Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence

TURNING OPERATIONAL KNOWLEDGE & COMPLIANCE INTO A COMPETITIVE EDGE

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The Procedural Paradigm Won’t Scale: We Need Configuration Agility!

It’s been said that I claim the procedural paradigm won’t scale anymore. Guilty as charged! Let me explain. Procedural vs. Declarative In the big scheme of things, you have two basic choices for conceptualization, and ultimately implementation, of business capabilities: procedural vs. declarative. Let’s make sure we agree on what these terms mean. I’ll draw directly on Merriam-Webster Unabridged to make sure we’re on the same page. If the terms don’t mean what they’re supposed to mean, all bets are off. But I guess that goes without saying, doesn’t it?

procedure: 1a: a particular way of doing or of going about the accomplishment of something 1b (1): a particular course of action (2): a particular step adopted for doing or accomplishing something (3): a series of steps followed in a regular orderly definite way

You can spot the seeds of the scalability problem right away with repeated use of the word “particular” and with the phrase “regular orderly definite way” in the definition. Given the degree of product/service customization desired today, and the accelerating rate of change, how much business activity still occurs in a particular and regular orderly definite way? The answer, of course, is less and less all the time. ‘Exceptions’ have become the rule. The essential characteristic of procedures is that they flow. The flow comprises the steps by which a thing is intended to become a different thing (or the same thing in a different state). The essence of ‘procedure’ is therefore that something will be hopefully transformed. For sure, that’s a very basic, very important, very necessary part of any business capability. The problem arises taking procedure beyond that point. Something declarative, in contrast, doesn’t flow. It just states something that must (or should) be true.

declarative: 2: having the characteristics of or making a declaration : ASSERTIVE;  specifically : constituting a statement that can be either true or false

Business rules are that way; they simply give guidance. They don’t do anything. They don’t flow anywhere. They can’t be anything other than true or false. In short, business rules are fundamentally different than procedures. Big-P Process The traditional procedural paradigm (I’ll call it Big-P Process) embeds business rules in procedures (and in process models and in procedural code).What happens when you treat things that could be declarative in a procedural way? You get bloat. You lose business intent. You produce needless complexity. And you also get what I call configuration stagnation. As you scale, these problems grow exponentially. How many business rules are we talking about? Any given business capability easily has hundreds, sometimes thousands of business rules – especially when you begin to factor in the know-how needed to make smart operational business decisions. And don’t our businesses increasingly depend on ever more complex know-how? Is there any end to that trend in sight? At the scale of today’s business, the Big-P Process paradigm simply doesn’t work. It results in ungovernable business operations and unretainable know-how. Big-P solutions are like setting the business in concrete. It’s all so unnecessary and so counterproductive. It’s just not smart. Configuration Agility The key question for agile business capabilities is how the business is configured (and quickly reconfigured) for operation at any given point in time. In the Big-P paradigm, the building-blocks become thoroughly entangled with flow (procedure). The result is essentially a semantic dead zone. Because things that could be expressed declaratively aren’t, the opportunity is lost to use logic to automatically evaluate business rules (read ‘business practices’) for conflicts, anomalies and other logical defects. The future clearly does not lie in that direction. Instead, it lies with granular, declarative, semantically-rich specification of business configurations in building-block fashion. It lies with the paradigm that can produce the optimal configuration agility. In addition to procedures, smart configuration models will feature at least these other building blocks for business capabilities, all specified at the business level:
  • business rules 
  • operational business decisions 
  • structured business vocabularies (concept models, also known as fact models) 
  • business goals and risks 
  • business events
From an engineering perspective, the secret to agile configuration is ‘late binding’ – that is, bringing all the pieces together for execution (i.e., performance of procedures) as late as possible. That way, performance can be as up-to-date and as flexible as possible. Smart configuration models should be the new mantra for enterprise architecture. In a world of constant and accelerating change, I simply see no alternative. Doing more of the same is simply not going to work anymore (and already hasn’t been for a good, long while). [Warning, plug coming]: Smart configuration schemes also address business governance and compliance – essential in a world of constant change – and just-in-time (JIT) delivery of know-how for operational workers. In our new book, Building Business Capabilities (see http://www.brsolutions.com/b_building_business_solutions.php) we call systems built using smart configuration models business operation systems (as opposed to ‘information systems’).  

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Where Rules Fit in the Zachman Framework … Conspicuous in Their Absence?

Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Business Rules Manifesto[1] http://www.businessrulesgroup.org/brmanifesto.htm FAQ #8 Question: Why aren’t rules found in any of the cells of the latest Zachman Framework? The Manifesto says clearly (principle 1.1) that rules should be considered a first-class citizen of the requirements world. Yet rules cannot be found in any of the cells of the latest Zachman Framework. Contradiction? No. For an artifact to appear in a cell of the Framework it must represent a primitive. An artifact that references multiple primitives is considered a composite Rules are intrinsically composite. Even atomic rules can address multiple primitives. (Atomic means “can’t be reduced into two or more rules without losing meaning.”) An example: An accounting must be given by the CFO in Delaware on March 15, 2015. This rule refers to a thing (‘accounting’), a person (the CFO), a place (Delaware), and a date (March 15, 2012). Simply because an artifact is composite, however, doesn’t necessarily make it unimportant. Consider what Zachman calls integration relationships – the connections tying the six primitives together. Integration relationships serve to configure the enterprise at any given point in time. No integration relationships, no enterprise. To illustrate, Zachman frequently rolls the Framework into a cylinder and looks through it like a telescope. The primitives must be tied together through that empty cylinder by integration relationships. What can serve in that role? Traditionally, integration relationships have been implemented by procedural means – hardcoded into application programs. Unfortunately, that’s like setting the business in concrete. It also plays havoc with process as the simple, straightforward primitive it should really be. A much better alternative is rules. Rules, by comparison, are far easier to change. So consider rules as the first-class candidate to achieve configuration agility for the enterprise  


[1] The Manifesto is free, only 2 pages long, translated into 15 languages. Have a quick look (or re-look!). No sign up required. Well worth your time.

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What Role for Business Rules in *Business Agility*? One of the ‘Must-Knows’ of Business Rules …

Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Business Rules Manifesto[1] http://www.businessrulesgroup.org/brmanifesto.htm FAQ #5 Question: How do business rules support business agility? Think of business rules as expressing business practices. These practices can cover a wide range of business concerns, including the composition of products, the customization of services for individual customers, operational hand-offs with suppliers, implementation of regulatory constraints, and so forth. Historically, rules have been embedded (hard-coded) in processes, in many different places and often inconsistently. There is no easy traceability for any given rule. Changing rules inevitably requires IT intervention, along with the associated cost and delay. From a business perspective, the resulting business support is simply not agile. Business rules support business agility by providing pinpoint means to evaluate and modify business practices. Rules are expressed and managed independently of processes (a.k.a. rule independence). By that means they can be consolidated (single-sourced) and evolved more rapidly and reliability. From a platform point of view, the Manifesto says it this way …

6.1. A business rules application is intentionally built to accommodate continuous change in business rules.  The platform on which the application runs should support such continuous change.

Clearly some platforms are far better than others in this regard. The quality of their support for rules should be a critical factor in selection and design. Unfortunately, many organizations are trapped as much by legacy platforms as by legacy systems. True business agility requires migration to new platforms as quickly and easily as possible. For example, a central concern of many organizations these days is mobile computing and social media – capabilities not even on the horizon ten years ago when the Manifesto was written. There’s no end to platform innovation in sight – and companies will always want to get on-board faster and faster. Is there any way of doing so without knowing your business rules? No! So the Manifesto recommends …

10.3. Business rules should be organized and stored in such a way that they can be readily redeployed to new hardware/software platforms.

Always remember that business rules are what you need to run your business, not to design systems, at least directly. There will never be a future platform for which you do not need to know your business rules.  


[1] The Manifesto is free, only 2 pages long, translated into 15 languages. Have a quick look (or re-look!). No sign up required. Well worth your time.

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How Many Different Ways Can Your Organization Be ‘Silo-ed’? Why You Need to Address Every ‘Silo-ing’

