This is my first blog entry on businessrules-café.com and so I'd like to start out with a brief introduction of my philosophy as it relates to the business of implementing business rules.

I have been implementing business rule systems for about ten years and in general have been working in enterprise environments for well over twenty years. I consider my self a technologist, but more than that a pragmatist. By that I mean I have seen my share of IT failures and (jaded by these experiences) I've grown weary of the mumbo jumbo that is touted in so many "industry experts". Rather, I've ended up with the saying "git'er done" ringing through my temples. Not that I think expediency is a best practice mind you, however I've seen enough mega-projects get bogged down in debates about architecture. In the end, the projects that fly low, under the radar, with a small agile team, is more likely to be successful than a monolithic undertaking with MS Project Gantt charts coming out the yin yang.

My experience with business rules is that the ratio of failures to success is not that different from other endeavors, but seems to favor of success when the approach is agile in nature. So this brings me to my first item regarding agility and success factors: the members of the team must have a grasp of technology and business acumen,... in one brain. Now I'm going to get somewhat controversial; this skill is not something that can be outsourced. By that I mean, the traditional approach of writing a spec and throwing it over the cubicle/wall/ocean does not work well when we need people to embody both IT and business acumen. To do that you need proximity, communication, face time, trust, understanding, ...the list goes on.

I can hear the howls already, but if we are talking about automating the aspects of a business that makes it unique, it's not enough to break the problem down into the duality of business and IT, rather the endeavor is the integration of the two. In my experience, the only way to do this in a light and agile way is to have people on the team that can embody both the ways of the business with the means of the technology.

Business Rules, perhaps more than any other enabling technology demands, even requires, synergy between what continues to be two departments, budgets, chains of command. The old ways have to fall to the new, and for business rule endeavors to be successful, you need a unique human being. In fact if you manage to get more than one, say a handful, your chances of a successful implementation of Business Rules just went way up.

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