Tag: PW2012

Setrag Khoshafian, Pega’s VP of BPM Technology, presented a breakout session on intelligent BPM and its use in business transformation. He sees BPMS getting intelligent through dynamic case management for ad hoc, unstructured, collaborative processes, able to handle events and more real-world problems. Pega case management includes the Case Designer and Case Portal for designing and managing all sorts of work, right along the spectrum from structured to unstructured. BPM also gets intelligent through analytics, from historical reports to dashboards to predictive and adaptive BPM; their new unified platform brings predictive analytics together with BPM to make this happen.

I had to duck out early to head for the airport; not much new here that hasn’t been covered in other sessions, but a bit more detail on how they are positioning Pega as iBPM in advance of Gartner’s upcoming intelligent BPMS magic quadrant report.

That’s my last session at PegaWORLD, and I’m headed home to Toronto. After a somewhat grueling schedule of conferences so far this year (PEX, Kofax, Appian, Gartner, IBM, ISIS Papyrus, DST and now Pega), things slow down for a while, with just the IRM BPM conference in London later this month and Social BPM Summer School in Como in July between now and the end of the summer.

I’m in the first breakout session of PegaWORLD day 1, and decided to hear Colleen Dugan and Jeff Gallimore of Zurich Financial Services talk about their underwriting solution implemented on Pega. Their original Pega pilot implementation in 2008 was rolled out in 74 days, which is pretty amazing: I know that all the BPMS vendors claim that you can do this, but few large companies can even get the contract executed in 74 days, much less the first production solution. That was just the beginning, of course: they’ve implemented a number of initiatives across their North American organization since then, and a lot of their success has been due to business change management rather than just the technology.

They initially selected BPM as a technology for their organization for a number of reasons:

• Consistent workflows across the business.
• Realign work with roles, allowing centralization and offshoring; a big part of this was offloading administrative and support tasks from underwriters, allowing them to be more customer-facing.
• Transparency in transactions for improved customer service, which is especially important when the underwriter no longer does all of the work on a specific account or transaction; this allows anyone with an interest in the account or transaction being able to have visibility into it.
• Management tools for measuring and monitoring performance, including SLAs, cycle time, and individual/team productivity metrics; this also allows for doing some tasks based on predictions, such as doing the administrative preparation for an account before the underwriter quotes the work, based on the past history with the account.

There was some resistance from the underwriters who perceived this as losing control and gaining Big Brother, but eventually they saw it as a way to offload the work to which they didn’t add value, allowing them to focus on serving their accounts better. That transition took a lot of change management work: everything from having the right leadership through ensuring that the proper roles are defined.

They identified a number of critical success factors, most of which are related to their organizational change management:

• Fully defined and documented processes, both current and future state, allowing them to understand what is required for process improvement and transformation. In early cases where they plugged in BPMS before they did this, they just put structure around a process that didn’t necessarily work very well, or what we refer to as “paving the cow paths”. This also allows for identification of common processes across business units, which can significantly accelerate a technology implementation through reuse.
• Clearly stated objectives that are communicated across impacted areas, so that all business units and users understand why this is being foisted on them, how they’re going to benefit, and why this isn’t just another piece of useless technology that they have to learn. (I’m paraphrasing here).
• Engagement and buy-in of managers responsible for impacted areas, so that they understand both the higher-level organizational benefits as well as the individual team member benefits, and can be advocates for the new processes and technology.
• Front line user subject matter experts to participate in design: these are the actual business users, not business analysts (who often report to IT and have never actually processed a transaction themselves), allowing the technical design team to see how the new designs will actually be used.
• Fully defined change management strategy, more than just a communications plan.

They have developed a change readiness framework, focused on not implementing until they were “ready”, which is defined as the impacted audience being ready for change, having the support model in place, and sufficient confidence levels that benefits will be achieved. They consider seven areas of readiness on their checklist: process, people, product, market, benefits, training and technology.

In response to questions (but not as part of their presentation), they discussed a bit about the solution: a listener detects new email-based requests for renewals, endorsements and other transactions and creates a case in Pega, after which a person has to determine which work basket to assign each transaction – sounds like they could use some intelligent automated routing based on analysis of the email content. Once that initial intake has been done, however, BPM really shines in allowing them to split the work by role, send certain tasks offshore for cost reduction, and monitor everything that’s happening in order to ensure that work is being done effectively and within SLAs. Pega Professional Services did their first pilot implementation, but Cognizant is now their main Pega implementation partner.

Any user-facing BPM implementation changes the way that people work, and requires attention to change management. This was a great presentation on the change management factors that are often left unsaid in discussing BPM implementations, but can cause even a technically perfect project to fail.

Kerim Akgonaul, Pega’s VP of product management, finished the day 1 morning keynotes with a view of what’s coming in Pega technology: social, mobile and predictive analytics. He stressed that all of the capabilities that customers need for managing work are built into their integrated PRPC platform, making it unnecessary to integrate several different technologies and components. On top of that, they offer industry frameworks for additional specific functionality, meaning that the actual solutions built on that are (in theory, at least) a thin layer on top of a thick base of standard functionality.

He walked through the high points of their recent technology advances: mobile, social, predictive analytics, decisioning, case management and user interface.

In the mobile area, they believe that it’s just another channel to be served by the same application: the same PRPC application definitions can be used to generate the UI for mobile platforms as well as standard desktop browsers, but with features specific to the device such as geolocation and camera.

Considering social capabilities, they allow for multiple external social media channels (such as Twitter) to be captured used in processing work, but also provide a some social features directly in their applications: Pega Pulse for a collaborative event stream view (similar to Appian Tempo and others), and direct feedback to allow a user to provide feedback to the developers directly from any screen.

