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December 18, 2007
Building alignment and compliance into your systems

Yesterday I saw an interesting article over on TechRepublic - Sanity check: The 10 biggest headaches of 2007 for CIOs and IT managers. It was a nice list and a couple of items struck me as being great justifications for taking a more thoughtful approach to decision management and the technologies of decision management. The two headaches in question were "Alignment between IT and business goals" and "Dealing with compliance". In both cases the author took a different perspective to mine which is that alignment and compliance, especially in combination, are great drivers for adopting decision management.
My perspective on these two issues is that, with companies automating more and more business processes, ensuring alignment and compliance means making sure that what is coded into the processes and services being automated is aligned and compliant. The best way I know for doing this is to focus on the decisions in those processes and to automate those decisions using business rules. Why does this work?

• Decisions, business decisions, are one of the most critical areas where the business and IT must be aligned. Focusing on decisions explicitly is key
• Business rules, being declarative and amenable to business user management, ensure that the decision logic can be developed collaboratively by the business and IT. This helps ensure alignment
• Business rules are easier to check for compliance than code both because those who understand the regulations can read the rules (but probably could not read the code) and because it is very easy to tell which rules executed for which transaction and this makes it much easier to show compliance

Business rules used to manage decisions allow for the business and IT to collaborate, and ensure compliance, in the critical business logic that would otherwise be buried in code. They allow for alignment and support compliance and should be on your list of technologies to consider.

Posted by jtaylor in Business Rules • Compliance • Decision Technologies |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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