Carole Ann Matignon is presenting on KPIs and rules.

Doing things as we used to won’t work anymore. We can’t ask an IT developer to come in and do “his magic” to fix something in the system. We actually need to build the systems for agility and empower business users.

Empowering the business user is not easy, it can be a painful process because it requires a change in paradigm. Once empowered, the business users become very powerful. Once empowered, “who watches them”?

Does agility necessarily lead to better business performance? That was the idea, but things are usually different.Enterprise Architects are empowered, but it takes “super powers” to control it all. No control (or supervision) could lead to disaster.

Assuming business users are empowered, some safeguards might already be in place with some rule verification, rule validation and possibly some governance processes in place. But the added value comes from KPIs.

KPIs are there to allow to measure the impact of a change before it goes in production. Simulations allow you to gather information to calculate your KPIs. KPIs will vary based on your business. What metrics make sense in your industry?

If we take this one step further, we are then looking at Decision Modeling. It allows you to make predictions on your company bottom line and perform some sensitivity analysis.

You can use a “Champion-Challenger” approach to make a percentage of your population go through a challenger set of rules and to use that information to compare with the rules that are your original rules and this allows you to compare results and perform analysis on the effects of new rules. This is an approach that can be used instead of a big bang approach. You limit your risk that way.

To enable this, you need an Architecture that enables KPIs.

Very interesting presentation. Carole Ann actually gave me some ideas that I might try using in one of my projects.