Fighting entropy with Metrics in Archer 6.6

Let's talk about entropy. No, I'm serious, we have to talk about it. Entropy is the natural tendency for things to become less organized over time, a natural decay of order and planning that creates chaos and uncertainty. And it is a natural tendency. As the work piles up, the new tasks, the urgent tasks will replace the mundane and old tasks at the top of your conscious mind. They have not become less important, they just are a victim of entropy.

I fight against entropy all the time, we all do. We try to create order and structure through a calendar, a to do list, reminders… Anything can become a tool in the fight against entropy. And that does bring us to a new feature in Archer 6.6, the automated metrics update.

Metrics are a great tool to monitor data, whether is it performance, risk or control data. It can give you a quick snapshot of a situation, it can give you early warning if something is not quite right, it can be used for trending, it has a lot of uses. The issue is that what you get from your metrics program is what you put in. If your metrics are not updated on a regular basis then you won't get anything of value out of them. Entropy is fighting against you, who will remember to go in an update a key indicator when there are ten new tasks to perform?

That is why we leveraged the new rules based enrollment feature in Advanced Workflow to implement an automatic upgrade of key indicators. Based on the update frequency and the last update date, metrics that are past their due update date are now going to be automatically enrolled in a workflow. The metric users will receive a notification, and have a task created for them to update their outstanding metrics. It’s a simple one step process that will ensure the key indicators stay up to date.

The end result is that since metrics will be more reliably up to date, all the information you use them for, dashboard, reports, trends, alerts will also be more up to date and reliable. So will the metrics you decide to feature on a dashboard through the new featured metric feature. The insights you will get from them will be better and timelier. And your fight against entropy will be made easier since there will be no need to chase metrics owners down to get them to update their data.

Now, this is only one illustration of how the new rules based enrollment workflow feature can be used, I am impatient to see what you will actually use it for. What do you think will be the first workflow you build using this?