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Seriously, that was the name of Giovanni Diviacchi’s session that I attended this afternoon, which looked at his experience as a business analyst at both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (the two big government-backed mortgage companies in the US). He had a number of good pointers on how to extract rules from the business and document them in a way that will be properly implemented by the developers.

They developed a “business action language” for the business analysts to communicate with the developers in an unambiguous way, including statements such as “present” (i.e., >0 and not null), “mutually exclusive”, “is required”, and my personal fave, “read my mind”.

He pointed out that the old axiom “rules are meant to be broken” is true even for business rules, in that you can’t ever plan for all the ways in which a rule might need to be overridden; he discussed one case of a woman who was born prior to 1936, never worked and never had a Social Security Number, which meant having to override the rule that SSN is required for a mortgage. There’s a lot that can be learned from this one example: I see so many rules embedded directly in applications — especially web applications — that make some assumptions that aren’t necessarily true, such as assuming that all people have a US address.

I often work through issues of policies, procedures and processes with my customers, and it was interesting to hear his comments on the relationship between policies and rules. He said that if the policies are well-written, the rules pretty much write themselves, and by spending more time on the policy behind the rules, you end up with a better set of rules. That definitely caused an “aha” moment for me in my emerging role as an evangelist for business rules in a BPM world, and will help to form some of my ideas on how all these things come together.

After a brief intro by Gladys Lam, the executive director of the Business Rules Forum, the conference kicked off with a keynote from Ron Ross, the driving force behind this event and a big name in the business rules community. A couple of things are distracting my attention from his talk: I’m up directly after him, and I’m presenting in this room, which is the main (read: big) conference hall. Let me make my ever-present complaint about passworded wifi in the meeting room and no free wifi or wired internet in the hotel, since I know that my regular readers would be disappointed without that news from the front lines. 🙂

Ron and I have exchanged email over the years, but this is our first opportunity to meet face-to-face; I’ll also have the chance to meet James Taylor and a few others who I only know from afar. Today, Ron’s talking about the shift from business rules to enterprise decisioning. This is the first business rules conference that I’ve ever attended, which means that most of the attendees likely know a lot more about the subject matter than I do, and most of the sessions will be new material for me.

Ron predicted that no one will be talking about SOA at a major conference in 15 years, but they will be talking about business rules or decisioning; I certainly agree with the first point, and the second makes a lot of sense.

When he said “we want our business processes to be smarter”, it was like music to my ears, and a direct lead-in to my presentation. He talked about three trends in the decisioning space:

• The shift from an exclusive focus on BPM to a balanced approach on enterprise decision management (EDM). He mock-grudgingly admitted that business processes are important, but pointed out that the “smarts” provided by business rules provides agility in the processes (which is exactly the point that I will be making in about 45 minutes — maybe the material here won’t be all that foreign after all).
• The shift from an exclusive focus on data quality and accessibility to a balanced approach on decision deployment. This is the whole convergence of BI and BR into decisioning — again, a key point in my presentation. I think that Ron is scooping me! He included a great quote from Taylor and Raden’s new book, Smart Enough Systems: “Making information more readily available is important, but making better decisions based on information is what pays the bills.”
• The shift from an exclusive focus on rules to a balanced approach on decisions. My key takeaway for this conference is figured out a good distinction between business rules and decisioning, since these terms seem to be used interchangeably in some cases; it seems that decisioning is about (not surprisingly) decisions, which in turn are based on business rules and some information about the current scenario.

He finished up with some pointers on where to think about applying decisioning in your business through a few use cases, such as creating “rules of record” for compliance purposes.

Like every other technology-specific conference (especially the BPM ones that I typically attend), this one has at the heart of it that its subject matter is the most important technology in an enterprise, and that herein lies the key to business perfection. I’m being a bit facetious, but we really do need to start getting a bit more cross-over between some of these conferences and technologies.