Business Rules consistently deliver costs savings, agility and happy customers. Yet most Business Rules efforts remain point solutions. A typical first Business Rules Management System (BRMS) implementation starts by creating what could be a called a Big Bucket O’ Rules. The team has selected a BRMS as part of a project and they start capturing their rules. Typically they interview experts, read policy manuals and reverse engineer code into rules. Almost always, but especially when they reverse engineer code, they end up with a lot of fairly low-level rules. In one, big, bucket.
This big bucket of rules is not usable. The team will often try to add rules to their very complex process diagrams, placing each individual rule on the process diagram. Most of the low level rules cannot be placed in this way and doing so just contributes to over-complex business processes. It’s also difficult to manage the rules properly. There’s no organizational structure to the rules so they end up being grouped by source or by the person doing the rule identification. As policies or regulations change, or as new business needs are identified, the team often struggles to update the right business rules.
Decision Management resolves these issues. Business Rules Management Systems generate an ROI when they improve business decisions – it’s the decisions that create the value. By focusing you on the decisions that matter to your organization, the ones that affect your business drivers and measures, Decision Management simplifies business rules design and implementation while accelerating adoption of a BRMS where it has the highest impact. A Decision Management approach delivers on the promise of business rules:
- Flexibility at a low cost
- Automate manual activities to improve staffing ratios
- Improve repeatability and compliance
- Reduce maintenance costs
- Increase transparency and business user participation
- Empower business owners to manage their own systems
- Simplify processes and improve business agility
We can show you how to establish a Center of Excellence that maximizes re-use, collaboration and business engagement. Our decisions-first comprehensive approach matches business drivers to decisions, identifying where to apply Business Rules for maximum ROI.