Business User Rule Maintenance

From SmartEnoughWiki

Business Rules Management Systems often promise to deliver business user rule maintenance. However, most business users don't want to "maintain rules" any more than they want to "write code". They want to run their business better. They want to:

• Relax their underwriting policies
• Reduce their risk exposure
• Retain more customers even if it costs more
• Promote slow-moving products
• Catch a new kind of fraud
• Enforce new regulations
• and so on...

To get business users to maintain the rules in their Decision Services without them feeling like programmers you must:

• Present rule maintenance as a business function
  • It cannot look like they are being made to maintain code
  • It cannot look like it was designed for IT people
  • It must look like they are doing what they want to do - changing the way their business runs
• Make the environment familiar
  • Browser-based
  • As intuitive as possible
  • Uses the same layout and style as other systems they use routinely
  • Use their terminology and expectations
• Integrate the process of rule maintenance
  • It should seem like a seamless process to go from a task to changing the rules
  • It should let them do rule editing when it makes sense for the user, for instance when they see a report telling them something should be changed
• Make it secure & controlled
  • Audit trails
  • Release management
  • Security to prevent unauthorized changes
  • An environment that prevents them from making errors in the editing of rules

Well designed templates can provide the control and security you want before non-programmers start changing a system while also allowing enough control over how the user interface looks to convince users they are just doing their job, not their IT department's.