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September 25, 2008

Ten Rules for Wall Street

Ten Rules for Wall Street

What are the rules? Did people break the rules, bend the rules, or ignore the rules?

Confidence in Wall Street went down the drain last week. The credit crisis gave business a bad name, and it gave government a bad name for not doing anything about it. Trust disappeared. 

It's time to rebuild trust in business and government.

Here are ten rules for restoring trust in business and government. These rules apply to everything from the global financial system, to Wall Street; from federal governments to local jurisdictions; from global corporations, to organizations and small businesses.

Companies that learn to define transparent rules that are sensible, consistent, easy to understand, and easy to follow will be easy trust. On the other hand, companies that rely on opaque rules that are complicated, confusing, illogical, inconsistent, or deceptive will be hard to trust. They will go out of business.

Rule 10 - Have guiding principles. Act on principles, independent of influence by greed or friends.

Rule 9 - Follow policies and guidelines about what is permissible and what will not be tolerated.

Rule 8 - Establish rules of behavior concerning what is right and wrong. Success in business depends on understanding the rules. The rules of the business are the way the business really operates. Design transparent rules that are logical, sensible, easy to understand, and easy to follow.

Rule 7 - Leverage knowledge and judgment. Know what you know, and know what you don't know. Document and retain what your experts know and how they think so their knowledge can be shared with those who need to know. Use wise judgment. Know when to follow the rules, when to bend them, and when to forget them.

Rule 6 - Make smart decisions informed by facts, rules, knowledge, principles, and judgment. Decide using clear, logical, and unbiased rules that explain each decision clearly. Use sound reasoning to make rules-based, principles-based, and knowledge-based decisions.

Rule 5 - Create enterprise architecture to deal with change and complexity. Use architecture to simplify complexity, and to understand how the whole business and the whole system works; Understand who, what, when, where, why, and how. Design the architecture to ensure that all the parts fit (interoperability), connect (integration), work (quality), work as intended (alignment), last (reliability), and can be shared (reusability). Design the architecture so the business can handle increases in complexity and increases in the rate of change (flexibility). Design the architecture to reduce time-to-market and reduce operating costs. Design the architecture to support rules-based and principles-based compliance.

Rule 4 - Do the engineering, to design systems that work, change, and last. Apply architecture and engineering design principles to ensure alignment, flexibility, quality, interoperability, integration, reusability, reliability, compliance, reduced time-to-market, and reduced costs. Build in risk management safety factors so the business and the systems can handle extreme stresses and excessive loads.

Rule 3 - Have a clear vision. Stand for brand.

Rule 2 - Instill confidence. Improve the quality, consistency, and accuracy of decisions and actions.

Rule 1 - Build trust. Align actions, decisions, and transactions with management's intentions. Align execution to goals, strategy, and mission. Align systems to business. Align implementation to intention.

Sept. 25, 2008   Rolando Hernandez   BIZRULES

March 13, 2008

Introducing the BIZRULES® RuleMap™

Documenting business rules is a good first step on the path towards the business rules approach.

But sometimes that's not enough.  Taking the next step and getting to the next level requires simulating business rules so they are easy to review and verify.

Over the past few months BIZRULES has been working on a new product that lets us do both. It's a visual tool that lets us not only draw diagrams of business rule models, it also lets us simulate the rule logic. This tool helps us speed up the rules harvesting process and improves the quality of our rulebooks.

BIZRULES® RuleMap™ is an interactive rulebook that models business rules and simulates business logic.  This logical model lets you see how your business rules really work. It lets you visualize the Reasoning Chain™ that leads to smart conclusions and right decisions.


We use this tool to document your business rules independent of any BRE - yet it can be implemented using any BRE. Again, this is a logical model of your business rules.  It can be used as the rulebook or specs for authoring the rules in any BRE.

Take a look at a sample RuleMap. And let us know what you think. Contact us for pricing or a web demo.

 

 

Visible Knowledge LLC helps companies prevent Brain Drain

10,000 baby boomers are retiring today.

10,000 more will retire next Monday. And Tuesday. And so on. That's the way it's going to be for the next 20 years. Key personnel and subject matter experts with 20 to 30 years of experience are going to clear their desk and head down to Florida. As they walk out the door, invaluable corporate knowledge will simply disappear.

Intellectual capital, a vital corporate asset, will melt away unless companies do something to stop the brain drain and to retain critical knowledge.

Visible Knowledge LLC (www.visibleknowledge.com) has a solution:

  • An interactive RuleMap™ that models business rules & simulates business logic
  • An interactive Expertise Blueprint™ that transforms knowledge into Visible Knowledge™
  • A Legacy Interview(sm) 

Visible Knowledge helps companies retain vital corporate knowledge before it melts away. They focus on documenting invaluable critical knowledge from your top domain experts and key personnel, before they retire. It can take companies years and millions of dollars to recover from losing this type of knowledge.

A traditional exit interview is just not enough when you're dealing with subject matter experts or super experts. So Visible Knowledge has developed a Legacy Interview(sm) process that extracts and documents critical knowledge before experts leave or retire. They use a rapid knowledge acquisition process to extract maximum amount of knowledge in a minimum amount of time. Visible Knowledge focuses on capturing critical knowledge.

If Know It All Ken just gave you two weeks notice, and he's the only one who knows how to fix the $5 million widget making machine, Visible Knowledge can help. They can spend a few days with Ken and document the crucial knowledge you need to keep the business running.  

If Super Expert Sally is retiring in a few months, Visible Knowledge can spend a few weeks with her to elicit as much vital and critical knowledge as possible before she leaves.

If your entire Dept of Super Experts is retiring next year, Visible Knowledge can work with your team over the next few months or years to document the critical knowledge you need to retain.

Later, if you need to automate the knowledge that was captured and retained, companies like BIZRULES can help you do that. BIZRULES works with leading knowledge software vendors to design and build knowledge-based and rule-based solutions.

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