James Taylor's Decision Management

Michael Hugos had a nice post over on CIO magazine - Six Techniques Lie at the Heart of IT Agility

It is an interesting list. I am not sure I would add to it so much as make some observations:

• JAD
  Managing the rules of your business like they are requirements is a bad idea - rules are not requirements. Using JAD techniques (and others) to develop rules and requirements in parallel is a good one.
• Process Mapping
  One of the key elements in good process design is the effective and systematic identification of decisions that impact that process and the consideration of those as separate opportunities for automation.
• Data Modeling
  As the power of predictive analytics grows, it is no longer enough for programmers to analyze data in traditional ways, they must learn what kind of predictions can be made from the data, what insight can be gained from it, and how that might be used in their application.
• System Prototyping
  Prototyping code is important but so is identifying the pieces of the application  or service that change all the time and creating an environment in which the business users can do the evolving of that component, not IT.
• Object or Service-Oriented design and programming
  Decisions can be a little orthogonal to objects and decision services deserve to be considered as a separate class of service.
• System testing and rollout
  The value of testing is highest when the people who understand the business are engaged in the testing of the business logic and this takes the approaches noted above. Rollout is also the beginning, and not the end, of an application's life and the whole process up to that point needs to remember that this is the case. Change-time is coming.