‘Silo’ is so common as an industry buzzword we mostly just take it for granted. The usual sense is ‘functional’ silo or ‘organizational silo’. I recently heard ‘no man stands alone’ (‘alone’ = ‘silo-ed’) as a common-sense justification for Big-P process. (See http://goo.gl/Cuk3s) That logic is simply flawed. Here are other ways your business can be fundamentally ‘silo-ed’.
  • You can stand alone (silo-ed) in your strategy – goals not aligned, tactics not aligned, policies not aligned.
  • You can stand alone (silo-ed) in your timing – events, intervals and schedules not coordinated.
  • You can stand alone (silo-ed) in your logistics – locations isolated, connections and transport linkages not optimized.
  • You can stand alone (silo-ed) in your language – different vocabularies and meanings, producing semantic silos (a.k.a. a Tower of Babel).
And of course, you can stand alone (silo-ed) in your business rules. Any one of these ‘silo-ings’ can be worse than ‘functional’ or ‘organizational’ ones. My bias, of course, is toward language (nothing gets done effectively in a Tower of Babel) and strategy (if you’re storming the beaches, you’d better hope the generals already got it together strategy-wise). But that’s not the point. If an approach doesn’t evenly addresses all the ‘silo-ings’, it’s trouble. As we say in our new book (http://www.brsolutions.com/b_building_business_solutions.php) you need a well-factored approach. (And of course, John Zachman has been saying that for 25+ years.) The Big-P process view steers you in a harmfully simplistic direction … and probably right into the waiting arms of some eager consultancy or services provider.

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How Business Rules, Decisions, and Events Relate in True-to-Life Business Models

What is operational business know-how? How can you model it? What results can you achieve by doing so? The answers lie with creating true-to-life business models based on behavioral rules, decision rules, operational business decisions, and operational business events — all as first-class citizens. Understanding their intertwined roles is key to creating top-notch business solutions and business operation systems unmatched in their support for business agility and knowledge retention. Find out what ideas and techniques you need to create know-how models: http://www.brcommunity.com/b623.php

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My New Talk and New Take on Business Architecture at BBC2011: The Architecture of Enterprise Know-How

Business Architecture Summit at BBC2011 – Thurs, Nov 3, 2011 – 10:10am I am giving a talk next week called The Architecture of Enterprise Know-How at the Building Business Capability (BBC2011) event in Florida. If you’re there, I hope you’ll come listen. I’ll be plowing new ground. We’ve done some fascinating work the past several years and now it’s time to talk about it … Does the know-how of the company have intrinsic structure at the enterprise level? Can you use that structure to assess and plan operational business capabilities? Where do business rules, business processes, and business analysis fit in? Every company depends on its special know-how, a point so obvious we often overlook it. The products and services we deliver to customers can never be better than our capacity to organize, manage, revise, and deploy that know-how. In a knowledge economy, operational know-how is king. Current techniques for creating enterprise architectures are largely IT-centric. They focus on processes, data and services rather than on business products and the business capabilities to produce and deliver them. We need to change all that using proven, pragmatic techniques that directly engage business managers. The new approach is highly innovative, business-driven, and surprisingly easy.
  • How to conduct a deep, meaningful, rapid assessment of business capabilities
  • How to identify life-cycle-long, enterprise-wide dependencies
  • How to give Finance the crucial, coordinated touch points it needs
  • How to plan for massive customization and reconfiguration of products
  • How to put the ‘business’ into business architecture and business agility
  • How to rekindle the spark of creative thinking in your organization
 

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The Debate Continues … Business Rules in Zachman 3.0 … and the Upcoming Business Architecture Summit at BBC2011

At the Business Architecture Summit in Ft. Lauderdale (BBC2011 – Oct 31 – Nov 4) I will be joining John Zachman and Roger Burlton for one of our rabble-raising 3Amigo sessions. The session is only an hour long, so I’m sure there will be some fast talking(!). One of the first questions I want John to address is: “Where are the business rules in Zachman 3.0?” The following recent exchange represents my current understanding on the matter. I plan to come back on the record after the event to say what I got right and what I got wrong. Question: Can rules address more than one primitive (column) in the Framework? My Answer: Yes, atomic rules can address multiple primitives – e.g., An accounting must be given by the CFO in Delaware on March 15, 2012. (By ‘atomic’ I mean ‘can’t be reduced into two or more rules without losing meaning.’) In this rule you have a thing (‘accounting’), a person (the CFO), a place (Delaware), and a date (March 15, 2012). So even atomic rules are composites, not primitives. Question: Does rules not being a primitive mean that business rules shouldn’t be treated as a first-class citizen? My Answer: What ‘first-class citizen’ has always meant in the Business Rule Manifesto (http://www.businessrulesgroup.org/brmanifesto.htm) and elsewhere is that business rules shouldn’t be subordinate to other kinds of requirements for system design in general, and to what I call ‘Big-P’ processes in particular. Big-P processes are not primitive (think ‘input-process-output’), but rather they amalgamate (think ‘mash-up’) some or even all the other primitives. In other words, Big-P processes are also composite. Composites are about the configuration of the enterprise at any point in time. Business rules are one candidate for that capacity. I believe business rules are a far better choice in that regard than Big-P processes (think ‘business agility’). In any case, business rules being a composite in no way diminishes their importance. The enterprise is not built on primitives alone. If you had only primitives, there would be no configuration, and literally no enterprise.

