As a reaction to my MegaTrend post, James Taylor posted a response on his blog. It is funny how we can disagree on he surface while being in violent agreement on the fundamental issue. Let me explain.
In short, James says that more features in existing BRMS products would only lead to more complex and unusable products. He claims that we, as an Industry, should invest in training and frameworks. I do not disagree with that but I think he may have mistaken my point on innovation. I am not at all interested in more features / more complex products. Innovation is very different from adding capabilities on an existing product.
What’s Innovation?
With my Product Management hat on, how could I not mention the infamous quote from Henry Ford?
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses
Innovation can be about adding capabilities on top of existing products of course but real, creative innovation is often about creating a disruption in the existing product lines. The beauty of the creative mind is to think outside-the-box to find a new and different way of empowering users, to spread adoption or to enable new usage, with a solution that does not resemble the original product.
Innovation is, for example, coming up with an iPad when the rest of the market is working on making computers faster, lighter, etc. Changing the user experience by removing the keyboard, adding touch, some gyroscopic technology inside such that my 3-year-old can intuitively pick it up and start using it. Granted he eventually figured out that the touchpad moved the mouse on the screen on his laptop, but he did not need ANY guidance at all with my iPhone or my iPad. He just started playing the marble game or popping balloons — totally intuitively.
What’s the innovation we need for Business Rules?
It all comes down to what the #1 issue is… I believe that most projects fail because of the complexity of the technology. You need to be an expert to design a good Business Rules or Decision Management project. I have met lots of experts that were really good and still failed on some projects. I have seen people who struggled to find the right resource, trying out several consultancy firms. If the technology is too complicated, we need to address that very problem.
Training or framework do help a little. They reduce the learning curve but they do not take it away completely.
This “iPad” user experience is the kind of innovation we need in this industry. Not yet another new feature on top of existing products. Not simpler product by removing existing features (learning curve as always been an issue even with version 1 of those products). But simply a totally different experience for Business Users and Business Analysts that are struggling to use existing technology. We need to figure out how to give them an iPad-like experience such that it does not require experts to get started, such that learning curve stops being an issue, such that they can focus on the quality and performance of the business decision that they are making rather than the technology that executes them.
I believe that Decision Management technology can be dramatically improved to deliver such benefits. I think that once Decision Management will be “simple”, the very nature of Business Rules will become clear as well, to Mark Norton’s point. In that context, we will be able to finally treat them as corporate assets as they deserve to be treated.
Carole-Ann
Carlos Serrano-Morales
Well you won’t get me to argue that easier to use technology would be better – I have long held that video games, for instance, allow children to perform far more functions than most enterprise applications need with a simple joystick by effective use of combinations and context. We make this stuff too hard too often – typically because we try and make everything possible rather than making core activities easy.
I don’t think, however, that “most projects fail because of the complexity of the technology”. My clients know how to work the technology, they know what it does. What they need is helping putting the business, IT and organizational pieces together in a way that will work and will deliver business value. Easier to use technology might help some but better ways to think about their problem, better words to use to describe it even, would help more.
By: James Taylor on November 11, 2010
at 9:57 pm
We’ll agree to disagree then. There is a problem way beyond organizational issues when Great West Life says that 1% of their rules turn into Business Rules. 3 out of 300. Mark Norton commented rightly so on the confusion re: the nature of business rules. Technology does not help practitioners and it should. Technology has failed to empower the business users as they should be empowered. It was the original promise of that technology and I believe it would be more successful / businesses would be more successful if we could make it a reality.
By: Carole-Ann on November 12, 2010
at 10:03 am
Carole-Ann and James, I think you are both exactly right even though you appear to disagree. Innovation is required to achieve simplicity, but how this innovation plays out in terms of product or approach or even the actions of market participants and their clients is uncertain.
We see the disabling effect of complexity on our customers on a daily basis. This is not just a tool issue – James has referred to our product as one of the most business centric rules products on the market.
My view is that much of the complexity is only perceived complexity. By this I mean that at the end of the decision modeling process, what was perceived to be a problem of great complexity is now seen as being far simpler. So the problem itself in such cases is not complex, only the pre-analysis perception of it.
We think that the decisioning approach is crucial to distilling the simpler essence from apparently complex problems. This approach is dependent on having a clear definition of a decision and then decomposing the problem into a series of atomic level decisions within a decision model. This is analogous to data modeling. Note that the decision (comparable to an attribute in a data model) and the decision model are both essential ingredients in this approach. This is the antithesis of the historical BR approach which has a very imprecise definition of a business rule (hopefully this is not up for debate) and a model that is usually opaque and often dynamically inferred at runtime.
Many of us are trying to solve the complexity problem. I am convinced that natural language is NOT the way – there is nothing simple about natural language unless you are a local native speaker who understands the ‘idiom’ – the idiom is all important and never simple for any other than a native speaker – the Navaho whisperers being an extreme example. In other words, introducing a new business rules paradigm to current generation SMEs is going to be complex no matter how we cut it, simply because it is not how they currently think – it is not their current ‘idiom’ by definition.
So one solution is to mimic how they currently think if we are going to make it less complex for them. For this reason we have found the approach outlined in http://bit.ly/c6YfcI is useful – asking recursive questions like ‘what decisions do your need to make in order to achieve xxx?’ This reflects how SMEs think, and they do find it relatively simple to respond. The drawback is that it usually requires a moderator – this is not easily ‘self- actuated’.
We are finding that this approach is helpful even for the SMEs because it helps them to organize their own thinking and approach. Just last week we worked with the author of a complex clinical pathway trying to codify their own textbook on the subject. By going through the above mentioned approach we collectively evolved the pathway to a new level of simplicity and clarity in 3 days, helping the expert to simplify, organize, and codify their own domain knowledge.
This is not ‘problem solved’ though – it is still a mentored process, scalable only by the number of mentors. The tool is not the critical factor – the approach and the mentor is.
Notwithstanding all of the above, I do think that we (being the business rules community in general) have simplified things by an order of magnitude for an entirely different audience – if they let us!
The audience is the IT development community. The simplification is achieved by removing decisioning entirely from the SDLC – treat decisioning as content, not as application ‘plumbing’. Frankly, even without any BRMS tool at all, this can still deliver an order of magnitude improvement in development performance. Remove all decisioning into stand alone, discrete components that are owned and managed by the business – period! This improves application design and reduces application complexity by a large margin, and as T Capers Jones [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capers_Jones ] has comprehensively demonstrated, reducing size and complexity generates an corresponding exponential reduction on development cost, risk, and time.
We are not there yet, and as you observe, there is still plenty of room for innovation to tame the ‘beast of complexity’. But where will this innovation appear – products, approaches, and/or market practice?
By: Mark Norton on November 12, 2010
at 2:31 pm
[...] So let’s focus on Innovation, since I strongly believe we need it. If you’ve not heard yet my rant on the lack of innovation, check it out! [...]
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[...] concerned if innovation was of lesser importance in the Decision Management space I care about. Carole-Ann wrote about this earlier: innovation matters. The need for innovation is there, the industry is slowing down in its [...]
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