BPM in Action 2011: Rules are Rules, and Why They are the Most Important Piece of BPM

Increasing the value of business processes calls for well-managed business process management practices and techniques, but there's a piece that often gets overlooked - the rules that drive the processes. "Eighty percent of the benefits seen in processes will come from changes in rules," Kathy Long, president and consultant with Innovative Process Consulting, points out.

Long explored the importance of managing business rules at ebizQ's latest BPM in Action Web conference. To get to a state in which processes deliver business value, companies need to look holistically at the rules being applied to those processes, she advised. Organizations need to employ a combined approach between processes and rules, working toward a "collective view."

In capturing the information and rules, the first thing you need to know is what is the relationship between process and rules," she says. "Process is designed for the organization - the 'who,' 'what,' 'when,' 'where,' 'why' and 'how.' Business rules provide detailed information on the 'why' piece

Managing rules often is the key to attaining significant results for key business processes, Long says, because even through business processes may be applied across the enterprise, individual departments and business units often have their own rules attached to those processes. For example, the simple process of paying cell phone bills may differ across the company. Sometimes, because the bills get handed off from one department to another and eventually to accounts payable, it may take 15 days to pay a bill. By applying consistent rules across all departments as to what constitutes an acceptable cell phone charge, the process can get shortened to 45 minutes, she illustrates."This is where most of our opportunities.. this is where we get reduction in cycle time."

Without a holistic enterprise approach to rules, enterprise decisions are inconsistent, because "decisions are the biggest part of defining rules," Long says. "Decisions are being made by different people, whether its financial, sales support, sales, or accounting. What might happen is we might develop some business rules that are appropriate for finance, but might not appropriately be applied by the salespeople."

The key is to "understand the relationships and the connections between the rules and the processes," Long says. "And when we do that, then we can get phenomenal results out of our projects."

Prior to the conference, Kathy Long spoke with ebizQ colleague Peter Schooff, predicting that this year we'll see growing interest in BPM practices, due to a faster-moving economy and maturing thinking around the way processes are managed and automated.

http://www.ebizq.net/topics/bpm/features/13203.html