Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Post Before Processing

In Talk to the Hand, Saul Caganoff describes his experiences of error entering his timesheet data into one of those time-recording systems many of us have to use. He goes on to draw some general lessons about error-handing in business process management (BPM). In Saul's account, this might sometimes necessitate suspending a business rule.

My own view of the problem starts further back - I think it stems from an incorrect conceptual model. Why should your perfectly reasonable data get labelled as error or invalid just because it is inconsistent with your project manager's data? This happens in a lot of old bureaucratic systems because they are designed on the implicit (hierarchical, top-down) assumption that the manager (or systems designer) is always right and the worker (or data entry clerk) is always the one that gets things wrong. It's also easier for the computer system to reject the new data items, rather than go back and question items (such as reference data) that have already been accepted into the database.

I prefer to label such inconsistencies as anomalies, because that doesn't imply anyone in particular being at fault.

It would be crazy to have a business rule saying that anomalies are not allowed. Anomalies happen. What makes sense is to have a business rule saying how and when anomalies are recognized (i.e. what counts as an anomaly) and resolved (i.e. what options are available to whom).

Then you never have to suspend the rule. It is just a different, more intelligent kind of rule.

One of my earliest experiences of systems analysis was designing order processing and book-keeping systems. When I visited the accounts department, I saw people with desks stacked with piles of paper. It turned out that these stacks were the transactions that the old computer system wouldn't accept, so the accounts clerks had developed a secondary manual system for keeping track of all these invalid transactions until they could be corrected and entered.

According to the original system designer, the book-keeping process had been successfully automated. But what had been automated was over 90% of the transactions - but less than 20% of the time and effort. So I said, why don't we build a computer system that supports the work that the accounts clerks actually do. Let them put all these dodgy transactions into the database and then sort them out later.

But I was very junior and didn't know how things were done. And of course the accounts clerks had even less status than I did. The high priests who commanded the database didn't want mere users putting dodgy data in, so it didn't happen.


Many years later, I came across the concept of Post Before Processing, especially in military or medical systems. If you are trying to load or unload an airplane in a hostile environment, or trying to save the life of a patient, you are not going to devote much time or effort to getting the paperwork correct. So all sorts of incomplete and inaccurate data get shoved quickly into the computer, and then sorted out later. These systems are designed on the principle that it is better to have some data, however incomplete or inaccurate, than none at all. This was a key element of the DoD Net-Centric Data Strategy (2003).

The Post Before Processing paradigm also applies to intelligence. For example, here is a US Department of Defense ruling on the sharing of intelligence data.
In the past, intelligence producers and others have held information pending greater completeness and further interpretative processing by analysts. This approach denies users the opportunity to apply their own context to data, interpret it, and act early on to clarify and/or respond. Information producers, particularly those at large central facilities, cannot know even a small percentage of potential users' knowledge (some of which may exceed that held by a center) or circumstances (some of which may be dangerous in the extreme). Accordingly, it should be the policy of DoD organizations to publish data assets at the first possible moment after acquiring them, and to follow-up initial publications with amplification as available. Net-Centric Enterprise Services Technical Guide


See also

Saul Caganoff, Talk to the Hand (11 November 2008), Progressive Data Constraints (21 November 2008)

Jeff Jonas, Introducing the concept of network-centric warfare and post before processing (21 January 2006), The Next Generation of Network-Centric Warfare: Process at Posting or Post at Processing (Same thing) (31 January 2007)(

Related Post: Progressive Design Constraints (November 2008)

1 comment:

  1. Hi Richard, thanks for your comments on my earlier post. This has inspired me to write a little more about other situations where different rules may apply throughout the data management lifecycle. Master Data Management and distributed CAD systems come immediately to mind. And I think similar ideas can be applied to design-time governance processes in SOA. For example, the design of schemas and service interfaces.

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