Business software should be an advisor to users, not a dictator above them. Business software boils down to one thing: Business Rules. How business rules are implemented in software is just as important as the rules are themselves. Some applications seek to "enforce" business rules by restricting behaviour until certain information is provided, or sequence of steps have been followed. There are definitely cases where this must certainly be expected to be the case, such as enforcing authentication and authorization to features. However, when applied to business logic this kind of enforcement leads to inflexible and, in some cases, very costly issues.
People generally like dictators at first. Life is pain, they need someone to stimulate the economy, get the trains running on time. When a software system is first designed, the idea of enforcing rules to save time and minimize mistakes is certainly attractive. Unfortunately, software has to evolve as business requirements evolve, and before you know it, your wonderful software application has divided Poland with Microsoft Office, and invaded Czechoslovakia. All you wanted was a system that would bring the efficiency back into your organization, but pretty soon you have a behemoth costing you hours of time, stacks of bug reports, and your business is failing to serve its customer base which is costing you customers.
Enforcing business rules restricts flexibility. Rather than designing software to be an enforcer, design it solely to be a time saver. Ensure that the only mandatory fields are things that ARE mandatory, and if the system can default a bunch of other optional fields, then fine. Someone can always change the values later. Also accept that a certain amount of business logic is best left in people's heads and hearts. Sure, you could define rules, even strive to make them configurable, but in the end keeping the most flexible business rules outside of software is sometimes the best option.
A perfect example of this was brought up today when one developer was querying another about a legacy system for manufacturing. The question was that when orders are received, different products take different amounts of time to manufacture. How does the factory worker know when they need to manufacture each product to get it done by the dispatch date? The answer was, "The floor supervisor decides what to manufacture to ensure everything is done on time." This is based on a report with the various orders and their respective dispatch due dates. It took a few rounds of questions to let this fact sink in. The software system didn't tell them when to manufacture the product, it simply told them what needed to be manufactured and by when, and a person would need to determine what should be done first.
There are an assortment of rules that govern when products get manufactured, and a *lot* of environmental variables involved. I'm sure the first thoughts of this developer would have been along the lines that the rules could be codified so that the software system could calculate and dispatch out work to the factory floor so that products are manufactured by their dispatch date. This would be more efficient and could probably mean they could accept more work or work with fewer staff. But the problem is that you cannot hope to codify *all* variables that are accounted for in the decisions to get work done. Staff being sick or on vacation, whups, need a rostering component. Machine break-downs or services, ah, incident tracking. Last minute order changes, cancellations, or changes in priorities. Stock shortages or quality issues. Issues that can crop up that haven't even happened before. Machines follow very clear an concise rules very effectively, but they cannot adapt to unknown variables like a human being can.
The result of leaving a good chunk of the business rules for producing the product in a person's head means that the actual mechanical work of getting product produced is completely dynamic. The machine simply advises what needs to be done, can make suggestions based on information it can compile, and records the results of the production. If the machine goes down, the data can still be queried, the product produced. The machine is not relied upon, it can be updated once it sorts itself out.
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