Critical Challenges Facing Business and IT Today

I was looking through some presentations I gave five years ago and found a list of critical challenges facing Business and IT. These problems could be solved using a business rules approach and BR technology. I'm afraid many companies that haven't climbed aboard the business rules train still face many of these challenges today.

Now that I'm blogging, I thought it would be a good idea to "externalize" this list and make it available on the Web. I'd like to keep adding to this list over time. And of course I welcome your suggestions or additions.

Critical Challenges Facing Business Today

• Compliance with external regulations/laws and with internal policies/rules
• Ability to change business rules instantly
• Managing knowledge
• Managing business rules
• Re-engineering and simplifying business rules and business processes
• Product development time to market
• Application development time to market

Critical Challenges Facing IT Today

• Dealing with rapid business change and increasing complexity
• Time to market
• Increasingly complex business rules
• Changing or adding business logic can break existing logic
• Business rules aren't properly documented
• Business logic duplicated across systems
• Building flexible systems that can support unknown future requirements.
• Many systems today limit what the business can do
• We don’t know the rules in our systems, yet these systems run the business
• Existing rules may actually be inherited system constraints
• Different IT units document business rules differently, if at all
• Business people speak business rules, yet IT speaks data and code
• Managing knowledge, especially business rules

The business rules approach and business rules technology can help solve each of these problems.