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Why Don’t Requirements Approaches and IT Methodologies ‘Get’ How to Use Strategy as a Technique? … Not Acceptable!

An enterprise architect recently said to me, “The motivation (why) column of the Zachman Architecture Framework is the most underrated, underutilized construct in architecture.” Absolutely correct. Even worse, IT methodologies (that is, the people who create and use them) don’t realize how far afield they are on the matter. As a result they cause business people to focus on the wrong things … or to drop out entirely. Ironically, IT then becomes the impediment, rather than the solution, to much needed business innovation. A bit of background: The Business Rules Group (BRG – www.BusinessRulesGroup.org) identified the area of business strategy as a missing ingredient for business rules in the mid 1990s. In 2000, we came out with a standard for the area, now sponsored by OMG, called the Business Motivation Model. It’s a highly readable document with lots of good examples (and free): http://www.businessrulesgroup.org/bmm.shtml. It provides standard vocabulary and structure for strategy. Zachman, by the way, was a key participant. I am proud of my role as co-editor and author of the first working draft. My business partner, Gladys S.W. Lam, and I have just come out with a new book that explains how strategy (and business rules) can be an integral part of business analysis. It’s actually not that hard to do (if you have the right people, motivation, scope, and approach), and it doesn’t take all that long (ditto same caveats). Those are big myths. Gladys is generally given credit for some of the key ideas in the standard. She grew up in a highly entrepreneurial environment and has a natural sense of business risks and solution sinkholes. But I digress … See Chapter 4 of Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Ruleshttp://www.brsolutions.com/b_building_business_solutions.php.

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What is Agile? … Or Rather, What is It We Really Want to Be ‘Agile’?

This post excerpted from our new book (Oct, 2011) Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules. See:  http://www.brsolutions.com/b_building_business_solutions.php ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Agile in software development is an IT development method featuring rapid iteration and prototyping. Agile software methods and business agility have nothing to do with each other. Agile in software development leaves off exactly where business agility picks up – at deployment. In working with clients we frequently come across systems that feature a very ‘open’ environment with few enterprise controls. Typically, this ‘flexibility’ resulted from diligent efforts by IT to satisfy many stakeholders individually. But the ‘flexibility’ is just an illusion. The failure of business-side stakeholders to come together and develop a collective business solution before ‘agile’ software development commences can plague the company for years to come. It reduces overall productivity, lowers customer satisfaction, and diminishes the capacity to make sound operational business decisions. It makes apple-to-apple financial comparisons virtually impossible. And it always costs a lot in ‘maintenance’. There are simply no magic bullets for building business solutions. Business agility results when the IT aspect of change in business policies and business rules disappears into the plumbing. All artificial (IT-based) production freeze dates for deployment disappear and the software release cycle becomes irrelevant. The only constraint is how long it takes business leads and Business Analysts to think through the change as thoroughly as they feel they need to. So the answer to my question is that business should be agile. Here then is our definition of business agility: being able to deploy change in business policies and business rules into day-to-day business activity as fast as business people and Business Analysts can determine the full business impact of the change and assess whether the change makes good business sense.

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Rules in the Zachman Framework … Get Ready for a Burst of Architectural Rethink

As it turns out, rules have been one of the hardest things to figure out in the Zachman Framework. From a purely selfish point of view, that’s been a good thing, because it’s given an excuse for John and I to have many long dinners over the question in places that have really, really good food. I think the emerging answer is an exciting one. Think ‘gray lines’ in 3.0. Rules turn out to be composites. As John likes to do, roll the Framework into a cylinder, then look through it like a telescope. The gray lines arching through the space inside represent the current configuration of your enterprise. Traditionally, those gray lines have been implemented by procedural means … and we know the pitfalls of rules hardcoded into application code. It’s like setting the business in concrete. I think what 3.0 really points us toward is a new vision for the composites; a highly innovative burst of rethinking about configuration based on the primitives. I’ll be having more to say about this in the near future … It’s the topic for my 15 minute 3Amigos session with John and Roger Burlton at this year’s Business Architecture Summit (Oct 31 – Nov 4, Ft. Lauderdale) … http://www.buildingbusinesscapability.com/ P.S. Try to picture John being able to say anything in 15 minutes. That will be interesting in itself!

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