A client recently asked me for guidance in establishing a center of excellence concerning business rules within their organization. Their objectives included:
- Accumulate requisite skills for productive success.
- Establish methodologies for productive, reliable and repeatable success.
- Accumulate and reuse content (e.g., definitions, requirements, regulations, and policies) across implementations, departments or divisions.
- Establish multiple tutorial and reusable reference implementations, including application development, tooling, and integration aspects.
- Establish centralized or transferable infrastructure, including architectural aspects, tools and repositories that reflect and support established methodologies, reusable content, and reference implementations.
- Establish criteria, best practices and rationale for various administrative matters, especially change management concerning the life cycles of content (e.g., regulations or policies) and applications (e.g., releases and patches).
I was quickly surprised to find myself struggling to write down recommendations for the skill set required to seed the core staff. My recommendations were less technical than the client may have expected. After further consideration, it became clear than any discrepancy in expectations arose from differences in our unvoiced strategic assumptions. Objectives, such as those listed above, are no substitute for a clearly articulated mission and strategy.
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