When Sameness is a Good Thing
Even little kids understand the value of fairness. On the playground, everyone plays by the same rules. And the worst thing you can possibly do is cheat (and get caught). In business, company policies and external regulations not only instill fairness for consumers, but also drive operational efficiency. Encoded in workflows and business rules, processes and decision-making become consistent.
When Difference is a Good Thing
Assuming that your organization is in compliance, there may be cases where you should treat segments of the population differently. For example, you have a website that is essentially available to everyone, yet your products or services can only be sold in California. Obviously, you’re going to treat a California resident navigating your website differently than a New York one. At this point in time, you only have 2 segments: California residents and non-California residents. Your approach may be to come up with a set of business rules to handle these segments (or just one set with ELSE to handle non-California residents).
Managing Segments through Duplication
However, what if you start expanding into Nevada, and then Oregon, and then Arizona? If you’re like most organizations, you would duplicate California’s rules for of the subsequent states and make any necessary adjustments. Maybe at this point, this approach is still feasible because we’re only dealing with 4-5 sets of business rules. But what if you expand to all 50 states? And what if you go international? Do you really want to manage 50+ rule sets where a lot of the rules are essentially the same? Remember, that means every time you make a change, you would have to go through all 50+ rule sets to make any appropriate business rule changes. This is an overly simplified illustration, so let’s look at a real-world example.
I recall working with a client that had started out with a couple thousand business rules. As they developed new customer segments, they would simply duplicate and modify those business rules. Because of their marketing prowess, they had many customer segments which translated to many sets of business rules. By the time I was working with them, they had over 1.5 business rules! At this point, the decision logic was near impossible to manage and they were behind on a lot of updates.
Managing Segments through Exceptions
Equifax had a similar challenge, since they provide credit approval solutions to thousands of customers. They would need an army of consultants if they had to duplicate their decision logic across their entire portfolio! One way that they were able to solve their management nightmare was to think of their business rules in terms of common rules and exceptions. Leveraging SMARTS™ cascading decisions, Equifax would only need to author rules that applied to everyone in their portfolio once, and add exception rules where necessary. Rex Keith (Equifax Senior Director, Product Management) and I cover this and other design suggestions in our “Exceptions are no Exceptions” presentation at BBC 2015. We hope that you’ll be able to join us in Vegas!
In case you’re unable to join us, I covered a lot of similar themes in my below webinar, “Managing Complexity in Automated Decisions.” In my next post, I talk more about designing business rule overrides.
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