really helps with cost reduction and with staying open while also reducing the opportunity costs by making changes faster to implement. New opportunities might require more change than the business can manage on their own but now the IT folks have the time to think about this as their maintenance burden has gone way down.

Other posts you might enjoy on this topic include:

• Composite Applications
• Dynamic Business Applications
• Business user rule maintenance
• Business Rules Cafe
• Reducing maintenance with business rules
• Business process and business rules for agility

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Management • Business Rules |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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Posted by: Sally, software manager at December 19, 2007 03:50 AM