When you start a business rules project, do you want to spend your time figuring out the right design? or do you want to focus on the business decision? Let me illustrate.
When I was at BBC 2011 in Fort Lauderdale, I met a gentleman by the name of Russell. As we talked about this concept of fluid metaphors aka Visual Logic, he made a brilliant comment:
“users want handrails, not handcuffs!”
What a perfect way to summarize the point I was trying to make in much more words than he did!
Why seeing isn’t everything
In many posts, we have talked about the difficulties of picking one graphical representation for business rules. Exceptions break the nice and comfortable decision tables. Decision trees are much better at navigating the decision logic per population segment. Decision graphs are great for showing the many paths that lead to conclusions. And textual rules are great to understand the logic one rule at the time.
Being able to turn any ruleset into a decision table, a decision tree or a decision graph is quite helpful for understanding how they all relate to each other… But what is the point of understanding if you then have to change your view, and start over your thinking process, to find the change you know you need???? Yes there is a point. No it is not enough! It would be like staring at the cake from outside the store, through the window…
In this 10-minute video, I demonstrate how you see the “cake” and eat it too:
If you do not have to make the design decision up-front, you can really give more freedom to your subject matter experts and empower them to do what they need to do in the way that they are comfortable with.
No handcuffs.
Learn more about Decision management and Sparkling Logic’s SMARTS™ Data-Powered Decision Manager
