Rules, guidelines, laws and judgement

A few weeks back I attended an interesting debate and presentation about Business Process Management (BPM) in the Public Sector. In fact this was a Government Panel discussion led by a consultant who was ‘much singing’ the praises of BPM backed by enterprise rule systems (ERMS). If you’re not familiar with such patterns, the basic premise is the process is separated from the business logic which is crafted and maintained in a separate, dedicated system and ‘consulted’ as necessary in key decision steps in the business process.

It was a solid pitch, I certainly bought into most if not all of the approach (as long as we don’t go crazy with rule specification in the ERMS). My rule of thumb is put things in there that are a) volatile and/or b) complex. Legislation is often complex and volatile, so many aspects of decision making in Public Sector processes fit the mould nicely.

What surprised me was the Q&A session that followed. We were (you see) in a room full of community leaders, many of them Justices of the Peace. Think ‘Wisdom of Solomon’ meets immovable ‘binary’ automated decision making.

The mathematician / engineer in me took the view that ‘the rule is the rule’,  a guiding truth by which the decision is made based on real-time inputs. The ‘interpretation of the Magistrate’ however was much different. The ‘rule’ is the questionable mandate, the hand tying aspect that removes judgement from human aspects of the process. Is the rule ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘well-intentioned’, ‘lawful’, ‘open to interpretation’, ‘backed by precedent’ all tumbled out as arguments against stringent rule driven process definition.

I was bemused. Surely the rule(s) brought order to chaos, uniformity to individualism, defensibility and intrinsic fairness. Judgement should ‘overrule the rule’ was the basic counterpoint. This principle has worked (with life-saving grace) during a number of aircraft emergencies when the pilot switches off auto-pilot, so I do not readily dismiss.

But at the heart of this is a personal feeling of control and influence. If there are human factors in the decision process, we must define the boundaries of constraints. Law, best practices, company goals and values, regulation all set the parameters. The nature of rules define their ‘elasticity’. Some are naturally more ‘bendable’ than others. Some tasks and job functions require more elasticity, while others are easily more ‘binary’. This brings me to the point, rules are themselves often of quite an organic nature. Fear of uptake might be borne in a misconception of system rigidity, a loss of control, contribution, judgement, experience. As ‘propeller heads’ of the rules world, we need to exercise caution in describing their flexibility to business users, and maybe even ‘the general public’. Rules can be soft, although some must be ‘hard’. It’s important however to represent diversity and be cognisant of perception when explaining the operational aspects of these systems to potential users.

The Business Change folks should be astute at handling ‘emotional uptake and acceptance’, but let’s not make their lives harder by speaking too much as ‘purists and absolutists’. Some see such rule driven systems as a form of intellectual castration. Judgement, knowledge, experience, gut feel, intuition, innovation might be hampered by a lack of elasticity.  As the presenter found, there is a time to appeal to human psychology and its inherent resistance when faced with a perceived loss of control.