Tag Archives: Processes

Dirty Little Secret of Business Rules?

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James Taylor is out again revealing secrets. Here is the latest dirty laundry.

Business users don’t want to “maintain rules” any more than they want to “write code”

What they want to do is run their business better……

…..They can’t and don’t want to use the same technology IT does but they can and should be brought into the process. To deliver this requires thought and effort but it will pay off in increased agility, decreased costs and improved precision in decision-making.

I agree with James’ prescriptions on what IT needs to do to make it easier for business users to define business rules that ‘run the business’. The Business Rules Engine interface needs to be intuitive and  familiar;  presented in a business metrics context; allow ‘what-if’ scenario building; and provide audit and governance ‘under the covers’.

The underlying assumption here is that business users do have a reasonably well-defined and agreed-upon decision-making criteria. So when ‘business rules’ need to be built into the ‘business logic’ of a system, the IT team should be able to pick up the binder listing all the rules and start implementing the system. In an Orwellian parallel universe maybe. Not in the real world.

Too frequently the business needs to think through the business processes, objectives, decisions and rules first before any system can be implemented. These rules are again subject to change depending on business direction and market conditions. So IT is increasingly abstracting the business-rules-engine component out of the underlying implementation.

IT can develop and procure Web Services that enable individual business processes – and provide ‘switches’ to configure the process and its interaction with other processes. The Business Rules Engine that brings the full value chain together is then the ultimate responsibility for business domain experts within the business.

No matter how dirty, techie, complex or ridiculous the Business Rules Engine is, the business needs to know where the switches are and how to drive. Can the business visualize a Ferrari dashboard or is a Model-T ‘dashboard’ sufficient?

Business Processes and CRM Systems

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Ann All is pointing out the convergence between Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and Business Process Management (BPM). She writes

Too often CRM is a disjointed mishmash of departmental or divisional activities. CRM touches a number of enterprise systems, including operations, accounting and e-commerce, so companies must make a better effort to integrate their CRM data with these other systems….

Business processes across the enterprise are either directly or tangentially concerned with customer interactions. Since a 360 degree view of the customer is key for managing the relationship, it follows that all processes need to be considered and relevant customer data lined up for the CRM system to be effective.

For organizations used to working with enterprise-class systems like SAP, an integrated process-based approach is easier to visualize and execute. It is the organization with departmental silos that gets attracted to ‘partial’ solutions that address the contact management functions of CRM. Despite the customer being so central to the modern enterprise, customer relationship management questions quickly devolve into the basic question of, “who owns the customer?” Very rarely do all business departments sit together and design a common integrated process focused on the common customer.

A true customer focused organization will need to take an enterprise-wide process view in implementing CRM.

The New Heroes -The Adaptables

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‘Being adaptable’ is one of those backhanded compliments. It can have negative connotations associated with being wishy-washy, spineless, impressionable, naive, crafty, calculating, opportunistic and similar. Despite this the history of civilizations is full of examples where adaptation was critical for survival and for growth.

Adapting and evolving to exploit changes in the environment has now become a business buzzword - being Agile. Definitions of agility can range across the continuum from operational agility to business-model agility. I agree with the latter definition that James Taylor clarified recently.

Agility to us, I think, is a measure of responsiveness to change rather than responsiveness to customers or to orders. It is not the time it takes a company to, for instance, restock a product. While that’s an interesting thing to measure, it is not agility to me. The time it takes a company to change its reorder approach or a specific product/vendor is, however, a measure of agility. 

Being an agile organization requires it to be able to rearrange its people, processes and systems into new configurations at short notice. ‘Composing’ new value chains and business models using existing processes as components is the new competency that sets organizations apart. The new generation systems need to support these process-components in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). And, we need many more of those ‘multiple-hat’ people who morph among roles like architects, business-analysts, project-managers, designers and customer-advocates.

Those video-game playing, text-messaging, social-networking, hyperactive, mobile, multi-tasking kids – and adults – are perfect for this paradigm. Systems are now available as Services that you plug into as and when needed. Businessweek claimed recently that  you may never buy software (or hardware) again.

No longer do small companies have to spring for servers and IT staff just to get the basics. With software services, you don’t install programs on your own computers or server. Instead, you sign up online for software and use it while you’re connected to the Internet.  

This agile, anything-can-change-at-any-time world needs ‘being adaptable’ in spades. The pace of change is accelerating and business-ecologies are constantly forming, dissolving, splitting, aggregating and reforming in a kaladeoscopic blur.

The Adaptables are center-stage now – as always leading the charge for survival and growth.

Follow thy Customer

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ShopRite grocery stores have just started beaming customized ads to shoppers through their computerized shopping carts – as part of a Microsoft Atlas technology roll-out.

Microsoft will deliver the ads based on data obtained from ShopRite’s customer loyalty cards, according to the companies. When shoppers scan their cards on the computerized shopping carts, they will see ads and promotional offers on the screen based on their purchasing histories.. 

Most retail stores track customers’ path through the store to gauge effectiveness of various displays and product placements – mostly as passive observation to help with merchandising and advertising – and not for personalized sales and advertising. So, this is a proactive move at influencing customer behavior while shopping and not the usual attempt made with discount coupons spewing out of the printer at the checkout lane.

This story reminded me of the sophistication that some Casinos had put into place almost two years ago. At Harrah’s

Gamblers don’t just win money when they play at one of Harrah’s 26 casinos. When they swipe their loyalty cards, they’re also eligible to win a variety of perks, from appetizers to Swedish massages, depending on their level of spending and the information Harrah’s has collected about them. …..Data from low-rollers also convinced Harrah’s to redesign its casino floors to include, for example, a higher percentage of lower denomination slot machines and video poker games—for a 12 percent hike in slot revenues.

Loyalty programs of various kinds need not be just a mechanism to track and reward repeat customers. If technology is used appropriately, a loyal customer can now be tracked through the shopping experience and also through the service delivery experience. A very comprehensive set of data can then be collected at that micro-level of interaction – analyzed at an aggregate – allowing new products, services, marketing and attention to be delivered seamlessly back to the customer at the individual level.

Customer and Seller can now be engaged in a longer relationship, learning from each other and helping each other be more efficient, effective and profitable.

The Goal of Automation

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Why do we try to automate as much as we can – in the business world and in our own lives? The hope is that our routine and defined activities should take as little of our time as possible – and we have more time to spend on the fun things like doing nothing or inventing sliced bread 2.0.

So, when Allan Wille from CRM Daily wrote recently that the End-Game for Business Intelligence is to create sophisticated Dashboards, I was pleased to find James Taylor of ebizQ taking exception and inviting everyone to, “[please] kill me now….”

I agree wholeheartedly with James when he says

Surely the endgame for BI must involve some kind of predicting of the future, some looking forward?…….. why show them a dashboard when we could program the systems to ACT? Enterprise decision management would use this same data not to display a pretty graph on some marketing directors desktop, but to make the CRM system, the website, the call center and everyone involved in the organization act more intelligently.

Dashboards are good and relevant in some situations, but the goal is to have business rules drive and automate as much decision-making as possible. The rules themselves need to evolve and become sophisticated enough to ‘sense’ the environment and the context based on raw data feeds – on our way to the Intelligent Enterprise.

With sophisticated systems doing this intelligent work what do the people do? They can now take the next unstructured problem and put structure to it – in a constantly escalating endeavor to tame the next market and the next competitor, or to discover the next breakthrough product.

Let’s not spend time doing things that machines are better at!