James Taylor's Decision Management

In An executive take on the top business trends: A McKinsey Global Survey the folks at McKinsey present some compelling evidence that the pace of change really is increasing like we (business rules people) say it is. Some key points:

• Vast majority of executives say their companies are facing a more competitive environment than they were five years ago - 85% say "more" or "much more"
• Executives around the world see innovation and the free flow of information as the primary drivers of an accelerating pave of change in the global business environment
• Second most important factor in the rate of change is "Greater ease of obtaining information, developing knowledge"
• Risk preparation is generally not great with only regulatory change, currency change and economic slowdown really planned for

So in this changing environment what can you do?

1. Build for change, build-in agility

• Use business rules to develop more agile systems and to give your processes decision agility
• Renovate high-change parts of your legacy systems to use rules to improve their responsiveness and reduce costs
• Focus on change-time not build-time

• Build predictive models from your data to help you decide what to do, don't just analyze your data for the fun of it
• Use your data to segment and target your customers and give yourself a competitive edge over your competitors (who don't have your data after all)

• Build rulesets that reflect how you might behave if a given situation arises. Then you can just swap those rules in if it happens
• Build risk models into your transactions using predictive analytics
• Think about how you might change your risk profile in different circumstances and use a segmented modeling approach to develop rules and models for each

You have to be able to change faster. Technology, business rules and other decision technology in particular, can help.