process – Page 38

SharePoint: Today & Tomorrow

Since the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) ended up in my backyard this year, I decided to drop by for a couple of sessions. There’s a lot here that’s not all that interesting to me – more for the partners’ sales teams on how to sell more Microsoft stuff – but it’s a good opportunity for me to catch up on a few product announcements and also see some of my vendor contacts who are also Microsoft partners.

You can watch the keynotes and some other interviews online and follow the Twitter stream; this morning, we heard about how Windows 8 is going to be the biggest thing since Windows 95, and saw some of the new hardware that’s being developed to take advantage of the new features.

This afternoon in a breakout, Jared Spataro from SharePoint product management gave an update on trends and the product direction, although they are not yet ready to talk about SharePoint/Office 15 so I have the sense that there will be some more interesting stuff coming out later in the summer that we didn’t hear today. He did outline what they see as key industry trends:

Social. Well, duh, they just spend over $1B on Yammer. The next session is on enterprise social, and it’s not surprising that they’re looking at social in a business context.
Consumers, and the consumerization of IT.
Devices, and allowing their customers to work on whatever device they have. He claims that they no longer have a protectionist policy of supporting only Microsoft platforms, but maybe they should talk to their conference organizers about having something other than a Windows Phone app for the conference.
Cloud to reduce the time to value as well as support a broader audience. They intend to develop for the cloud first for SharePoint as well as all of Microsoft Office, and see cloud as a strategic platform for enterprises of all sizes in the future. They don’t necessarily see that organizations are going to move existing on-premise systems to the cloud, but that it will become the platform of choice (and completely seamless to the end user due to single sign-on) for new deployments, and they’re developing more tools for hybrid (cloud/on-premise) solutions.
Cross-organization support for collaboration outside a single enterprise, which is obviously supported by the cloud platform.

Over 65% of companies with SharePoint have deployed to their entire employee population, which is a good indication of the viral nature (which you can consider to be good or bad) adoption of SharePoint. About half of their base has updated to SharePoint 2010, although I see a lot of my clients with much older versions, and Microsoft needs to think about how to move them off those old versions so that they can start to leverage the collaboration capabilities rather than just a place to dump documents.

Their focus now is to transition from being a document-centric system to a people-centric system: making it a more personalized experience for each user, so that SharePoint provides the context, content and platform for doing their work. They’re starting to see more companies managing projects using SharePoint, not just storing documents, so are trying to better support conversations about documents rather than just the documents themselves. Bringing together search, content, workflow and social into a single platform has a lot of potential, especially considering the market penetration of SharePoint.

With just that whiff of what’s coming in SharePoint 15, he moved on to their FY2013 field sales priorities (which is what all these partners are crowded into the room to hear):

Win “enterprise social”, so that every new social experience in a customer is a Microsoft experience. They’ll be doing some social roadshows to back this up and keep the momentum going, so that they start winning a lot of the social deals.
Launch SharePoint 15, which pushes the social message broader and deeper into the enterprise.
Drive new seats with Office365, especially in the mid-market in the cloud.

They want to use social as a conversation-starter, but continue to move in with SharePoint and Office core functionality, pushing upgrades and cloud migration. They also see Yammer as something that business can do without a lot (or even any) IT support, so that they can start using social enterprise software without deploying internally. Then, as Microsoft develops stronger ties between Yammer and SharePoint (as they must), Yammer will leverage users into a social-enabled SharePoint.

We were left with quite a number of large gaps in upcoming product information, since they are not quite ready to spill on the features of the next version. Frustrating, but I understand that public companies just can’t do too much in the way of pre-announcements.

