conferences – Page 18

PegaWORLD: SmartBPM at TD Bank Financial Group

Adrian Hopkins from TD’s Visa Systems and Technology group talked about their experiences with Pega, through various major upgrades over the years and now with SmartBPM for multi-channel customer management in their call centers. TD is one of Canada’s “big five” banks, but is also the 6th-largest bank in North American due to its diverse holdings in the US as well as Canada, serving 17 million customers. They’ve been a Pega customer for quite a while; I first wrote about it back in 2006

8-10% of TD’s workforce – 7,000 employees – are in call centers spread across 23 locations in North American and India, handling 47 million calls per year, hence their need to commoditize the agent and provide the ability to route any call to any center and have the customer’s questions answered satisfactorily. The key here is service leveling: providing the same level of service regardless of from where the call is serviced, through training, access to technology and information, and scripting. The goals were to improve service levels, increase capacity, and providing opportunities for up-selling by the agents while they have the customer on the call. TD is using BPM automation to achieve some of this – automating fulfillment and integrating disparate systems – plus providing more intuitive processes that require little training. In one example, they’ve consolidated the content and functionality of 12 different mainframe green screens into a single screen that can be used to handle a majority of the inbound calls; another allows them to process a credit card fraud claim in a single screen and a small number of steps, replacing an overly-complex manual process of 95 steps that involved managing the claim, handling the fraud and replacing the car. In the latter case, they’ve moved to a completely paperless process for handling a fraud claim, and reduced the case handling time from 7 hours down to minutes. Interestingly, they didn’t take away the old green screen methods of doing things when they deployed the new system, since some of the call center old-timers insisted that it was faster for them; however, they gradually removed the access since the new interfaces enforced rules and procedures that were not built into the green screens, generally improving quality of service.

They’re looking at savings and benefits in several areas:

Reduce training time: at a 10% attrition rate, saving one week of training per new employee means a savings of $750,000/year
Reduce callback rates, which increases customer satisfaction as well as increasing agent capacity
Improve compliance, and reduce the cost of achieving and proving compliance
Increase customer-facing time due to less follow-up paperwork, increasing agent capacity
Reduce secondary training requirements by guiding agents through complex inquires, allowing less-skilled agents to handle a wider variety of calls, and reducing handoffs
Increase ability to drive incremental sales from every contact, or “would you like fries with that?”, although they’re not yet actively doing this in their implementation

They’re still using SmartBPM 5.3, but are looking forward to some of the new capabilities in version 6, which should reduce the amount of code that they’re writing and allow them to put more control of the business process rules in the hands of the users.

Based on the screen snapshots that we saw, however, they’re still building fairly large desktop applications; this must be impacting their agility, in spite of their Agile approach, even though it is providing a huge benefit over using the green screens directly.

PegaWORLD: Medco’s Business Transformation

Kenny Klepper, president of Medco Health, gave a keynote on their business transformation, and how Pega has played a part in that. Personalized medicine is at the core of their strategy; that concept, plus their rapid change and growth through acquisition makes business agility a critical competency. They are looking at how to make medicine smarter through delivering pharmaceutical care as well as ongoing genetic research, particularly for patients with chronic and/or complex conditions. Since poor management of chronic and complex diseases leads to $350B in excess healthcare costs each year in the US, getting a better handle on this is important for the patients, for healthcare providers and ultimately (given the new healthcare bill in the US) on everyone in the country via tax burden. This isn’t about reducing care: it’s about making sure that the right people are getting the right care in order to prevent future problems.

Shifting focus to agile enterprises, he talked about the necessity of agility in order to address changing requirements, and to reduce operating expenses. He sees high operational expenses as an indicator of lack of agility in an enterprise, and hence agility as a primary way to drive down operating expenses. An agile enterprise needs to have a strong underlying technology platform to allow new applications to be built and deployed with a minimum of new investment: their architecture includes a data warehouse, a data management layer, data “fabric”, a service bus, and application frameworks on top of all of that. That provides wide access to information – no one needs to reinvent data access protocols, for example – and allows business applications to be built easily and quickly (using Pega) on top of the stack. As their business becomes more complex, expanding across lines of business and new markets, they are focusing on the common core processes across those lines, and aligning centers of excellence with those horizontal business processes, not just on lines of business or technologies. This shifts the “hot spot” issues from those processes into the CoEs (e.g., an order processing CoE), providing a single source for resolving problems in similar processes across the entire organization. This, plus the fact that they allocate budgets to the joint control of business and IT (redeploying many IT people to the business-focused CoEs), enables real business-IT alignment.

