The second half of today’s keynote started with a customer panel of C-level executives: Bruce Mitchell, CTO at Lloyds Banking Group, Jessica Kral, CIO for Medicare & Retirement at UnitedHealthcare, and Richard Haley, CFO at FBI, moderated by Rafe Brown, CFO at Pega. Some interesting comments there about how their organizations are transforming: a shift to customer focus while improving efficiency by reducing handoffs on inbound calls; how incremental development and faster release cycles reduce risk and improve business-IT alignment; and how big data can be used to improve context for everything from customer journeys to police investigations.
We finished the morning with new product highlights from Kerim Akgonul, Pega’s SVP of product management. Their case interface is the cornerstone of the new look of Pega: business processes are described at a high level by simple linear stage view, with processes that might happen at each stage listed below: very reminiscent of the simplified phase views that I’ve seen in a number of other products, both design-time and runtime. I still maintain that there are many processes that don’t lend themselves to a simple stage/phase representation, since activities from multiple phases may be happening simultaneously, but this seems to be a popular representation.
According to their customers and partners, it’s 6.4 times faster to deliver on Pega 7 than direct Java development (assuming, of course, that Pega becomes your captive application development environment, which is not an option for many organizations), and there are definitely many capabilities in the platform and solutions built on that platform, such as next best action marketing, sales force automation and customer process manager. Predictive analytics is definitely assuming a higher profile as a competitive differentiator in sales, marketing, CRM and other customer-facing applications, since it can help provide better customer service as well as improve sales goals. A recent acquisition is also giving them robust mobile support, allowing mobile and remote workers to participate fully in case management activities, while other acquisitions are providing interactive customer support and social media engagement.
Don Schuerman, CTO at Pega, joined Kerim on stage to show how all of these things can come together, with a (fictional) insurance company responding to a tweet about motorcycles with an offer for motorcycle insurance, tied directly in to their back office systems for quotes as well as their call center and CRM system. They demonstrated a seamless integration between the insurance app and the call center agent’s screen, allowing the CSR to push application documents to the customer’s phone in real time. Fun demo of omni channel for integrated communication, next best action with product recommendations, and business processes for fulfillment, complete with drone delivery and helmet-mounted crash detectors.
That’s it for the day 1 keynotes at PegaWORLD 2014; we’re off to a breakout session before lunch and a tour around the technology pavilion, then an afternoon of breakouts and some roundtables with executives.
Great, so its application development now and not AGILE process management. Should that not be worth a mention rather than finding it all amazing? Semaless integration at design time is boring no-end. Can they do it on the fly during process execution? We have had those demoes as described for for years now and in the meantime some of it has translated into projects. Mind you, social is nowhere as important as one might think it is.