Jim SinurI find that almost every business and IT professional that I run into these days mentions the “A” word during the course of any discussion. Agility seems to be on everyone’s mind with the economic dramas being played out in front us. Not only are people wondering about reactive agility, but proactive agility in light of seeing the world not really ready for what is still unfolding. I think the set of events we are seeing will engender another set of discussions around scenario planning and the linking of these scenarios to human and system actions.
We are seeing agility in the managing of “heads down” process workers in the form of adjustable flow rules, changeable goals and performance tolerances, adjustable escalation rules and adjustable governance constraints etc. in BPM implementations. We are also seeing the upgrade of supporting systems to include agility in the forms of combinations of adjustable flows, rules and services leveraged on top of an adjustable infrastructure. The possibilities for dynamic adaptation are exciting and mind boggling for me, at least.
What seems to be missing in this agility story is a concern for managing it. I think this comes through the establishment of a business rules management strategy supported by a business rule management system (BRMS). We have documented the requirements for this emerging technology that promises to store crafted scenarios and their links to the business rules and constraints necessary to manage agility in a proactive manner. I think it is time to move from slow and reactive response to change to managed near real time change. The BRMS will be instrumental in this emerging change.
Category: Business Process Improvement Business Rules Tags: Business Process Improvement, Business Rules
10 responses so far ↓
1 Rashid Khan October 15, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I think you hear a lot about agility only because it has beome a buzz word. It is so commonly used in analyst circles that people feel compelled to use it when talking to a Gartner analyst.
On a macro scale, the economic mess we are in is a clear, big indication that the financial services industry is no where close to agility. The problem has been festering for years. This is the industry with supposedly the best IT infrastructure: BPM, BAM, BI, BRMS.. you name it. And yet it took years for it to fester and explode.. and no one saw it coming. Or if they it coming they did not know what to do about it. It goes to show that if the rules are crappy and the motivation is skewed, no amount of BPM, BI, BRMS will provide agility.
2 Rashid Khan October 15, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Jim
Please ask your Web master to increase the font size of the comments field and provide some more space so that people like me do not have to squint while typing comments. I think that will encourage more comments, Try writing a comment yourself..
3 Brian Hellauer October 15, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Thanks for the feedback re the comments field. We are looking into it.
4 Jim Sinur October 15, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Rashid,
I agree about the font size issue, but thanks for the comments anyways. Agility is a topic that clients brought up before we may have added our brand behind it. From a personal experience perspective, my business partners at NML & AMEX were demanding faster response.
Jim
5 Dan Sholler October 17, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Isn’t there an old adage that says you cannot manage what you cannot measure? We have done some work around measuring agility (see Defining, Cultivating and Measuring Enterprise Agility )
To measure IT agility, I have not seen a precise metric, but I have spoken with a number of organizations that are looking at general heuristic measures to get trend indications. Simple things like measuring the time and cost to make changes of a certain scale (small, medium, large) will not give you precision, but over time you can get a clear indication of direction.
6 James Taylor October 21, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Jim
I remember reading a number of pieces on agility that you and your colleagues posted some while ago and I tried to summarize what I saw as the differences between process agility and decision agility.
Hope it helps
JT
Author, with Neil Raden, of Smart (Enough) Systems
7 Nick Jones October 29, 2008 at 5:03 am
Isn’t “managed agility” a bit of an oxymoron? If you knew what was going to happen in the future then you’d have a plan for it and could prepare processes, systems etc. The reason you need agility is because you’re operating in territory where the future is unguessable or at best you have a very short term window into it. So maybe it’s not classical “management” so much as riding the tiger and hoping it goes in roughly the right direction without eating you. Traditional metrics based management may be less useful, because you only know what you should have measured after it happened. Do BPM people have aterm for this style of management?
8 Jim Sinur October 29, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Nick,
Really sharp business folks manage agility in a couple of ways. One is to set constraints, so the agility is bounded. The other is practice scenario plannning, so that there are anticpated needs for agility with preprepared rules on the shelf, ready to go. These two approaches can help guide agility, so maybe the word is guide. Guiding is a form a management, certainly not manical in nature by any means.
Jim
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