Business rules and forms processing
February 10, 2010 by Paul M.. Filed under Business rules, Process.
Imagine a traditional business or a public service that processes a lot of paper forms according to a set of rules. In the old days it was easy: Customers (or citizens) would turn up at their local branch or the relevant office at 10am and stand patiently in an orderly queue for hours on end with forms in hand.
[Aside: We still have physical queues - supermarket checkouts on a Saturday morning, or behind the gates at a concert or sporting event. And many people still have to line up at banks and other services like Centrelink, Medicare, and health insurance providers. But for most of us (ie., the demographic that can read this blog, at least), the rise of online self-servicing has done away with much of the need for physical queues and paper forms processing. I think of those bad old days and wonder at the staggering productivity cost of having to line up with paper forms. I assume someone somewhere has done a study on this...?]
That’s the front-end of the business, but for now I’m more interested in the back-end. In the back office there would be a small army of process workers in cubicles (they used to be called ‘clerks’) working through the pile of forms in their in-tray, processing each one according to a set of rules. Occasionally they’d have to put one into a ‘problem pile’ because it failed to satisfy one or more of those business rules.
In retrospect, computerising simple forms processing is intuitive and straightforward. And the business case should be a lay-down misere – remove a major chunk of the cost of that human forms-processing army.
The situation becomes more challenging when the forms and their processing, or more specifically the business rules, are more complex. The implementation of easily maintainable business rules in a computer system is non-trivial. Of course, business rules have been implemented in software forever – usually hard-coded within the business logic of applications. But by easily maintainable I mean that a business stakeholder (or someone on her team) can modify them in the system as needed, without requiring the lag and friction of software development support to re-code the changes.
There are tools out there that allow such business rules to be specified using standard or proprietary business rules languages. But business rules processing is not yet a widely adopted technology because it is still a young field – organisations are still learning about its power, and it’s not like there’s a huge pool of subject matter experts out there to draw on. But they do exist in modest numbers, and NICTA is one place where you’ll find some of the best in the world. In fact, as they move ahead with the development of new tools for formal analysis of business rules (more on this in my next post), they’re eager to sink their teeth into more real-world business rules challenges. If you’re starting to work your way through the business rules maze and could do with some help from the experts, they’re right here – please call or email!
Tags: analysis, business process, Business rules, NICTA
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