Business Logic – Where is it?
20 May 2010
I changed my car insurance this week, from a company that kept its business logic in its computers to a company that kept its business logic in its people. The premium played a part (2% difference), as did the country in which the call centre was based (wales or india) but what really made the difference was whether the company was set up to respond intelligently to real people.
There’s a wide school of thought which has it that computers can be “smart” “intelligent” and “automatic”. There’s another which says that they are intrinsically stupid, have to be told explicitly what to do and are rubbish at handling exceptions. Unfortunately, my old insurer seems to have bought a computer system from someone from the first school of though.
You see the thing is that the business logic (the steps that have to be followed in order for your organisation to do its job), have to “live” somewhere. Some of it lives in people’s heads (if someone phones and asks to speak to X, you don’t need to refer to the manual to check whether that’s the right procedure), and some of it lives in people’s computers (ours, for example automatically trigger alarms if a client raises a critical support issue, and notify other people of what’s happened in the weekly report). The problem is that some organisations take this too far, and assume that ALL of the business logic can be handled by a computer. In the case of my insurer, they had no process in the computer for accepting my request to send out a document after my policy lapsed, so they couldn’t do it. The guy spoke to had no diary, no calendar, no post it which he could write a note to himself to raise the documentation later in the week, and as a result, I had to call up again today to request the documentation (there’s a process to do it after the policy lapses!). Because I’m a customer, I was prepared to do that, but try that kind of thing with a donor or a customer, or someone booking an event or a place on one of your programmes, and you’ll lose people right away.
The alternative approach is to assume from the outset that business logic should live in people’s heads. Sure sometimes the systems they use need to support that, remind and cross-check, but if they limit and prevent what someone can do, they cease to be useful tools and become a liability.
Every HR person I’ve met believes that the people are an organisation’s greatest asset, but many organisations act as though it’s really the computers that we want to keep happy.
Never mind artificial intelligence, here’s to the real thing.
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