But as this approach makes its way into the mainstream of business infrastructure software, one new challenge that will become increasingly apparent is checking or validation of a collection of business rules. This is about spotting flaws – inconsistencies, loopholes, dead-ends, infinite loops, etc. These are flaws that can’t usually be spotted by looking at the rules one or a few at a time. To be completely confident that you’ve got a consistent rules set, you need a means to analyse the whole lot together.

Fortunately our researchers at NICTA have anticipated this looming challenge and have approaches to deal with the problem using formal logic principles. We are starting to work with some trial partners in industry and this may be the topic of a future post. But we’d certainly like to expand the range of scenarios in which this new technology is trialled.

The vision is quite simple: ‘Push-button’ formal logic analysis of your complete business rules set. Instant results will report that you’ve got a contradiction here and a loophole there, etc., thereby allowing corrections to be made before the processes are exposed to ‘production’ usage.  Further, as business policies (and therefore processing rules) change, you’ll want to know immediately whether your new rules will play nice with the existing ones.

If these scenarios resonate with you because you’ve been wondering how to deal with the problem of functioning business rules in your (or your client’s) environment, we invite you to comment here or talk to us.

[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!