Let’s put you on the hot spot. You are forced to agree or disagree with the following statement, and defend your answer. What would you say?

The most valuable asset of a business analyst is a digital mind.

Here’s how I answer: I agree. How about you?

My reasoning: I almost certainly don’t agree with the statement in the way you think I might. It’s not the business analyst who needs a digital mind. It’s our machines that need the digital minds.

As we increasingly disintermediate customers and company workers, we will no longer have our workers in the loop to convey and apply operational business knowledge at the point of interaction to make things right. Machines will have to do that work. And those machines must be equipped with the knowledge to do so.

The key to launching us successfully into the digital age is setting up deep knowledge reservoirs in the company. Obviously, they will be digital.

The first and most basic step toward treating knowledge as a first-class citizen is true business rules. Business rules represent explicit operational knowledge. By the way, because of the need for compliance and traceability, business rules (think obligations) will never go away.

There are, of course, other ways in which knowledge can be applied to processes, ones where traceability and compliance aren’t so important – for example, machine learning and neural nets. Those technologies can also be used to build digital minds for your organization.

As a professional, how do you future-proof yourself? The secret is to make yourself indispensable both to the business and to machines in the business with digital minds.

Given that insight, what is the most valuable asset of the business analyst in the long term? It’s not agile, it’s not empowerment, it’s not even critical thinking. It’s the ability to communicate deeply and creatively using concise terminology about the problem space. If you’re still speaking in codes and data fields – in ITSpeak – I’m afraid you’re not on the critical path.

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The point of knowledge (POK) is a real place. POK is where know-how – business rules – are developed, applied, assessed, re-used, and ultimately retired.  In other words, POK is where business rules happen. When you start to fully understand business rules, a whole lot of other pieces of the puzzle fall right into place.  You arrive at smart architectures, which gives you smart knowledge management and smart processes. In smart architecture, business systems become knowledge companions, enabling never-ending, on-the-job training.  Flash points of knowledge – real-time evaluation of business rules – enables dynamic processes and personalized, just-in-time delivery of up-to-date guidance. A smart architecture is one equipped to address the formidable challenges facing businesses today – the accelerating rate of change, massive customization, and products and services that are ever richer in knowledge.  Effective engineering of the POK is the new litmus test for agility. The question you should be asking: How do you get your company to the point of knowledge? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Excerpted from Business Rule Concepts: Getting to the Point of Knowledge (4^th ed, 2013), by Ronald G. Ross, 162 pp, http://www.brsolutions.com/b_concepts.php www.BRSolutions.com  

Excerpted from Business Rule Concepts: Getting to the Point of Knowledge (4^th ed, 2013), by Ronald G. Ross, 162 pp, http://www.brsolutions.com/b_concepts.php What people-challenges face your business today?  What role should business systems play? Time shock.  As the rate of change accelerates, workers are constantly thrust into new roles and responsibilities.  They must be guided through unfamiliar procedures and know-how as thoroughly and as efficiently as possible.  The business pays a price, either directly or indirectly, if getting workers up to speed is too slow (or too painful).  Time shock is like culture shock — very disorienting if you’re not prepared for rapid immersion. Training.  The flip side of time shock is training — how to get workers up to speed.  Training is expensive and time-consuming.  Yet as the rate of change accelerates, more and more (re)training is required.  Where do you turn for solutions? The foremost cause of time shock for business workers is rapid change in the business rules.  At any given time, workers might be found at virtually any stage of time shock.  Sometimes, you might find them completely up-to-speed, other times completely lost.  Most of the time, they are probably somewhere in between.  That poses a big challenge with respect to training. The only approach to training that will truly scale is on-the-job self-training.  Knowledge Companions. Such built-in training requires smart architecture, where pinpoint know-how can be put right in front of workers in real time as the need arises — that is, right at the point of knowledge[1].  What that means, in effect, is that the relevant portion of the company’s know-how — its rulebook — is ‘read’ to the worker on-line, right as the worker bumps up against the business rules. So a key idea that business rules bring to architecture is that operational business systems become knowledge companions for workers in the knowledge economy.  After all, isn’t making people smarter the whole point of knowledge?!

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Excerpted from Business Rule Concepts: Getting to the Point of Knowledge (4^th ed, 2013), by Ronald G. Ross, 162 pp, http://www.brsolutions.com/b_concepts.php Let me use an example to sketch the workings of business rules in smart architecture based on points of knowledge[1].  Refer to the Figure to visualize how the system works.

Aside: I have been using this same slide since 1994(!).

Suppose you have a process or procedure that can be performed to take a customer order.

• An order is received.  Some kind of event occurs in the system.  It doesn’t really matter too much what kind of event this is; let’s just say the system becomes aware of the new order.
• The event is a flash point — one or more business rules pertain to it.  One is:  A customer that has placed an order must have an assigned agent.
• We want real-time compliance with business policy, so this business rule is evaluated immediately for the order.  Again, it doesn’t much matter what component in the system does this evaluation; let’s just say some component, service, or platform can do it.
• Suppose the customer placing the order does not have an assigned agent.  The system should detect a fault, a violation of the business rule.  In other words, the system should become aware that the business rule is not satisfied by this new state of affairs.
• The system should respond immediately to the fault.  In lieu of any smarter response, at the very least it should respond with an appropriate message to someone, perhaps to the order-taker (assuming that worker is authorized and capable).

