Business rules type on legalizing the product/service and the business rules

If you offer something for sale, you always need to consider legal issues connected to it.

There are three types of these issues to consider in respect to your product/service.

The ones connected with the information and regulations of its use needed for production/creation of the given product or service,
those related to the certification of the product/service itself, when it is ready to be launched, and
the information about the product displayed to the customer, which includes the price.

I would say that all products and services need to take into account all these three factors.

Let’s take a novel as an example. Even in the “fictionest” case of fiction, you would have certain standards to adhere to. Both in respect to the genre you write in (there is always a limit to the weirdness of the genre mixture that even the “craziest” of the readers would accept and be willing to pay for), and also to how you use the works of others in your fiction. Even the tiniest attempt of plagiarism cannot live and bring any profit for too long. In the growing transparency of our world all stealing attempts become more and more obvious.

If you want to follow a fair play, then there are rules to this game. For example, here is how The Chicago Manual of Style, the guide, which most respectable writers and editors follow and refer to, defines the “Fair Use” of the information created by someone else, as following: “Fair use is use that is fair — simply that.”

There are of course more details to the definition and more rules to follow.

Let’s consider the second aspect of legal matters listed above. When you publish a book, you claim copyright, have an ISBN number given to it, put the corresponding title and attributes, like publisher name and couple other.

Not all of the details attributed to your product or service will be visible to and needed for the customer to see. In case of a book, a customer can access such information as ISBN, or publisher name or other, but they rarely do consider it. The most important they look at are the book cover, the title, the author’s name, the book description, and among some additional other of course the price.

Even standards themselves follow the same scheme.

For example, my favourite technical standard to date, S1000D® (International specification for technical publications using a common source data base) lists to all the other standards and specifications it refers to in its definitions. Then there is a certain and official way how a new Issue of this specification is released. Each change goes through the review of national and international groups, panels and boards, then it is approved by the Steering Committee, the decisions of which often need the ratification by the Council.

The users of S1000D do not have to pay anything to get hold of a package with the specification text and all the data structures intended to facilitate its implementation. But they have to follow certain terms and conditions in order to be able to download one or another issue of the specification. They are obliged for example to agree to those terms and conditions by typing a generated code and clicking a confirmation button.

The same is true for many on-line services. And for many personal services with a storefront as well.

Many service providers will need to provide upon request the certificates confirming their professionalism. Lawyers, accountants, and translators are just some of the numerous obvious examples.

And as often in the articles describing business rules types in this blog, here is a surprise. Not only the products and services have legal issues to be clarified for them. The business rules describing them need to be legalized as well.

If you consider the contract you sign with your customers and partners as a part of your business rules documentation (which they are!) then this need becomes obvious. But even the parts meant for “mere” guidance of the personnel responsible for fabricating the whole or part of your product or carrying out the service, need to be reviewed and approved. Again, communication is vital here.

Business rules are a dynamic (not static!) set of documents. But you still need to release (or at least decide upon) them in first version and review and update them on regular basis.

Even for a self-publisher setting up the rules is very helpful. I didn’t record clearly all the parameters of formatting and publishing my first novel, so that I had to research some of them anew and re-read the books and articles in order to find the information needed. In some cases this didn’t cost too much time, in some this time could have been saved, have I recorded them somewhere. So for the second book I took more notes, although in some cases my mind did trick me into thinking, “Since it won’t take so much time until I publish my third book as it took me for the second, I will remember this and therefore I don’t need to record this.” I bet now that I will forget and research again. And maybe with the fifth or fifteenth book, I will have all my major and common business rules in place.

This is not so critical in case of a sole player in a small project and business. But as soon as you have partners, you need to share and agree upon certain rules. For example, if you are also a self-publishing author, then your cover designer must know what dimensions the cover will have, and also remember that the proportions for the e-book cover will differ from the proportions of the front cover of a paperback. Simple rescaling might not be enough, rearranging of images anew might be necessary to achieve a presentable result. You as the product/service originator and provider have the responsibility to take care of this.

You might not need a stamp from each of your partners on the rules, upon which you agree, but I join into the common advice and recommend keeping all the rules and the agreements upon them in written form. Even just an e-mail exchange with an OK as the final answer is better than no record at all. It is human to forget, so it is a part of being kind and taking care of all participating in shaping up your product/service (including yourself and the customers) to have all recorded comprehensively and correctly, as well as, as accessible for reference as possible.