“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change,” – Charles Darwin.
In the business world today, business rules are the atoms of change. A business rule is the smallest piece of business logic that is whole, making some sense by itself. Deployed carefully, rules can change a business in predictable and surprising ways.
Most people agree that business rules are business assets, some of which are automated in legacy or modern-day technology. Typically, the journey of a business rule from business context to automated systems involves the specification of requirements that morph through technical disciplines into programmed logic. The journey is often arduous, and if it goes too long or loses its way, the rules grow old and lose their power.
The Question
So, what does the question mean: can the business rule, can business people create rules? By providing structure and simple techniques, business people can take the driver’s seat, using business rules to launch new futures for the business. There are organizations where business leaders have taken back the business rules. These activities lead to a new way of running the business:
- Mentor business people in business rules processes and techniques
- Assign roles for managing the scope to specific business objectives
- Facilitate sessions and assign responsibility for process modeling, rule writing and glossary administration
- Collect and study specific directions set forth by executive management
- Document today’s business process model
- Develop a future business process model, without regard to current technology constraints
- Identify points in the future business process model where new rules can make a difference
- Examine the current rules for relevance and effectiveness
- Employ creativity to create new rules targeted at future objectives, without regard to current technology constraints
- Use metrics to measure the effectiveness of current versus new rules
Harvested rules are then available for a business life and a technical life. The business life involves connecting them to business processes, aligning them with business objectives, collecting relevant metrics, analyzing business performance and assigning business governance. The technical life involves addressing semantics issues, translating new glossary terms into formal models, designing an appropriate architecture, coding, testing, deploying and managing technical governance of the rules.
The business rules process begins with the business people who set the rules and ends with the business people who measure results and start the business rules process again. IT is strategically in the middle, enabling it all to happen smoothly, as it should.
The state of a business is partly what happens to it and mostly how it guides its response to what happens through rules. Thus, it makes sense that the business can and should rule.