Klepper noted that the more legacy-bound that your organization is, the harder it is for individual operating units to achieve their goals, and the more conflict there is within IT for competing resources. Their focus, however, is on productivity: he considers that they get Agile methods for free by focusing on the ROI of reducing operational costs through the business applications that they create. To achieve this, however, a key focus for any change agent is on sustaining sponsorship: you can’t keep these initiatives going unless you can successfully sell them internally.

This wasn’t at all a technical talk on how Medco uses Pega; rather, it was a call to arms for the agile enterprise. I hope that some of the attendees, mired in legacy-bound conservative industries, got the message.

PegaWORLD: Alan Trefler keynote

Weather and Air Canada conspired against me getting to Philadelphia yesterday, but here I am at the opening keynote as Alan Trefler gives us the high-level view of Pega’s progress (including the Chordiant acquisition) and what’s coming up. Pega is one of the longest-standing BPM players, now 27 years old – although not all of that strictly in BPM, I think – which gives them a good perspective of how the industry is changing. My links post this morning was a collection of posts about adaptive case management, dynamic BPM and social BPM, and Pega is part of this trend. In fact, Trefler claimed that many of the other vendors are hopping on the agility bandwagon late (even the BPM bandwagon), or in words only.

He pointed out how many of the pure play vendors have been acquired recently, and sees this as a play by the acquiring companies to reduce choice in the market, and artificially bolster the "x% of companies run our software" claims. In his usual style, he used a giant photo of a shark on the screen behind him to illustrate this point. He made direct hits on Oracle, SAP and IBM with his comments, claiming that if consolidation results in the lowest common denominator – a common level of mediocrity – then the customers will lose out. The acquiring stack vendors end up offering a Frankenstack of products that do not integrate properly (if at all), and that so much custom code is required in order to deploy these that they become the new legacy systems, unchangeable and not able to meet the customer needs, since they require that you change your business in order to fit the software rather than the other way around.

He discussed their approach to case management, stating that a case is a metaphor for whatever you need it to be in your business, not a construct that is pre-defined by a vendor. Like the comments that I saw about the recent Process.gov conference, I think that this is also going to be a conference about adaptive case management (ACM) as well as BPM.

Pega is about to announce a set of managed services; they are already pretty cloud-friendly (the recent demo that I had from them was done on an EC2 instance, for example) since they allow for complete configuration and administration via a browser. They’ve been talking about platform as a service for over a year now, so this isn’t a bit surprise, but good to see something concrete rolling out.

He finished up by stating that Pega intends to be the dominant player in the space. They announced on Friday that they’ve added 114 people in the first quarter of 2010, and have just announced 11 consecutive quarters of record revenues. They will continue to invest in R&D in order to achieve and maintain this position.

Judging by the tweets that I’m already seeing, several key BPM analysts are here with me, so expect a lot of good coverage of the conference.

Conference Season Begins

It’s been quiet for several months for conferences, but things are heating up again for the next four weeks. Here’s my upcoming schedule:

This week, I’m at PegaWorld in Philadelphia, including chairing a workshop on Wednesday morning on case management
The week of May 3rd, IBM Impact in Las Vegas
The week of May 10th, TIBCO’s TUCON in Las Vegas
The week of May 17th, SAP SAPPHIRE in Orlando

If you’re attending any of these events, be sure to look me up. I’ll be blogging from all of them. You can find these, and many other BPM-related events, at the BPM Events calendar. If you have an event to add to the calendar, just let me know.

Disclosure: each of the vendors pays my travel expenses for me to attend their user conference. They do not, however, have any editorial control over what I write while at the conference.

OpenApps at DemoCamp 26: Easy Functional Extensions of Your Website

Last night was DemoCamp 26: a forum for people to show off whatever they have to demo. It’s a good way to network with the tech community in Toronto, and see emerging new applications often before they even launch. We started with a keynote from April Dunford on lean marketing, a topic that many of the startups attending were taking to heart, before we moved on to the demos.

The first demo was by Krispy, a long-standing member of the TorCamp community (and a serial presenter at DemoCamp), announcing the beta launch of his latest project, OpenApps. OpenApps is a platform for you to add applications to your website without writing code, or even having to edit your site at all. Their app store has both free and paid (monthly subscription) apps, and an open model to allow developers to add their own apps.

