The Business Agility equation

I have been working with the portal concept and building people-centric Rich Internet Applications (RIA)s in both a SAP and Microsoft environment for more than 12 years and have participated in approx. 20 major portal projects. Some of the arguments for doing the projects were to enable a platform that over time could help provide process consistency and overall process visibility. Other arguments were the desire to include new user groups and provide a rich user experience or to achieve extensive collaboration within and outside the company or organization. These were just some of the arguments and I'm sure you could add additional ones from you interaction with various customers.

Phase one for these projects normally included some news functionality, collaboration either being Collaboration Rooms, Team Sites, Taxonomy folders or document folders with collaborative features etc. in addition to this, some vendor-developed RIAs were added and finally some custom development provided as webparts or iViews or other elements. Normally this first phase only covered about 5-10 percent of the platforms potential. In real life the vision was very hard to fulfill. So why was this so difficult to achieve?  This is the question, which made me wonder and finally ended up in a concept I call the Business Agility equation. The equation itself has evolved over the last 5 years as a result of many interesting discussions with customers and colleagues. It took its beginning after I did an article with the title ‘Portal and ERP Systems’ together with a brilliant colleague Hans Christian Ove. In this article we defined two concepts ‘Change Inertia’ and ‘Process Inertia’ these two concepts have become part of the equation and will be explained in this post.

 If you want to achieve increased business agility by utilizing the potential in a portal platform or people-centric build RIA whether it is a composite application or mash-up you need to take a number of factors into consideration. This is where the agility equation comes into play.

The equation gives you an indication of how effectively and speedy you are able to meet the business challenges in an agile way when providing content or functionality in an IT environment. Let me walk you through it.

The Business Agility equation

Business Agility

As describe above the Business Agility factor is an indicator of how effectively and speedy you are able to meet the business challenges. The higher value the better it is.

SkillsINV

The Skillsinv factor is an indication of how skilled the business is when it comes to innovation and how well the business understands the IT tool box available.

SkillsDEL

The SkillsDEL factor is an indicator of how skilled the organization is in delivering the project meaning technical, conceptual and associated skills.

InformationQuality

This factor is an indicator of how high the quality of the information or data is, available for the desired solution. The higher value the better it is.

InformationUpdateSpeed

This factor is an indicator of how fast relevant information becomes available. The closer to real-time the better it is.

Quantity

This factor is an indicator on how much relevant information or data is available. The higher value the better it is.

Accessibility

This factor is an indicator on how accessible the information or data is though one or more devices, infrastructure and how well the information is orchestrated and put into the right context also covering user-experience(UX) and user-interface(UI).

Change inertia

The change inertia factor refers to a situation in which changes become cumbersome, or are avoided completely, due to the fact that the underlying systems cannot be changed or adapted without the allocation of significant resources. The lower value the better it is.

Process inertia

The process inertia factor refers to a situation in which the actual implementation of a process results in the use of a disproportionate amount of time on navigation between the systems and information which are integral features of the process. The lower value the better it is.

The skills factors impact on the equation and the Business Agility

In short if there is no or very limited Business Innovation skills available in the organization the factor will be very low and this will have an impact on the skills expression in total. You can have as many as any skilled developers, infrastructure people, process integrators, conceptual people etc. but with little impact since the skills are limited or non existing on the Business Innovation side. No requirements will flow to the delivering side of this expression.

This part of the equation defines the maximum size of the business information potential. First adding up the information factors the quality, the updatespeed and the quantity. The higher these values are the better. After adding up the information factors we multiply them with the accessibility factor to determine the final size of the cake. It shows us that although the three information factors scores high the end result of the numerator become very low if the information or data is hard to get at.

Finally the denominator is a sum of the change inertia factor and the process inertia factor. The lower this sum is the better.
So in brief,

To maximize your agility as a company or organization, you need:

1. Better quality, updatespeed and quantity on your information or data.
2. Easy access to it.
3. Low values on change and process inertia.
4. Better business innovation and delivering skills.

I hope you got something out of this article. I often use the equation when I'm in a manageable way having to assess and explain the potential of a particular business idea. It can also be used for a comprehensive discussion of an IT strategy in a SOA scenario or as a basis for dialog on where you can use you limited resources and still maximize the overall business agility