Successful businesses can quickly address new opportunities and challenges. This requires that the applications that automate and control these processes can themselves be efficiently realigned. However, as applications age, they tend to grow more complex and less well understood. As a result, the core business logic of these systems becomes progressively more difficult to locate and adjust.

Over time, rules become progressively more obscured within the application code. This increases the time required for developers to analyze their systems before they can modify any given process. Without proper attention to the complex interactions within their applications, developers jeopardize the stability of the company's processes.

This also means that business rules cannot be rapidly modified to suit changing circumstances. Business users are forced to wait for IT resources to become available before changes can be made. Further, as business process changes become more frequent, IT resources will be increasingly devoted to modifying the buried rules and not focused on higher value activities.