Jim Sinur

Processes are quite often the first place exceptions show up in an organization. These exceptions might indicate a need to either trigger a pre-planned scenario or initiate more scenario planning. If these processes are agility enabled and/or unstructured, organizations can use these same processes to respond to emerging conditions.

Watching for Strong Signals (Proactive Style)

Processes that are running on agile BPM engine that have their own activity monitoring capabilities or play well with stand alone activity monitoring, are in a position to detect the measures that may indicate the presence of an emerging scenario. Processes enabled with complex event processing (CEP), organizations can take sensing to a higher level of sophistication than just human recognition of potential scenarios. Success, of course, depends on having pre-defined scenarios that have well thought out responses that may leverage policy and rule changes (see http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/02/scenario-planning-is-no-longer-optional/). Organization might have probes into market indices and watch the behaviors of customers, partners and regions.

Sensing Weak Signals (Reactive Style)

This is a little trickier in that these signals and or combination of signals may indeed be subtle and infrequent. Generally there are no known patterns to look for and there may be few optimization algorithms that can be used to sense impending need for further watching and action. Predictive analytics, genetic algorithms and complexity theory can add some insight, but there are few of these techniques aimed at sensing for business impact today. When outlying conditions send foreshadowing indicators, the recognition of opportunities or threats is difficult and the time to react may not allow a new scenario planning cycle. I expect this to be an evolving set of disciplines supported by evolving sets of technologies.