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.

Comments

[James Taylor]

Welcome to the blogosphere.
You wrote a nice article on this topic once - http://www.bijonline.com/index.cfm?section=article&aid=245

JT