James Taylor's Decision Management

I am attending the Brainstorm BPM/SOA/Rules event in Washington DC this week and blogging as I go.

Next session was Tom Debevoise on BPM/BR Method: Critical Success Factor for the Agile Enterprise. Tom is the author of book on Business Process Management with a Business Rules Approach and has a blog. Much of Tom's talk was pretty similar to stuff about which I blog as he tackled what rules and processes offer in terms of agility and what are the characteristics of business agility.

He argued that agility is driven by a need to save time (the scarcest resource), new economic forces such as globalization and outsourcing, Tom discussed how one can measure one's agility by mapping to several areas in a business and describing them in terms of the time from instantiation through recognition, solution development to actual implementation.

Tom discussed how both the management theory of BPM and the technology of BPM affect agility and he described business rules as a way to mediate the information in the process flows and then walked through how this would improve your agility e.g. by eliminating the need to train someone in something by using rules to automate it. How much agility would this add to an organization that had to hire and train people often? He argued further that more atomic process definitions will help with agility, moving towards an SOA-based approach to designing an organization where rules-based services are orchestrated to deliver processes that were needed.

Tom asked the audience the question if they were using new technology to generate old-style stovepipes and silos? He suggested building rules for scenarios like catastrophes and "rainy days", designing for more configurable processes and building rulesets ready for change over etc. He also discussed the lack of a good metric for agility and that only subjective analysis, such as that used in manufacturing is currently available. Focuses on these metrics of agility should inform the way you approach BPM and rules.

Technorati Tags: agility, BPM, BPMS, BRE, BRMS, Business Process Management, Business Rules