Dick Lee had an interesting post titled We Know Where We're Going, But IT Can't Get Us There. He made a number of points of which three stood out:
- Business often fails to communicate effectively to IT
- Poor process definition is often at fault
- The business side needs to step up to the plate
So the business side must step up to the plate, as he says, and start to manage this decision making logic. This requires that everyone agrees what decisions are being made (the basic premise of decision management) and that those decisions are implemented in a way that empowers the business to own the implementation directly. Only then can they change it easily and often enough to make a difference. This means using business rules or some declarative and user-friendly approach to specifying business logic and it means putting some effort in to how the business sees the rules in their decisions.
IT may not be able to get you where you want to go but empowering the business to be part of how systems are built by managing decisions can.
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The underlying assumption here is that business users do have a reasonably well-defined and agreed-upon decision-making criteria. So when 'business rules' need to be built into the 'business logic' of a system, the IT team should be able to pick up the binder listing all the rules and start implementing the system. In an Orwellian parallel universe maybe. Not in the real world.
IT can develop and procure Web Services that enable individual business processes - and provide 'switches' to configure the process and its interaction with other processes. The Business Rules Engine that brings the full value chain together is then the ultimate responsibility for business domain experts within the business.
No matter how dirty, techie, complex or ridiculous the Business Rules Engine is, the business needs to know where the switches are and how to drive. Can the business visualize a Ferrari dashboard or is a Model-T 'dashboard' sufficient?