🚩After a few decades of rules management you'd think organizations know everything about it. But even today, we still hear many common challenges they face.
* Complexity: As the number of rules grows, understanding of the decision-making scenario and decision path decreases. This is a byproduct of how the rules are managed, which leads to the “big bucket of the rules problem.”
* Consistency: Even today, in organizations that manage business rules still see inconsistencies across processes and applications. The reason is most often that managing rules as their number and complexity grow becomes too difficult.
* Traceability: The interconnection of business rules makes their traceability very hard as the decision execution path has become very unclear.
* Governance and Compliance: Regulatory requirements push the boundary of rules management as they change; the more changes they demand, the less effective rules management becomes because of the interconnection and complexity of the business rules increase.
💥Business rules management all sound sunny and happy until they are not. One leading factor is that most platforms provide very limited capability in terms of decision management at their core and almost no live debugging. Therefore, the focus on finding issues is mostly on executing business rules (rules, ruleset, ruleflow, etc.) rather than debugging them in action to understand their runtime behavior.
💥The second issue is how organizations approach rules management. At the core, this essentially starts by managing business rules, which is forced by vendors relabeling rules artifacts such as ruleset, rule flow, or even individual rules as “decisions.” Yet, they force users to manage business rules rather than business decisions.
💣Here are the signs that things are not going to work out:
* There is no decision modeling used, or they are not executable, and they become the points of hands-off
* Business rules are not managed around the decision model (Decision Graph such as Decision Requirements Diagram or Decision Requirements Graph)
* Process or other forms of models such as flow, workflow, ruleflow, ruleset etc. are used to structure the rules execution
* Debugging looks like an ad-hoc execution of a particular decision or rule scenario
* Debugging has no capability for breakpoints, bookmarks, step in or out
What do you see in your rules or decision platform that stops you to scale use cases across multiple projects, functions and departments. Add your comments and hare your experience below 👇
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Published July 16th, 2024 at 07:30 am
