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Most of you will have seen recent news about GEICO being sued for discrimination - Blacks Sue GEICO For Race Discrimination In Auto Insurance Rates for example. For those of you who aren't familiar, GEICO is being sued for discrimination on the basis that its use of education and occupation in determining insurance rates means that Blacks are often charged more than whites with the same driving record. I don't want to comment on the case but it does illustrate one of the key reasons why business agility is so key, especially in regulated industries.

Let's say that the suit is successful against GEICO, or even that it looks like it might be. If a company has hard-coded its use of education or occupation or any other property of a customer that has a significantly different distribution between races then it is going to be under the gun for changing its code. All the places in the code where that's used must be found and it must be removed. Statistical analysis must also be done to determine the impact on rates etc. One imagines that anyone continuing to use such measure if and when they were found to be illegal would be doubly exposed.

If, on the other hand, I have coded these potentially regulated rules in a business rules management system so that I have them in one place, managed as a corporate asset and structured to allow those with business/legal expertise to edit them, then I am in a much better place. I can quickly find the rules that are impacted (using repository tools increasingly common in leading products) and change them without any IT involvement before pushing them rapidly through testing and into production. Business agility enabling compliance.

This also illustrates why compliance is not something that can be assumed to run on a legislative schedule. Just because the law changes only slowly or periodically does not mean that a court case cannot force you to change your rules of doing business more or less instantly.

One last thing - you want to make sure that any business rules management system you use let's you control what kinds of things can be used in which rules so that you can make sure not to allow business users to accidentally include checks that are illegal. This requires some kind of templating and edit control approach not just a business rules free-for-all.

I have blogged on similar topics on my EDM Blog a few times - notably here and here, though the second one is mostly a link to an ebizQ article - Is business agility an Oxymoron?

Posted by jtaylor in Business Agility • Compliance |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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Posted by: Mark Peterson at April 6, 2006 12:03 PM