Global 360 has a bit of revolving door with analysts: first, they hire Jim Sinur from Gartner. Then, they hire Colin Teubner from Forrester. Then, Sinur leaves. And here today at the Gartner show, which he admits is his first-ever, Teubner presented on behalf of Global 360 about putting people first in BPM. He really only did the introduction, however, before turning over the presentation to one of their customers, Richard Van Hoever, SVP of Customer Service Paper at Citi Cards.
Citigroup uses a lot of Global 360: 10,000 users worth. They’ve implemented a pretty standard imaging and workflow transaction processing application, with work queues that push work to participants rather than allowing cherry-picking, work prioritization and routing, and load balancing across their domestic, nearshore and offshore workforces. The big challenges are the volume of work, tight integration between document management and BPM, and geographic routing.
They were able to get 75% of their required functionality out of the box with Global 360 (they were promised 90%, but that type of discrepancy is pretty common). Most of the customization was around the work filtering, sorting, assignment and presentation, as expected; Global 360, like other BPMS’, does most of the behind-the-scenes stuff out of the box.
What amazes me is that this is fundamentally not different from the types of imaging and workflow systems that I’ve been helping organizations to implement for about 15 years; the only thing that has changed is that the relative sophistication of today’s tools means much less custom code and greater process agility. However, the business process is the same inefficient, key-from-paper/image process that’s been happening the same way for years. Undoubtedly, the relative volume of some transaction types will have reduced due to online self-service, but it’s clear that many large financial services organizations have a long ways to go in terms of making it easier for their customers to do their data entry for them.