This paper looks at maximizing the value of BRMS implementations.

1. Business Rules Management Systems
Maximizing Value with an Enterprise-Level Strategy

2. Business Rules Management Systems
Maximizing Value with an Enterprise-Level Strategy
Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) are facilitating significant
changes in how corporations build and maintain their core business systems.
The traditional and costly process of translating business requirements to code
written by programmers is being replaced by structured business vocabulary,
business rules repositories, and business user-centric development tools. This
change is helping companies develop and modify business applications more
quickly, reducing cost, and enabling timely response to regulatory
requirements and changing market conditions. When implemented at the
enterprise level, business logic can be used across multiple business
applications, providing consistency and transparency across the corporation.
Enterprise decision services implemented via business rule management
systems offer a number of benefits to a company, while enabling effective and
efficient management and delivery of business policy through business
systems. At the same time, BRMS implementations can fail to achieve full
return on investment (ROI). The missed opportunity is often traced to a set of
common mistakes, including: narrow deployment considerations, limited
investment beyond initial deployment, over-customization, and inappropriate
program management and governance. The adoption of an enterprise-level
strategy and systematic follow-through during and post implementation will
maximize the value of decision services across the entire enterprise. A simple
three-step approach will help to avoid common pitfalls and help to achieve the
full potential of BRMS deployments.
Introduction:
Business Rules Management Systems enable quick and dynamic modifications
of business policies/procedures in a fast-paced operations environment.
Implementations of BRMS enable policy authorship and management by
business users, often fostering greater alignment between business and
technology organizations. A BRMS offers numerous features that enable an
organization to deploy policy consistently, and across multiple operational
platforms. Implementation of business rules engines in one or more business
units, particularly in areas of complexity or those requiring intense manual
calculations and review (such as eligibility, underwriting, pricing, etc.), is a
fairly mature strategy in large financial services organizations. The vendor
community is large and stable, and is supported by a wide variety of third-
party toolkit and professional services offerings that enable business and IT
organizations to successfully implement and leverage the technology for their
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3. Business Rules Management Systems
Maximizing Value with an Enterprise-Level Strategy
needs. Recent consolidation in the industry further supports this technology
by offering closer/native integration with several large-scale platform
solutions: e.g., ILOG (IBM), Haley (Oracle), Yasu (SAP).
Common BRMS Implementation Mistakes:
Despite the level of industry maturity and technological sophistication (yet lack
of deep penetration), many organizations do not maximize the value of their
BRMS implementations due to a set of fairly common conditions:
1. Evaluation of BRMS products is limited to a stand-alone application
view instead of an enterprise platform view: Software evaluations for
BRMS products typically focus on the feature sets as related to a specific IT
project and rarely involve rationalizing the product against other enterprise
IT assets (e.g., middleware, database integration, etc.). Additionally, due
to a variety of existing technical and organizational constructs, it is not
uncommon for the same policy to be implemented multiple times (and
sometimes multiple ways) in multiple decision services across the
enterprise. An enterprise-wide BRMS strategy and development of an
enterprise-level policy and rules repository is imperative to overcoming
limitations and maximizing the value of BRMS investments.
2. Initial operational capability is reached, while subsequent
investments required to achieve full enterprise value are withheld:
Organizations can lose momentum after an initial deployment, and not fully
follow-through on the implementation and maintenance of advanced
authoring and simulation tools. These tools truly cede policy administration
control to the business units and reduce the IT staff involvement in
syntactically manipulating business policy to fit software structure. Limiting
the deployment of these tools to their full potential often leaves the BRMS in
the hands of the IT staff, leading to lower overall transparency, and
resulting in longer turn-around times for changes.
3. BRMS products are “over-customized” to meet narrow or specialized
IT needs: Like the adoption of other commercial off-the-shelf products,
BRMS products must be integrated with existing testing tools or reporting
mechanisms (e.g., integration of BRMS into existing requirements
management and test automation tools). These integrations require
customization that limits the potential of the BRMS solution to be applied
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4. Business Rules Management Systems
Maximizing Value with an Enterprise-Level Strategy
broadly across the enterprise. This is due to the fact that different business
units tend to have different integration needs. Leveraging a common
enterprise architectural standard, like SOA, could alleviate this problem by
enabling the BRMS to operate in a state-less, autonomous service mode.
Further, leveraging native BRMS functionality to meet testing and reporting
needs reduces the need for customization.
4. IT and business governance procedures are inadequately modified to
leverage new platform capabilities: Enterprise software development
life-cycles (SDLC) must be modified or otherwise customized to enable the
hot-deploy features of BRMS solutions, therefore enabling the enterprise to
enjoy full value. The existence of governance processes that have rigid
and formal change approval mechanisms pose a threat to the dynamic
change execution features of BRMS systems. Systems implementation
governance procedures that require scope reviews, requirement
approvals, system design and development documentation, and test
certifications in a sequential manner with varying levels of executive
change board reviews often add cycle time to change management. In a
well designed BRMS, rules are closer to data than application programming
logic. The SDLC overhead of data updates (e.g., updating conventional
loan limits for residential mortgage underwriting or other simple
parameter-like or referential pieces of data) should be minimal, and
extended to other business rule changes as well.
