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  

In a recent discussion on social media I was explaining what I thought would make a business architecture smart. Tom Graves replied that he wasn’t sure what made one smart, but that he did know what makes one dumb. His criteria …  

• rigid rule-based boundaries.
• over-reliance on rigid true/false rules.
• attempts to implement most or all of that architecture through automated ‘business-rules engines’ that can only work with rigid true/false rules.

He went on to say that these criteria suggest that “a first requirement for a smart business-architecture is that it go beyond all these mistakes.” Tom’s emphasis on ‘true/false’ rules needs to be carefully qualified. After all, you do want the internal workings of a rule engine to be based on formal logic. I believe what he really means is an approach that allows no shades of gray with respect to nuanced enforcement of business rules. On that point I hardily agree. In addition, Tom got me to agree with him on two major points about the current state of the industry. In his words …

1. The quest for ‘certainty’ in an inherently-uncertain world is futile. Rules of all kinds exist to help human thinking and human judgment, not to act as a substitute for it.

2. The software vendors … are frankly not far short of committing fraud with many of the claims they make as to the efficacy and validity of their ‘business-rules engines’.

The term business rule unfortunately has been hijacked by software vendors to mean something very different from the original concept. For example, production rules[1] (the basis for the majority of current product offerings) are not business rules. Full stop. This distorted view of business rule needs to be rectified. Don’t let yourself be sucked into it! For real business rules there are three (optional) supplemental specifications for each business rule statement[2]:

(1) level of enforcement

(2) violation (breach) response

(3) violation (breach) message.

It is through these specifications that the richness of behavioral coordination can arise.

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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