The Real Truths Behind Business Rules Management

Accenture examines how pensions systems can make best use of business rules management systems (BRMS) to update pensions legislation much more quickly and easily. BRMS are being touted as a saving grace to help pensions systems cut through the current complexity involved in legislative change. And they can make a tremendous difference—provided they are put in the proper context. BRMS are tools, not solutions. Executives interested in making the most of them need to understand the bigger picture.

This POV separates the most pervasive BRMS myths from the realities, providing insight and real-life examples into how governments have used BRMS with considerable success.

Across Europe, North America and Australia, politicians have pension and social security reform in their sights. However, a large segment of pensions agencies still operate with decades-old legacy systems. Every change in legislation, no matter how minor, requires labor-intensive hard coding by IT staff.

Increasingly, BRMS are being touted as a saving grace. The appeal is understandable: the current volatility in the pensions systems environment means that, more than ever, governments need a way to quickly change rules and systems. Moreover, they need to do it in a way that directly involves the business users who understand the impact of the changes, rather than just the IT department. But are BRMS all they seem?

However, at its heart, successful business rules management is not about some human services technology, but about understanding and managing the rules that drive your business so that everyone and every system can use them. This is a fundamental shift in thinking: Success is not about the BRMS tools you use.

• Recognize that changes to legislation still require a thick layer of “translation.” Even if you could automate all the details of regulations, that would still not be enough to turn legislation into executable code. Data models have to match the relationships implied between rules, which typically means considerable additional work on the data elements.
  
  
• Prepare to keep IT closely involved. The business and IT side will have to continue to work closely on rules management, with the business users focused on changing the parameters and IT focused on changing the logic.
  
  
• You can start from where you are—just make a start. Many organizations believe the shift from legacy is an all-or-nothing proposition. However, BRMS actually can incrementally advance organizations toward a service-oriented architecture that allows a rule to be written once, but deployed everywhere across the organization.
  
  
• Test thoroughly. Meticulous testing is essential to verify that legislation and policy have been accurately modeled in the rules.