What exactly should the error message say? Obviously, the message can include all sorts of ‘help’.  But the most important thing it should say is what kind of fault has occurred from the business perspective.  So it could start off by literally saying, “A customer that has placed an order must have an assigned agent.”  We say the business rule statement is an error message (or better, a guidance message). That’s a system putting on a smart face, a knowledge-friendly face, at the very point of knowledge.  But it’s a two-way street.  By flashing business rules in real-time, you have an environment perfectly suited to rapidly identifying opportunities to evolve and improve business practices.  The know-how gets meaningful mindshare.  That’s a ticket to continuous improvement and true business agility.

Smarter and Smarter Responses

Is it enough for the system simply to return a guidance message and stop there?  Can’t it do more?  Of course. For the order-taking scenario, a friendly system would immediately offer the user a means to correct the fault (again assuming the user is authorized and capable).  Specifically, the system should offer the user another procedure, pulled up instantaneously, to assign an appropriate agent.  If successful, the user could then move on with processing the order. This smart approach knits procedures together just-in-time based on the flash points of business rules.  It dynamically supports highly-variable patterns of work, always giving pinpoint responses to business events (not system events).  In short, it’s exactly the right approach for process models any time that applying know-how is key — which these days, is just about always! The Business Rules Manifesto (http://www.businessrulesgroup.org/brmanifesto.htm) says this:  “Rules define the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable business activity.”  If you want dynamic processes, you must know exactly where that boundary lies, and how to respond to breaches (at flash points) in real time. Is that as smart as processes can get?  Not yet.  Over time, the business rules for assigning appropriate agents might become well enough understood to be captured and made available to the system.  Then when a fault occurs, the system can evaluate the business rules to assign an agent automatically.  At that point, all this decision-making gets tucked very neatly under the covers.  Even if the business rules you can capture are sufficient for only routine assignments, you’re still way ahead in the game. Smart architecture based on business rules is unsurpassed for incremental design, where improvement:

• Focuses on real business know-how, not just better GUIs or dialogs.
• Continues vigorously after deployment, not just during development.
• Occurs at a natural business pace, not constrained to software release cycles.

The Manifesto says it this way:  “An effective system can be based on a small number of rules.  Additional, more discriminating rules can be subsequently added, so that over time the system becomes smarter.”  That’s exactly what you need for knowledge retention, as well as to move pragmatically toward the knowledge economy.  Business rules give you true agility.

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Excerpted from Business Rule Concepts: Getting to the Point of Knowledge (4^th ed, 2013), by Ronald G. Ross, 162 pp, http://www.brsolutions.com/b_concepts.php For me the point of knowledge (POK) is a real place.  POK is where elements of operational business know-how — business rules — are developed, applied, assessed, re-used, and ultimately retired.  In other words, POK is where business rules happen.  Knowledge is power, so  you can also think about POK as point of empowerment. POK corresponds to point of sale (POS) in the world of commerce.  POK and POS are similar in several ways:

• In both, something is exchanged.  In POS, it’s goods.  In POK, it’s operational business know-how (from here on I’ll just say know-how).
• In the world of commerce, we often say that consumer and supplier are parties in point-of-sale events.  Each of us is a consumer in some point-of-sale events, and many of us act as suppliers in others.  The same is true for POK.  Each of us is a consumer of know-how in some POK events, and many of us act as suppliers in others.  Sometimes we switch roles within minutes or even seconds.
• A well-engineered experience at the point of sale has obvious benefits both for the consumer — a positive buying experience — and for the business of the supplier — real-time intelligence about sales volume, cash flow, buying trends, inventory depletion, consumer profiles, etc.  A well-engineered experience at the POK likewise has obvious benefits.  For the consumer, it means a positive learning experience.  For the business of the supplier, the benefits include real-time intelligence about the ‘hit’ rate of business rules, patterns of evolving consumer (and supplier) behavior, emergence of compliance risks, etc.

The consumer/supplier experience at  the POK is crucial to worker productivity and job satisfaction.  In no small measure, optimizing this experience is the real challenge in POK engineering.  It must  be deliberate.  After all, what’s exchanged  at the POK is know-how — something you can’t carry around in your hands. Today, much of your know-how is tacit — lose the people, you lose the know-how they carry in their heads.  How can you avoid that?  Make the know-how explicit as business rules.  That’s what POK are about. Critical success factors in engineering an effective POK include:

• Communication must be strictly in the language of the business, not IT.
• Interaction must be gauged to the knowledge level (and authorization) of each individual party.
• Less-experienced parties playing the consumer role must be enabled to perform as closely as possible to the level of the company’s most experienced workers.
• Know-how — business rules — must be presented and applied in a succinct, highly-selective fashion.
• Know-how — business rules — must be presented and applied in a timely fashion (i.e., ‘just-in-time’) to accommodate fast-paced refinement and change in business policies and practices.