Every business has rules, from the notification process for vacations, which I am sure many of you recently exercised or soon will, to qualifying an applicant for a home loan. What I have oftened wondered is why business rules engines have been a luke warm market segment, eclipsed by more exciting technologies like Business Intelligence. It sounds like a great idea, identify your rules, reduce them to a series of variables and just plug those into some software that automates them. Done... nothing to worry about. Right?
Unfortunately like a whole lot of enterprise software, often the marketing hype and situational reality are a bit disconnected. But it is not all the fault of the marketers, some of the blame falls on us humans. We tend not to like rules, or better stated, follow rules. They are constantly changing and everyone has a different interpretation of what the rule is, or means. Just look at our legal system. Vendors strive to make business rules engines easy to use and some have been quite successful, Global 360 just partnered with Corticon, a leader in Gartner's Business Rules Engine (BRE) magic quadrant. They have an excel-style user interface that is quite slick and powerful, yet easy for us non-techies. I do not believe that a bulk of the problem resides with the ability/inability to use a particular system, as a few pundits have theorized, but it is the fact that mapping out rules is difficult and there are implications to changes...and we love to make changes.
The information for specific rules is dispersed throughout an organization and many are quite complex, rarely independent, and a change to one component can invoke the law of unintended consequences. That is why, especially with BREs it is critical to start with something small and easily manageable, map it out completely, and then use the software to automate the rule. Doing so will make it easier to make changes when necessary and will set expectations appropriately from the start. The BPMInstitute had a webinar on 6/9 that explored some of these issues. You can check it out here.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
David S., I think you make an excellent point, but one that many vendors and subsequently, customers, have failed to recognize. I'd like to discuss this perspective with you further and if appropriate, write a follow-up to the original post.
Post a Comment