5. New evaluation and assessments methods/metrics are required for
BRMS implementations: Evaluating the success of a BRMS project against
traditional project management metrics (schedule and cost) is likely to be
inadequate, as these traditional measures typically focus only on the IT
element of the implementation (the project). A program review of a BRMS
implementation manages all of the stakeholder needs (and requirements)
and associated activities, responsibilities, and project risks. One critical
component of assessments that can be missed is the ability to track and
enable the necessary workforce and business process transformation
elements. Failure to include broader assessment criteria may result in the
project meeting its initial schedule/cost goal, but not fully recognizing
potential post-deployment value.
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5. Business Rules Management Systems
Maximizing Value with an Enterprise-Level Strategy
A Three-Step Approach to Maximizing Value:
Enterprises can maximize the value of their BRMS implementations by viewing
the technology solution in a broad enterprise context, including elements of
organization, governance, and business process transformation. A simple
three step-approach can help enterprises identify the right scope for a BRMS
implementation and enable them to manage the deployment effectively, and in
line with long-term strategy, maximizing value.
1. Conduct an enterprise-wide pre-implementation strategy assessment:
The pre-implementation strategy assessment should consist of developing
value stream maps for the enterprise’s core and secondary business
functions. A business-function to IT asset map should then be built to align
current business processes with IT assets. Each business process and its
component IT assets should then be analyzed for policy automation and
consolidation opportunities. Such a top-down assessment greatly improves
the enterprise’s chances of maximizing the return on BRMS investments.
2. Fine-tune any BRMS implementation assessment to rise above the
tactical IT deployment challenges: A periodic assessment that fully
incorporates tracking organizational and business process changes post IT
deployment is a critical success factor for maximizing value. ROI based
metrics constructed from division level or business unit level estimates do
not account for the missed opportunities for efficiencies across the
enterprise. Effective assessment should include a review of: (a) the
possible consolidation of business processes from multiple organizations,
(b) the collaboration across teams to establish centralized business rules
management and ownership terms, as well as (c) the design and
implementation of new governance measures that leverage the streamlined
policy change features provided by the BRMS. This assessment will help to
ensure that the BRMS project is rationalized against the long-term value that
can be delivered, and not just managed to the tactical risks in schedule and
costs for the initial deployment.
3. Establish a clear model for post implementation assessment to ensure
continued expansion of value across the enterprise: The third step
organizations can put in place is a post implementation assessment process
that continues to look for additional opportunities to expand the absorption
of the BRMS concept. This assessment should answer a few fundamental
questions:
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6. Business Rules Management Systems
Maximizing Value with an Enterprise-Level Strategy
 Are we able to manage business policy more consistently than with our
pre-BRMS solution (i.e., customers get consistent treatment of their
transaction (e.g., loan file underwriting, pricing, etc.) independent of
their channel)?
 Are we able to deploy changes more efficiently/effectively (i.e.,
release cycles shorter or scope larger for releases)?
 Have we improved productivity for the organization (i.e., eliminated
traditional development and deployment steps and moved policy
management and deployment closer to business users/knowledge)?
Conclusion:
Maximizing value from your BRMS implementation starts with establishing an
enterprise level strategy for evaluation and adoption of the BRMS paradigm,
devising broad program management metrics, and conducting periodic
project assessments to ensure overall project success. A thorough review of
your enterprise value chain will enable you to identify all the opportunities for
consolidating business policy and streamlining management using BRMS.
Additionally, devising a broader set of program management metrics that are
FORWARD looking in terms of maximizing post deployment value will serve as
an indispensible tool in managing BRMS projects. These include metrics that
reflect progress in workforce/skill set transformation, enterprise-wide
consolidation of business rules, and business process (operations) change
management. Once a strategic framework of enterprise-wide opportunity is
established and broad program management metrics are devised, periodic
assessments of your BRMS project against metrics that emphasize expansion of
BRMS usage after initial deployment will help you realize the full benefits of an
implementation.
About the author: Prabhakar Bhogaraju is Director and head of Decision Management for The Summit Point
Group, a strategic management and technology consulting firm. With over 10 years of experience in leading
large scale IT transformation and enterprise business rule management programs, he has established a track
record of leading and delivering complex, high impact IT systems. Prior to joining The Summit Point Group,
Prabhakar led design and development for Desktop Underwriter; Fannie Mae’s premier automated
underwriting service for the mortgage industry.
prabhakar.bhogaraju@thesummitpointgroup.com
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