Many times, we justify development or enhancement to a new system based on the cost to develop, test, and so on. When taking a Decision focus (see post about Smart Enough Systems book), we have the opportunity to drill into specifid business decisions that are part of a system and to identify the cost/risk/benefit of these decisions being done properly and in a manageable (dare I say, agile?) way.

As a simple example, consider a (fictitious) loan application process or system. Suppose one of the decisions in that process flow is to determine how likely the loan applicant is to default on a loan. Also, assume that business criteria evaluated to make this decision include: amount of requested loan, amount of downpayment, income of applicant's household, applicant's current debt, and so on.

We want to make sure this decision (in the flow) is done extremely well and easily changed so we may put a BRE in place (or not).

But, in scoping, we can assess that decision today. Maybe we find out that applicants who put down a downpayment < 10% of the loan, often (75% of the time) over-estimate their household income and cost us $100k in unpaid loan payments per quarter.

By focusing on the decision (not the entire system or its flow), we can carry out analytics (again, see Smart Enough Systems) to help us give an ROI to fine-tuning that decision. If we can put better rules in place and save the $100k/quarter, we have $400k annually in savings.

Sometimes, the analysis of just one major decision within a major development project may justify the project. It requires understanding the notion of Decision (as it fits into a process or system), its criteria, ways of evaluating current state of that decision, and new ways of measuring the improvements after the new rules are in place.

Is anyone doing this kind of ROI today, whether using a BRE or not?