There is an emerging debate around the interaction of processes and rules that will be fun to explore. I’m sure folks will have their opinions on this one. There are folks that believe that effective processes will leverage rules to attain positive goals and outcomes. There are others that would say that rules govern processes and process outcomes are heavily influenced by rules. Let’s dive into the debate.
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Process is King:
Processes dominate the mind of business professionals as the best way to accomplish work in an efficient and effective way. Some of the best processes have few rules. Take straight through processing, for instance. A sequence of work steps is executed after work qualifies for this speedy way to accomplish work. Sure business rules can help with exceptions and guide/govern processes, but business rules are a means to an end. Even in very unstructured processes, rules act as simple constraints/boundaries to keep processes on track. It’s obvious that process is at the top of the stack. The crown belongs here.
The Business Rule is King:
Processes are just a bunch of rules strung together into a static or dynamic sequence, so a process is just a packaging of business and technical rules. Process is just a convenient packaging of rules that people relate to in accomplishing goals that are represented by more rules. The decisions in and around these convenient process maps are represented by guiding rules. Those who think that processes are the center of the universe are sadly mistaken. It’s all about the rules. Long live the King!
I think the answer is that it is a balance. Processes are distinguished by accomplishing actions and work in the most efficient and effective way. Rules are disguised by their guiding capability that represents good management decisions. They go together like chocolate and peanut butter in a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. See http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=256&mode=2&PageID=2350940&resId=915317&ref=QuickSearch
7 responses so far ↓
1 Tweets that mention Process or the Business Rule: Who Wears the Crown? -- Topsy.com // Sep 23, 2009 at 11:27 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jim Sinur. Jim Sinur said: Want to vote on a new King? http://bit.ly/12NMru #BPM [...]
2 Mark Norton // Sep 24, 2009 at 12:15 am
Jim, while you present a fair case for process equivalence, Idiom’s view is that it is creating value that “dominates the mind of business professionals”, and decisions are the only means by which a business creates value – regardless of whether it is a corner store deciding to sell you sweets for $xx, or an insurer deciding to insure your fleet of trucks, or a hospital deciding to treat your bad knee, etc. Decisions are the policy driven specification of how value is created and recognized by each business. For value to be created, a change of state of “something” must be explicitly acknowledged by the organization, and this acknowledgement is a bespoke, decision centric activity. A process without decisions does not create value because the business does not recognize any state change – such a process is only a cost (although maybe a necessary cost – regulatory processes are a good example). In this context, an STP process is simply one which has all of its decisions automated.
When you have the decision models that represent the value creating policies of the enterprise, then you can infer the processes that supply the data and implement the decisions. By way of contrast, you can look at a process forever and not be able to infer how its underlying decisions are made.
Ergo: Our vote is that decisioning drives process and the reverse is not true.
For a longer discussion of this viewpoint you might want to have a look at http://tiny.cc/Gexj9
3 Gagan Saxena // Sep 24, 2009 at 10:24 am
Agree with Mark.
Business Rules and consequent Decisions add value to the Processes. Processes need to execute according to the ‘master plan’ that includes non-trivial Business Rules (built and managed by the business) and trivial System/Policy Rules designed to ensure quality Processing.
Hand that crown over to Business Rules – but can be forfeited if Business does not manage actively and/or does not use for active Decision-Making!
4 James Taylor // Sep 24, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Well I would say neither rules nor process but decisions. Rules can help you specify decisions but they can also help you specify processes so I don’t think that’s a useful distinction. Decisions, on the other hand, can involve rules, analytics an optimization all working together to ensure the right process runs, the right price is offered, fraud is detected, claims are paid and so on. You MUST have the process to fulfill the decision – to take the action you decided on – but it is the decision that rules.
JT
See you at the BPM Summit
5 Paul Vincent // Sep 24, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Of course, *people* prefer processes because the human firmware is tuned to serial, sequential activity processing. Computers, on the other hand, can match events to rules and process activities in multiple ways, in addition to the good old-fashioned simple “flow diagram”.
As Mark Twain might have put it: (processes, rules, decisions) are all just a bunch of constraints (on events)…
Cheers
6 Nik // Sep 25, 2009 at 9:35 am
As long as I have designed processes, I was never allowed to create or re-design a process based on efficiency (apart from quality aspects). Restrictions were at least: financial rules and regulations, laws, and management rules (e.g. memos).
Upper management of every company establish rules. Processes have to follow those rules.
I would really like to hear how Roger T. Burlton or Ron Ross would argue.
7 John Drew // Sep 29, 2009 at 11:32 am
Jim,
Interesting proposition, but I think you answered your own question of Who is King in your last paragraph. A set of processes without business rules is as useless as a set of business rules without processes. They are dependent on each other – but the rules must be defined first, so that they can be used by the processes. This is as true for STP as for human or document centric event-driven BPM processes, or even completely manual, paper-driven processes.
However to extend the argument a little bit, there is perhaps a distinction to be made between process rules, and business rules. Process rules tell the user/system what to do with a certain instance of work, while business rules tend to be at a higher level of abstraction. An example of a process rule could be that any work item that is for an amount in excess of $10,000 is referred to a Supervisor for approval. A business rule would be for example that for this particular geographic location a special interest rate is offered to all customers meeting the requirements of the offer. The processing of the work in this case is the same for all clients, but business rules dictate different interest rates applicable to a certain segment of clients.
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