In the beta release, there is a fairly small set of apps – Bing and Yahoo search, comparison shopping with Shopping.com, news/topic search with Daylife.com, Oodle Classifieds, and Twitter user/topic searches – but they list a number of other potential apps such as zip/postal code lookups. The best way to understand it, however, is to try it out. I did this in about 3 minutes (although, to be fair, I had seen Krispy demo this last night).

First, go to OpenApps and sign up for a free account, which requires only your email address and a password:

Next, go to the App Store to see the list of available apps; you can click on one to see more details about it, such as the Daylife app for adding news and other relevant content based on keywords:

Click on “Try this app” to fill in the parameters for adding this app to your site. Shown below, I changed the “App Name” field to “BPM news”, specified the keyword “BPM” and – this is the magic part – told it to adopt the look and feel of www.column2.com:

I clicked on “Preview”, and this is what was generated:

Click through for the full-size image, and you’ll see that OpenApps has replicated the look and feel of Column 2 (which is built on WordPress), including my header, sidebar and styles, and inserted the Daylife page based on the BPM keyword into the content portion of the page. Very, very cool.

To be able to publish this, I filled out the subdomain section of the application parameters, and changed my DNS to create a CNAME record “news” to point that subdomain to OpenApps, but they even provide links to step-by-step instructions from some of the popular domain registrars on how to do this. That took me another minute. I also had to sign up for a Daylife API key so that I could publish their content. There went another minute. That produced a page, news.column2.com, publishing Daylife content based on the BPM keyword, that appears to be part of my site, all done in about 5 minutes (plus wait time for DNS propagation and Daylife API account approval).

The page, of course, isn’t really on my site. The DNS change means that that URL redirects to OpenApps for the presentation, with the app content section redirected to Daylife. Still, it’s all pretty seamless. The magic part of OpenApps, where they make it look like my existing site, has to do with their technology to auto-locate the injection point for content for a number of common web content management systems, including WordPress, Joomla, Typepad, Movable Type, Drupal and Blogger; there are also methods to use a more complex manual detection process based on the page elements if you’re not using one of those platforms, or are using them in a non-standard way.

OpenApps is free to use; Krispy told us that developers who create apps for their app store retain 70% of the revenue, meaning that OpenApps is monetizing on the 30% commission that they charge to the app developers.

Progress Analyst Day Wrapup

I just found the last of my Progress analyst day notes from last week, scrawled in a paper notebook (which is why I usually write directly to keyboard at conferences). These were from one-on-one meetings that I had with John Bates and Dr. Ketabchi after the end of the formal presentations, where I had a chance to ask about product directions.

It’s probably good to do some writing after the fact, when I’ve had time to reflect a bit, review the presentation slides, and read posts by other attendees such as John Rymer [link fixed], who sums up Progress’ mission, customer case studies and product positioning. I particularly like his description of the two new suites that Progress is offering:

Enterprise Business Solutions tracks existing transactions and services interactions to discover and verify implicit business processes, defines, senses, and responds to real-time events, automates business process flows, and provides SOA infrastructure. Core to this business unit is a new suite that brings together Progress Actional, Apama, and newly acquired Savvion. Think of the new Responsive Process Management Suite as BPM and transactional systems wrapped in real-time event management.

Enterprise Data Services maps primary information sources into a new real-time model managed by DataXtend Semantic Integrator, including integration, aggregation, data delivery, and ultimately, analysis.

To sum up my discussions with Bates and Ketabchi (these were separate, but covered related topics, so I’ve combined them) on what’s happening with the products, particularly the integration of Savvion into the Responsive Process Management suite:

The first version of the Control Tower monitoring application is ready, or nearly so. This is based on the Savvion process monitoring portal (which already allowed for external data sources), and constitutes the primary piece of integration between the products.
The existing event-handling structure in Savvion will be used to feed events from Apama. Although there will be some tightening of this integration, there are no major changes required to make this happen.
Currently, the modeling for CEP (Apama) and BPM (Savvion) are separate tools. However, they are both Eclipse-based, so it’s likely that they will be combined in some way and given a consistent look and feel, even if only as separate tabs within the same modeling environment. Since they both have business-facing perspectives using graphical models, this makes sense.
Savvion’s current event processing capabilities – the only overlap in the Savvion and Progress product portfolios prior to the acquisition – will eventually be replaced by Apama, which will have an impact on Savvion customers who use that functionality. There is no plan for an immediate rip-and-replace, and the Savvion EP will be supported for some time, but customers should start thinking about migration.

