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Anarchy: AKA a World without Rules
By Jim Sinur | November 7, 2007
If businesses ran without rules there would be chaos. We would not be able to have business arrangements, ways to account for money, or guidance for the care and feeding of organizational assets.
In a world, now heavily influenced by governance, compliance, risk management and organizational goals, the need for upping the ante with rules seems to be the long range trend. The resulting increase in the number of policies and rules within normal operating scenarios will put a premium on managing rules in new and creative ways.
Add the fact that some organizations will also have policies and rules inventoried around unusual scenarios, the importance of avoiding anarchy and chaos with rule management will rise significantly over time. The first step in policy/rule management should revolve around the balance of what rules change and who is responsible for the policy/rule change process.
Volatility and Skill Guides Rule Flexibility:
Early attempts at the management of rules ended up in policy manuals on knowledge workers desks. It became evident that repeatable rules needed to be consolidated, automated and packaged, giving rise to the birth of applications.
These applications proved to be helpful in reducing costs, but not responsive enough for business needs. Then the configurable packaged application arrived on the scene, but again it took gurus to make changes and the package design dictated the rules that could change. This ended up better, but still limiting.
It became apparent that another alternative was on the rise. Agile rule-enabled BPM tools along with SOA dynamics allowed for flexible human guidance linked with a more responsive and granular application. It is also apparent that collaboration will also involve rules through constraints.
Instead of listing all the rules for knowledge workers, constraints can guide the apparent anarchy of collaboration. One key skill will be figuring best practices as to when to allow for rule changes in processes and applications versus the use of constraints to guide empowered humans.
Impact Guides Rule Distribution:
The next obvious area to deal with in the rule management world would be who changes what rules under what circumstances. Enlightened organizations are using the notion of impact analysis. The rules that have a huge business impact are generally managed in a stricter fashion where rule owners and stewards are designated.
Examples would include: ”What are the pricing policies for our product?” For those rules with local impact that also provide great benefit in moving the control of change close to the actual end use This would include customizations that are regional and customer specific around pricing agreements. This is often referred to as “core vs local” control of rule maintenance. Some advanced rule technologies will allow the modeling and impact of a rule change before the new rule takes effect.
Bottom Line:
Given that Gartner surveys have shown average rates of return in the 15+% range with a small subset of application rules, there seems to be plenty of justification to care about business rules management.
Topics: BPM |
November 7th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
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