Spataro left half of the hour-long session for questions, and the first one was about the perceived weaknesses of the platform for BPM and workflow. He admitted that they have not spent a lot of energy making SharePoint a premier BPM platform, and that they’re really focused on capturing the market share while leaving some of the functionality to partners. There are a number of BPM-related ISV partners here at WPC this week, including AgilePoint, K2, Kofax, Laserfiche and OpenText, plus services partners who build process-centric solutions; Microsoft has to tread carefully so as not to provide functionality that undercuts their partners’ business, and partners are always at risk that Microsoft will decide that their business is just a bit too strategic to leave to partners. I find it hard to believe that there’s not some sort of BPM work going on within the core SharePoint platform, since process is becoming a key competency in many organizations and Microsoft is unlikely to walk away from that opportunity to develop deeper ties into their customers’ business operations and IT infrastructure. That risk, of course, is the nature of being a partner with a huge software company such as Microsoft (or IBM, SAP and many others): like sleeping with an elephant, it’s toasty-warm most of the time, but watch out when it rolls in your direction.

BPM Framework For Product Development At Ericsson

Michael Andersson of Ericsson presented a breakout session on their BPM framework for product development in a global environment. Although many people are familiar with them as a handset manufacturer, Ericsson’s biggest business is to create and service communication networks that provide the infrastructure for telecom operators (their customers), and provide solutions to the telecom operators to pass on to the end consumers. With 100,000 employees and several product development locations around the world, they are actually the 5th-largest software development company in the world (by sales) as well as providing hardware solutions.

Their classical way of working, which is the same in many large-scale project-driven development efforts, was very waterfall-like: long release cycles based on static requirements, requiring extensive testing and very inflexible to change requests. They are moving to a more agile approach with frequent small deliverables, which is easier to test and deploy, and allows for more customer interaction during development.

The interesting part is that they’re using BPM for their product development cycle, which is not an application that I see very often: they have created a BPM framework within their product development ecosystem, which acts as a toolbox for managing and collaborating on requirements and the product development lifecycle. The ecosystem provides different perspectives to allow the different types of stakeholders to see a view of product development that is meaningful to them.

He walked through each of the perspectives (what I would consider tools or capabilities, not perspectives in the EA sense) and explained the use and audience for each; they all center around the product development framework portal. This framework provides guidance for different product development practices, and contains all knowledge for how they operate when developing products: product development principles; directives and guidelines (rules and policies); process flows (value chains); process components (procedural processes); performance measurements; and enabling resources in terms of information, IT and organization. Although most of this is provided top-down on an organizational basis, the process components (processes) are provided by the operational units doing product development in a more socially collaborative way.

A big benefit of the framework is to provide context for the engineers working in product development who might previously have only considered their own processes, and not how those relate to value chains, which in turn is a representation of the customer requirements. It also provides the platform for collaboration and sharing with other engineers in other geographic locations and business areas, or provides an interface to collaboration tools that are already in use.

This was really about BPM as a methodology, not a tool or system to be implemented; as Andersson said in his summary, you probably want to do BPM, but you may not want to call it BPM.

Demos At BPM 2012

BPM 2012 is the 10th annual conference on BPM research, hosted (as always) by a university with an active BPM research program: this year, that’s University of Tartu in Tallinn, Estonia. I’ll be there, probably giving a talk on social BPM on the industry day, and soaking up all the interesting new things that are happening in different areas of research. For all of you vendors out there, I highly recommend that you send someone from your R&D team to listen in on what’s coming out of the academic research: although there’s a lot of esoteric stuff here, I always see a couple of ideas that are really ready for market.

In conjunction with the conference, there is the opportunity to showcase at a demo track if you’re a research or in industry. From the description:

The BPM 2012 Demo Track is intended to showcase innovative Business Process Management (BPM) tools and applications that may originate either from research initiatives or from industry. The Demonstration Track will provide an opportunity to present and discuss emerging technologies with researchers and practitioners in the BPM field.

The deadline for the call for demos is June 10 (this Sunday).

Business Transformation Through Intelligent BPM

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.

Zurich’s Competitive Advantage: National Underwriting Solution

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.

Pega’s Intelligent Business Applications With @pegakerim

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.