Delivering Customer Centricity And Operational Excellence

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.