Overheard at the analysts’ breakfast…
I was in “fly-on-the-wall” mode this morning in the first of our two Ask the Analyst Breakfast sessions. Steve Hendrick from IDC and John Rymer from Forrester chatted with DIALOG attendees over coffee and croissants while I sat eavesdropping beside the Danish pastries…
A couple of topics in particular caught my ear…
The first of these related to user perceptions of business rule systems. One participant remarked that IT people seem to be very excited about business rules technology, but that the business people in her organization are concerned that implementing a system that captures their domain knowledge in automated business rules might impact their job security.
John Rymer, and a couple of others at the table were actually quite surprised at that reaction. While John understood why some users might think that way, in his experience he has found that in fact this type of knowledge-based rules-driven system actually has the exact opposite impact on job security for these business users. In many organizations, without a BRMS in place, analysts are often required to manually dictate or explain business rules and processes to their IT people who must then code those rules into the system.
In many firms, these same analysts, researchers and statisticians are driving the move towards BRMS solutions because it allows them to create and manage the rules in the system. This actually improves their job security by putting them back in control of how those rules get formalized and updated in the system, freeing up IT to concentrate on other tasks. And we all know that there aren’t many corporate IT departments out there who are worried about a shortage of work!
It was reassuring to hear ILOG’s vision of putting the rule creation and management tools in the hands of the business users vindicated in this way.
One participant remarked that ILOG’s BRMS was also helping to improve efficiency in other ways. Instead of the IT department trying to code business rules based on conflicting visions from different members of the business analyst team, their BRMS made it easier for business users to resolve their differences and agree on how particular business rules should be implemented without costly and time-consuming involvment from IT.
Over at the other table, IDC’s Steve Hendrick was mentioning how Business Rules systems seem to be popping up in all sorts of situations. He also said that while the large business rules tool vendors, such as ILOG and Fair Isaac, are building-in optimization technologies into their solutions that are enabling their rule execution environments to cope with many varied and complex parameters, he said that many organizations don’t necessarily need that complexity.
Steve is convinced that business rule systems need to become more pervasive and that the technology needs more visibility. This will benefit both customers and vendors such as ILOG, but they will only be able to achieve that pervasiveness if they can package their products into simpler solutions that are more accessible to larger markets.
Those companies looking to implement BPM solutions, for example, don’t need to handle so much complexity, and yet they can benefit enormously from business rule systems to automate workflows and day-to-day business processes. Simplicity, usability, reliability, and efficiency are the things these companies are looking for in a BRMS. As a former technical writer and someone who is convinced that less is more, I’m all over that!
Tags: Breakfast, Forrester, IDC, John Rymer, Steve Hendrick
