Premise and Conclusion

Extreme Business Agility ~ Part 3
Examples of Non-Agile vs. Agile Business Capabilities

by Ronald G. Ross

I am a collector by nature.  I freely confess it.  When I was young I collected fossils from my grandparents' ranch.  Well, I did at least until the attic of our house began to sag and my parents laid down the law (true story).  I collected baseball cards — I had both Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris in the famous 1961 homerun season.  (Sadly they somehow disappeared when I went off to college.)  In the late 1980s and early 1990s I collected business rules (yes, that's right!).  Many but by no means all of them ended up in the two editions of The Business Rule Book (1994, 1997).  These days I collect sand from every beach I go to.  (Ever compare sands from different beaches?  Fascinating!)

Recently, I've started a new collection.  How can you understand what true business agility is about unless you have a rich set of examples to work from?  So in this month's column, I've decided to share some of the best ones I've collected to date.  Can you see patterns emerging?  By the way, I always have room for more in my collection — fortunately, this one's digital, not rocks.  So if you've got some good ones, send them along!

Airlines — Food Service

Source:  Taken from "Branson's Flight Plan," Time Magazine, April 28, 2008, pp. 40-43.

Comment:  I can relate!

Financial Services — Credit Card Fraud Detection

The scoop:

• The bad guys pick up and move shop from Idaho to Manhattan.
• Transactions deemed suspicious by zip code yield a 10x increase in volume.
• Suspicious transactions are kicked out to fraud specialists for manual inspection.
• Fraud specialists are an expensive and non-scalable resource.
• Additional selection criteria (e.g., location of store, type of store, frequency of use, size of transaction, etc.) must be introduced to keep the volume of kick-outs relatively constant.

*Testing of assumptions and simulation by the business side is still required.

Comment:  This company told us that they have more than recouped the cost of a rules engine from the savings from this first application alone(!).

Insurance — Product Offerings

Comment:  Management's goal is to become the "Dell Computer" of insurance, product-wise.