Business Rules! or is that Business Rules...

"Living in the House" or So What's in the Demo

Our VP of Sales recently reminded me of an old joke.  A guy dies and is asked if he'd prefer to go to heaven or hell.  He asks to see both.  Heaven is tranquil and beautiful place where everyone is well dressed, enjoying themselves and discussing great thoughts.  Hell, is one big party.  Music, dancing, drinks.  He chooses music, dancing and drinking.  He is then escorted to hell and it is cold and wet with people dressed in rags and looking forlorn and tortured.  He points out that this isn't what he was shown, and is told; "That was just the demo".

Now I'm in the software industry, so you could suggest that I'm not a reliable source in discussing this topic, but I believe customers need to dig a little.  To get beyond the demo and figure out what it would be like to 'live in the house'... 

From that perspective we often suggest to our prospects that they not allow the vendors they are considering to build demo's or proofs off-site (ourselves included).  I've seen prospects send us a set of rules and then ask us to demo to them at some future date.  What they get to see is the pretty house all laid out for the buyer.  What they don't get is an understanding of what it is like to live in the house. 

I strongly urge any team considering a business rules purchase to ask all vendors to come in and build out a completely tested, integrated and executing Decision Service live.  Allow the vendors to bring nothing other than their base products at the start of the day.  Give the vendors their demo or test scenario without any ability to 'prepare'.  Spend a day living through the lifecycle of using the vendors product.  From inception through the build, test, deployment and maintenance of your business rules.  A business rules management system is an important purchases, so this small investment in time is actually very cheap.  Once you have bought the house and are living in it for real, it's not so easy to change addresses.   

Why is the Business Rules Market so Focused on Rules?

20 years of behavior can lead to some bad habits.  The one that I'm discussing is the focus the business rules market has put on the rule (versus the decision).  I will dig into why, if readers are interested.  But the rule as become the focus of design, storage, management, etc.  So why do I think this is a bad habit.  Because a rule (even a few rules) is rarely the basis of a decision, and in fact decisions are the reason we are utilizing business rules solutions in the first place.  In almost all other technologies, we focus on the higher level business outcomes, not the artifact to implement that outcome.  In programming we focus on programs or functional sub-routines, not lines of code.  In business process management we focus on processes, not tasks and routes.  These are of course important.  They are the artifact to implement.  But when was the last time during a business process discussion did someone ask to have the team randomly discuss tasks that occur within the organization.  Organizations start by talking about processes, about functional programs and in reality focus the discussion on decisions (not just the rules). Business rules, like tasks in processes and lines of code in functional programs come out of the discussion of decisions to be understood and eventually automated.  So when I hear people ask about capabilities to manage a rule I ask myself, when was the last time I heard anyone talking about independently managing a line-of-code.  The result of this history is that this thinking has added far too much complexity to the task we have given our business rules customers.  Instead of thinking about discovering, modeling and automating the top 250 decisions within their organization, they worry about the 10,000 or more rules that exist to implement these decisions.  That becomes a daunting task.