Great article on Agile Compliance - James Taylor's Decision Management

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March 21, 2007
Great article on Agile Compliance

Hugh Taylor (no relation) has just had a great article on Agile Compliance published by Align. Not only am I quoted in it, always a sure sign of a top-flight article, it makes some great points about delivering agility in an era of compliance. You should read the article if you work in an industry with compliance challenges.

Hugh talks about a McKinsey study from 2006 (blogged about here) that discussed agility and showed that business executives thought agility was important but did not see how IT helped. Now, like Hugh, I believe that IT must become an enabler for agility while still ensuring systems are compliant. Hugh recommends an SOA platform, as do I, for this but I would explicitly recommend using business process and business rules for compliance. Part of the reason for this is the need for business and IT alignment (tricky thanks to the different perspectives of IT and the business).

Hugh talks about strategic, operational and functional agility and I believe that both operational and functional agility require decision automation because your systems are your business in a very real way these days. If you cannot change the systems, and do so faster than your competitors, you will be in trouble.

I have blogged and written on this topic a fair bit including this piece on business agility in regulated industries, this one on self regulation by companies, another on SOA and decision automation and finally some notes on Gartner's view on agility.

Business rules make you more, not less, flexible

I reviewed Hugh's book, The Joy of Sox, here. It's good.

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