I've long had an interest in formal business rules specifications and systems for managing enterprise business rules.  Despite seeing the value in managing business rules explicitly, I've never been able to see how relatively small organizations like Steadyhand would have the resources to implement a business rule management system. The issue is compounded by the fact that many of our processes and technologies are outsourced to external vendors in systems that are very external to our operations, and bounded to us only by daily reports that we receive from them.

We've done a good job of capturing rules in a number of places:

• forms (both internal and external)
• company wiki and Intranet
• internal spreadsheets and tools
• tacit knowledge (the worst way to store business rules - in people's heads)

We have a large number of daily processes that we run, e.g. moving funds to the custodians, setting up accounts, processing trades, etc. We manage these processes by assigning responsibility to individuals within the firm to ensure that they happen each day. We've documented the processes extensively on our wiki, but despite that, it's easy in the heat of a busy day to forget the smaller tasks or to ignore the myriad of rules and regulations involved in a heavily regulated business.

I recently came across an article in the New Yorker which inspired me to revisit the idea of business rules, but embedding them into checklists. Author Atul Gawande highlights the effectiveness of simple checklists in improving the outcome for medical patients. I think we can do a lot in our business by utilizing checklists more than we currently do, and by embedding our business rules in the checklists.

Unfortunately it means one more place for business rules to exist (and ultimately another place to update the rules when they change), but it does put the rules close to the action or point of decision.