James Taylor's Decision Management

A blog post led me to this article - Business owned applications are a reality, manage it by Rajan Gupta. Rajan makes a good point by telling readers to deal with the reality of business ownership of applications and then lays out some steps to try and get control.

There are many challenges with business owned applications but I am going to focus on just one - When an application must be brought into the main application portfolio, how do business users retain ownership? This problem arises whenever an application has been developed and evolved by a business group is identified as critical to the business or when it has scale or performance problems that the business users cannot address. To resolve the problems IT takes over the application, often re-platforming or otherwise heavily modifying it. Yet the process of doing this often eliminates any business control over the behavior of the application. This annoys they business users, reduces the agility of the application and increases the risk that a new business-owned workaround will be developed.

If the critical decision logic within the application is not just coded, however, but developed using business rules then this problem can be mitigated. As I discussed yesterday, the use of business rules can build trust with business users by giving them shared control. When they are used to "owning" the application, this is going to be critical in convincing them that "giving up" their application was a good idea.