I asked about runtime collaboration within the products, but was not left with a clear picture of the future for Progress products here. Currently, Apama supports some threshold type of changes, and Savvion allows reassigning a task to another user but not changing the process model, which seems to represent a bare minimum in this emerging functional requirement.

You can find all of my coverage of the Progress Software Analyst Day here.

BPM Conferences Start To Come Out Of Hiding

2009 was not a stellar year for BPM conferences: many vendors cancelled or moved to an online format, and even Gartner decided that two North American conferences per year is too much. Although many organizations budgets are still tight, conference organizers are betting on a bit more available travel and education budget being available this year.

I just saw a post about Leonardo Process Days coming up in July in Sydney, and added it to the BPM events calendar that I maintain here, as I do with most other BPM-related events that I hear about. If you have an event that you want added, let me know; if you want to add a lot of events, then I can make you a contributor to the calendar. If you use Google Calendar and want to add this to the list of “Other calendars” that you can overlay on your own calendar, there’s a button at the bottom right of the calendar that will do that.

John Goodson on Informational Integrity

John Goodson, who heads up the Enterprise Data Solutions group within Progress, had the last timeslot before lunch to present on the role of informational integrity in operational responsiveness. Problems occur because business needs data faster than IT systems can deliver it, and inflexible methods can’t adapt to the fast-changing business conditions. Batch ETL just can’t keep up with this: data needs to be available from any system at any time as required to support real-time operations. We need to get rid of the overnight batch jobs that (for example) don’t allow me to see my banking transactions online until the following day, or can’t get my package tracking number until the package is already delivered.

Progress already provides Data Exchange for model-based data transformation and exchange; next month, they’re launching Progress Data Virtualization Server, providing real-time data access, integration and delivery from almost any data source, application and service. The key to their Enterprise Data Services is a common model – a sort of Babelfish for data – that allows access to multiple applications and data sources. They’ll leverage key industry-standard data models, such as ACORD in the insurance industry, with the goal of providing the right information in the right form at the right time.

Stepping back from just the information side, he pointed out that they’ll be providing responsive process management together with responsive information management; otherwise, data issues will impede responsiveness even if process improvement is undertaken.

Tom Aubuchon of Panhandle Energy (gas pipeline) joined Goodson on stage to discuss their data integration strategy: they used a customized supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system to monitor and control their 17,000 miles of pipeline, but need to integrate that with all of their other distribution and billing data. They have approximately 1,200 different applications, and a “hairball” of connections between them. They decided to replace their SCADA with a more generic ESB, and selected Progress because the common data model allowed them to tame all of the point-to-point connections between the applications, especially the new Data Virtualization Server.

Dr. Ketabchi: A Shared Vision With Progress and Savvion

Dr. K. took the stage to tell us about the planned integration between the existing Progress products and Savvion, starting with a discussion of Savvion’s event-driven human-centric beginnings, model-driven development and solution accelerators. The new Progress RPM (responsive process management) suite has Savvion’s BPM at its core, combining their BPM and BRM strengths with CEP and information management. A challenge for Progress – and any other BPM vendor – is that less than 5% of enterprises’ processes run on a BPMS, and although dramatic improvements could be made to 80% or more of enterprise processes, most enterprises find it too difficult and costly to implement a BPMS in order to make these end-to-end improvements. It’s Progress’ intention that RPM overcome some of this resistance by extending visibility of business events to business managers, and provide the ability to respond in order to control business and ultimately increase revenues.

He was joined by Sandeep Phanasgaonkar of Reliance Capital, who have a large and successful Savvion implementation. Phanasgaonkar was responsible for the Savvion implementation at a huge outsourcing firm prior to his time at Reliance, where they automated and standardized their processes in the course of improving those processes. When he moved to Reliance during their expansion into their multiple financial products and channels, he saw the potential for process improvement with a BPMS, did a vendor comparison, and again selected Savvion for their processes. They use Savvion as the glue for orchestrating multiple legacy financial systems, Documentum content management, low-level WebSphere messaging processes and other systems into a fully integrated set of business processes and data.

