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Business rules essential for effective BPM

By Marilyn de Villiers
Johannesburg, 06 Oct 2017

For many organisations, being able to apply business rules in an automated fashion is the route to being able to work better, smarter or more cost-effectively.

However, simply having rules is not enough. What's really needed are rules that are well considered, implemented effectively and applied consistently across the entire organisation.

Unfortunately, according to BPM guru and founder of process improvement and information governance consultancy Holly Group, Steve Weissman, "rules are often misunderstood and can lead to unrealistic expectations".

Writing in the SearchSOA epublication "Embrace Intelligence in Your BPM", he noted that consistency was absolutely essential for business rules to have any measurable impact on an organisation. There were common misconceptions about the nature of business rules, with many people confusing them with goals, benchmarks for success, or even business processes.

In addition, although business rules were essential to determining how efficiently a process was executed, and for governing processes so that business goals could be achieved, the key goal of business rules management was only to enable rapid process execution and achieve consistency across the enterprise.

According to Weissman, this goal was where most enterprises focused their BPM initiatives. However, they also often failed to ensure that the rules were applied in the same way throughout the entire organisation. As a result, different departments could end up making contradictory decisions about the same issues.

This inconsistency could be costly to enterprises, both in terms of delivering contradictory information and varying levels of service to customers leading to customer churn; as well as in demoralising employees as there could often be no clear lines of decision authority.

Five of "tricks of the trade"

Weissman set out five of what he called "tricks of the trade" that would help to ensure business rules were utilised effectively throughout an organisation.

Central repository
Using a centralised repository for the management of business rules. This would allow for each rule to be updated in one place as necessary and ensure that every process utilised the same version of that rule.

Plain language
Writing rules in unambiguous, plain language that can be understood by everyone.

Process metrics
Developing process metrics and tracking processes, thereby allowing for the impact of changes to business rules to be ascertained.

Models or simulations
Creating models or simulations to test run the potential impact of rule changes before they "go live" in the actual operation.

Big picture
Keeping an eye on the big picture as there would always be areas in the business that were not covered by rules - a good thing, as too much micro-control on every process could end up slowing the process down.

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