Now, I was speaking to our Product Architect yesterday. He was saying that we need business rules technology to solve the problems arising out of H-Commerce. Now, what in the world is H-Commerce?

When we think and of business systems, I have noticed that we generally think in terms of computers, software systems, databases, business processes, warehouses, SOA, Information Management Systems, ERP and other countless other words.

But, you canNot really ignore that there are people out there, and are very much a very big part of every equation.

Now, H-Commerce is essentially the sum of the following.

1. H2B - Human to Business Interactions
2. H2C - Human to Customer Interactions
3. H2H - Human to Human Interactions

People take a zillion business decisions everyday. These decisions involve interactions with their business systems, with other people in their environment, with customers.

So,the big question is how do they take their business decisions everyday? And how can you operationalize & automate these business decisions? In most cases, they rely on tacit knowledge, or training or regular tools like Excel to assist them.

Here are some of the Gaps that need to be addressed given this scenario.

You need to be able to operationalize and automate all these day to day operational business decisions

A lot of employee time is wasted because they get lost in their day to day work. They get lost in the Moment. How much time is really spent on trying to improve how their decisions are made. If decision execution is automated, then one can concentrate on Decision Improvement.

A lot of organizational and business knowledge resides as tacit knowledge in people’s heads, in manuals, in emails and so on. How does the Business institutionalize all this knowledge and make it reusable and generally available?

A lot of lessons learnt are available in Analytics Reports from Systems like SAS. But, how do these lessons learnt get back into the system? Again, the organization has to rely on people to exercise judgement. Again, this decision making knowledge is locked up in a form that is difficult to retain and reuse.

Are you sure that your Customer Service Functions are reliable, consistent and accurate across the Enterprise and across different channels? How are you centralizing service delivery strategy, while ensuring consistent execution?

In many organizations, policy interpretation and understanding across the Enterprise might be an issue. Given this scenario,how will one provide for a Consistent and Uniform Policy Deployment across the Enterprise?

These are all difficult questions, and beyond a point are independent of technology itself. And you would need better models or should I call them patterns of integrating your applications, current datastores across the organization, business processes and people.