Reliance has no other Progress products besides Savvion, but they see the importance of managing business events and processes as a cohesive whole, not as two separate streams of activity. This will allow them to detect degradation in processes due to seasonal or other fluctuations, and address the problems before they fully manifest.

John Bates, CTO of Progress

John Bates started with more of the Progress message on operational responsiveness, highlighting the importance of process and event management in this. He showed survey results stating that companies find it critical to respond to problematic events in real time, but only a small percentage are able to actually do that. Companies want real-time business visibility, the ability to immediately sense and respond, and continuous business process improvement in a cycle of responsive process management. Yeah, and I want a pony for Christmas. Okay, not really, but wishing doesn’t make any of this happen.

By adding BPM to their suite, Progress brings together process and event management; this makes is possible to achieve this level of operational responsiveness, but it’s not quite so easy as that. First of all, we need to hear more about how the suite of products are going to be integrated. Secondly, and more importantly, companies who want to have this level of operational responsiveness need to do something about the legacy sludge that’s keeping them from achieving it: otherwise, Progress (and all the other software vendors) are just pushing on a rope.

Bates then called up James Hardy, CIO at State Street Global Markets Technology, for an on-stage conversation about how State Street is using the Progress Apama CEP product in trading and other applications. They’re a Lean Six Sigma shop, and see CEP as a natural fit for the type of process improvement that they’re doing in the context of their LSS efforts: CEP allows for some exceptions to be corrected and resubmitted automatically rather than being pushed to human exception management. They’re also committed to cloud-based technology, but by building a private cloud, not public infrastructure, and have seen some speedy implementations due to that. They see operational responsiveness as not just about increasing revenue, but also about mitigating risk.

Bates then talked about 3Italia, an Italian telco that was having trouble dealing with the incremental credit checks and revenue generation required for their prepaid mobile customers: since their billing systems weren’t fully integrated with their servicing systems, they sometimes allowed calls to be completed even though a customer had run out of credit and their credit couldn’t be revalidated. They are also a TIBCO enterprise customer, but weren’t able to get the level of agility that they needed, so implemented Progress (this is Progress’ version of story, remember). They managed to stop most of that revenue leakage by providing direct links between billing and servicing systems, and also started doing location-based advertizing to increase their revenues.

He also spoke about Royal Dirkzwager, a shipping line, and how they were able to achieve millions in fuel savings by detecting potential issues with docking and loading before they occured, and avoid burning fuel getting to the wrong place at the wrong time.

He finished up the case studies with a couple of airline scenarios for maximizing profits using situational awareness: responding to crew or flight delays proactively rather than just responding to irate customers after the fact (this is a lesson that Lufthansa could definitely learn, based on my recent experience). To bolster this case, he introduced Joshua Norrid of Southwest Airlines – also a TIBCO customer – who discussed their journey from “Noah’s Architecture” (two of everything) to focusing on strategic products and vendor partners. They were an IONA customer, then Savvion, and recently started using Actional: having lived through two of the products that he used being acquired by Progress, he said that the acquisitions where done “in style”, which is pretty high praise considering the usual experience of customers of acquired companies. They’ve started to look at how they can be more operationally responsive: text messages when flights are delayed, for example, but also looking forward to how flight bookings might change during a weather event, or how local hotels might be pre-booked in the case of significant expected delays. They see reducing redundancies and inefficiencies in their architecture as a key to their success: lowered cost and better data integration helps in bottom line IT cost savings, operational savings and customer satisfaction.

After the customer stories, Bates discussed the future of responsive business applications: packaged applications evolving into dynamic applications; a control tower for business users to model, monitor, control and improve dynamic applications; and solution accelerators for pre-built industry-specific dynamic applications. Savvion’s strong focus on pre-built applications is an important synergy with the rest of the Progress suite. Their solution map includes these accelerators supported by a single control tower, which in turn provides access to BPM, CEP and other technology components. For example, their Responsive Process Management (RPM) Suite includes Actional, Apama and Savvion underpinned by Sonic, DataDirect Shadow and Enterprise Data Services, plus the common Control Tower and three vertical accelerator applications for finance, telecom and travel/logistics. They believe that they can continue to compete in their specialty areas such as CEP and BPM, but also as an integrated product suite.

RPM technical won’t be publicly announced until March 15th, but it’s already all over Twitter from the people in the room here in Boston.