In decisioning, they’re implementing a lot around next best action, which analyzes customer behavior and past transactions to determine what the customer is most likely to respond to positively, either while on the telephone with a customer service person or on the web. As with all of the other BPM vendors, who are all eagerly anticipating Gartner’s upcoming report on intelligent BPMS in which analytics plays a big role, Pega is really focused on analytics and how they can improve processes.

They’ve made a lot of headway on getting customers onto their cloud solutions, both as development/test systems and as operational systems; using their VPN tunneling, you can link a Pega cloud application directly to your internal systems. Furthermore, the applications are portable, making it easy to move from a cloud to an on-premise system. The last that I looked at their cloud solution, it was a bit clunky from a provisioning standpoint: implemented on Amazon EC2, it was not really self-provisioned or elastically scalable, although it did provide a viable cloud platform.

They’re showing off their new Case Designer for their case management capabilities; this was a bit clunky before, so I’m looking forward to seeing the new interfaces both for designers and users. In addition, they’re allowing for multi-page document scanning directly into a case, then use CMIS to push that into a content repository. There are some serious issues with that scenario, such as a lack of a chain of custody as well as (I’m guessing) some scalability limitations, but there are certainly situations where this would work.

He ended up talking about user interface, and using Pega as a development tool for building both internal and customer-facing applications. They’re pushing towards HTML5 for more portable, functional and lightweight interfaces.

I have a 1:1 chat with Kerim scheduled for this afternoon, which will give us a chance to dig into some of these a bit more, so stay tuned for that.

PegaWORLD 2012 day 1 kicked off with a keynote by Alan Trefler on the changing ways in which organizations interact with their customers. In the keynote that I gave at the Appian conference a few months ago, I nailed this point as well, talking about my own experiences with two organizations: one that gets it, and one that doesn’t.

He talked about some of the customers that have implemented Pega since last year’s conference: lots of financial services, which is their mainstay, but many other verticals as well. He referred to BPM as “unfortunately named”: they consider BPM, CRM, business rules and case management all as part of helping their customers to deliver. Trefler is a former chess master, and talked about both chess and ping pong (while hitting ping pong balls into the audience of 2000 – impressive multitasking) as analogues for business: strategy and agility.

He believes that the traditional data-based 360 degree of a customer isn’t enough: you also need a 360 view of intent (why/what) as well as process (where/when/how). Adding intent and process into the data view of a customer enables “high definition” customer service (360 + 360 + 360 = 1080 – get it? ) that allows for the holy grail of cross-channel interactions, cross-silo processes and operational efficiencies. This starts with having business and IT work together to capture business objectives using their DCO technique and tools, generating models without writing huge requirements documents, then move on to develop executing systems from those models. Great vision, but in practice it doesn’t always happen that way: I still see a lot of customers (of Pega and other vendors who promote model-driven development) stuck in old waterfall development models, and unable to break out of them due to culture, intertia and budget incentives. Not the fault of the vendors, but it remains a barrier to their success.

He finished up with more about their positioning and vision, including a quick view of their six Rs of managing work: receive, route, report, research, respond and resolve. Good start to the keynotes, and entertaining as always.

I thought I was going to spend the afternoon here in Dallas at the pool before the opening reception at PegaWORLD this evening, but there is a pretty active pre-conference program and I sat in on the financial services special interest group. In my role as a consultant to enterprises implementing BPM (which is usually a majority of my work), my focus is on financial services and insurance, so I wanted to hear what Pega is saying about what’s new for financial services. There were a number of presenters from Pega, including Tony Young and Rich Jefferson, both of whom are part of Pega’s financial services vertical.

Pega’s had financial services customers from the start, but they’re building out more customer service offerings so that they can do more than just transactional processes in the back office. From a past focus on improving operational efficiency, they’re also targeting both improving customer experience and driving revenue growth for their customers. To manage this in the financial services space, they have frameworks specifically for building financial services solutions. They are updating their frameworks to keep up with the underlying PegaBPM platform – mobile, integrated decisioning, federated case management – while modernizing and simplifying the product porfolio, bringing everything in to baseline on their financial services industry foundation (FSIF). There are also some new solutions that Pega has developed including capital markets onboarding, and partner solutions such as lending automation.

We also heard about some of the initiatives for creating community within companies for learning about and collaborating on Pega projects: at Wells Fargo, for example, they set up a closed LinkedIn group with information on educational webinars, regular meetings and other information. A closed group on LinkedIn (or other social networks) is a great way to get started when you’re a bit too small to support an internal center of excellence (COE) or community site, and also want to include external collaborators (assuming, of course, that your company network doesn’t block these sites). Pega has also set up private microsites for other customers, such as TD Bank, to act as a knowledge base. My only concern with having the vendor setting up these community spaces is that they tend to result in the client organization developing a vendor-specific COE rather than a broader-based BPM COE, which is usually not a good thing for supporting more general BPM initiatives within the organization, although it’s better than having no COE at all.

There are five booths at the conference just for financial services solutions, plus their customer centricity center and core PegaBPM booths; lots of things for financial services customers to see. There are also a lot of presentations to be delivered by financial services customers this week: American Express, Asya Bank, JPMC, Schwab, Wells Fargo and more.

Pega is claiming that there are 2,000 attendees registered (likely including their own people), which probably makes them a contender for the biggest BPM conference around; I know that my flight down this morning from Toronto was jammed with people talking about Pega, if that’s any indicator of the interest.

On a logistical note, if you’re trying to reach me here, don’t call or SMS my Canadian mobile number, because I swap in a US SIM chip when I travel to the US. Best way to reach me is by email or Twitter.