Jim Sinur

There are obvious benefits in making business policies/rules explicit and easily changed via accompanying quick-change processes. The apparent benefits revolve around faster reaction to competitors and markets, as well as quick response to management and collaborative tuning. There are more subtle opportunities to get ahead of the game and anticipate customer demand, thus creating the ability to generate incremental revenue streams that play off of increased demands. Customers may also be enabled to make changes to their individual processes as they interact with an organization. CRM efforts are struggling to have a differentiating customer experience. BPM with explicit rules will allow this experience to evolve and become individualized.

This newfound agility can also be turned to deal with costly governance issues around transparency generated compliance and risk. In fact, business organizations can ready their processes for likely and unlikely business conditions and/or scenarios, and they can store them for future utilization. An extension of explicit policies/rules would be to identify potential process scenarios and to warehouse the proper policies and rules to govern a rule-fitted process. This approach would enable process owners to change the basic behavior of a process under different business conditions. One way to do this would be to identify business/process strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Each of the corresponding scenarios would have the corresponding business policies and rules attached to them. In the interest of prudence, these scenarios and their linked rules could be pre-tested, if needed, and “put on the shelf” or in a business rule management system for future use. These could also include unimaginable scenarios like market melt downs and/or hyper inflation, because outlying conditions need to be considered going forward..

As policies/rules permeate processes as a common way to deal with governance and change, there are additional opportunities to use different aspects of rule capabilities besides affecting actions and changing the processes’ effects. Policy/rule governance can be leveraged to watch process to determine the commonly used paths and exceptions that may need attention. In fact, rule technology can be applied as expert rules as well — not just action rules. These rules can be leveraged to give the average process manager advice on courses of action. This is accomplished by having rules guide the recognition of out-of-tolerance conditions. In advanced cases, the advice might include the recognition of conditions that could trigger a planned scenario. In fact, the processes could select process paths for work based on dynamic and conflicting goals given to the process in flight. In essence, the policies/rules now govern intelligent and dynamic goal-directed flows. This is truly a rule guided approach.

These flows could be directly linked to desired management outcomes. A more manual approach would work as well when combined with business optimization, where the events, data and results of processes could be fed into optimization techniques (simulation, forecasting, pattern matching and so on). The optimization formulas would, in turn, provide guidance for manual rule changes. Links between optimization and the business rule management system (BRMS) could be automated or embedded in the process management system. There is never anything free in this world, so this policy/rule agility comes at the cost of having to manage the explicit rules as first-class members of the management environment. This could happen in a separate BRMS or in the process platform of choice, assuming it has an appropriate mechanism for managing rules in their respective silos within the context of policies and scenarios.