process – Page 39

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? Winking smile ) 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.

PegaWORLD 2012 Financial Services Special Interest Group

I thought I was going to spend the afternoon here in Dallas at the pool before the opening reception at PegaWORLD this evening, but there is a pretty active pre-conference program and I sat in on the financial services special interest group. In my role as a consultant to enterprises implementing BPM (which is usually a majority of my work), my focus is on financial services and insurance, so I wanted to hear what Pega is saying about what’s new for financial services. There were a number of presenters from Pega, including Tony Young and Rich Jefferson, both of whom are part of Pega’s financial services vertical.

Pega’s had financial services customers from the start, but they’re building out more customer service offerings so that they can do more than just transactional processes in the back office. From a past focus on improving operational efficiency, they’re also targeting both improving customer experience and driving revenue growth for their customers. To manage this in the financial services space, they have frameworks specifically for building financial services solutions. They are updating their frameworks to keep up with the underlying PegaBPM platform – mobile, integrated decisioning, federated case management – while modernizing and simplifying the product porfolio, bringing everything in to baseline on their financial services industry foundation (FSIF). There are also some new solutions that Pega has developed including capital markets onboarding, and partner solutions such as lending automation.

We also heard about some of the initiatives for creating community within companies for learning about and collaborating on Pega projects: at Wells Fargo, for example, they set up a closed LinkedIn group with information on educational webinars, regular meetings and other information. A closed group on LinkedIn (or other social networks) is a great way to get started when you’re a bit too small to support an internal center of excellence (COE) or community site, and also want to include external collaborators (assuming, of course, that your company network doesn’t block these sites). Pega has also set up private microsites for other customers, such as TD Bank, to act as a knowledge base. My only concern with having the vendor setting up these community spaces is that they tend to result in the client organization developing a vendor-specific COE rather than a broader-based BPM COE, which is usually not a good thing for supporting more general BPM initiatives within the organization, although it’s better than having no COE at all.

There are five booths at the conference just for financial services solutions, plus their customer centricity center and core PegaBPM booths; lots of things for financial services customers to see. There are also a lot of presentations to be delivered by financial services customers this week: American Express, Asya Bank, JPMC, Schwab, Wells Fargo and more.

Pega is claiming that there are 2,000 attendees registered (likely including their own people), which probably makes them a contender for the biggest BPM conference around; I know that my flight down this morning from Toronto was jammed with people talking about Pega, if that’s any indicator of the interest.

On a logistical note, if you’re trying to reach me here, don’t call or SMS my Canadian mobile number, because I swap in a US SIM chip when I travel to the US. Best way to reach me is by email or Twitter.

AWD Design Studio: Services And Automation with @smsj76

Simon James of DST gave what will be my last presentation of AWD Advance (in fact, I have to leave before the end to catch my taxi to the airport), looking at how services and automation are done in the Design Studio in AWD 10. This is a code-free (or code-light) environment for composite application development for process-centric applications. [Note to vendors: just because it’s done in a graphical environment doesn’t mean that it’s not code. Just sayin’.]

He walked through a number of examples of what could be done with their library of available services, and showed a bit of the environment used for this; this ranged from automatically adding comments to work items to performing various sorts of calculations, which sounded as if they were things that have caused headaches (and custom coding) for their customers in the past.

As I’ve pointed out in my posts about the other sessions, this is not cutting-edge technology, but it’s ahead of where most of DST’s customers are in their technology journey. Existing AWD customers can be upgraded to AWD 10 without changing their existing applications, but that won’t allow them to take advantage of the new features that we’ve been seeing this week: to do that, they need to redevelop their applications using AWD 10. Design Studio definitely makes that easier, but that may not be a popular idea with customers who are happy with their existing legacy applications built on older versions of AWD that run just fine on the AWD 10 infrastructure.

Consider the different types of AWD customers:

Customers for whom DST outsources at least part of their process and infrastructure, including “friends and family” (companies that are connected to DST through corporate ownership) as well as arms-length customers. These have, I believe, already been upgraded to the AWD 10 infrastructure, but for the most part are still running legacy AWD applications. These are likely to have their applications updated to AWD 10 on an ongoing basis, since DST has some degree of control over the application development and deployment.
Customers who use other DST transactional systems such as TA2000, tightly integrated with AWD. These will undoubtedly be convinced to upgrade the infrastructure, but may decide to stick with their legacy AWD applications unless they can see clear reasons why they need to take advantage of the new functionality. Rewriting their applications will take time and holds some degree of operational risk, so they may stay on the legacy apps (although on the new infrastructure in order to remain supported) for some time.
Customers who do not have tight integration between their transactional systems and AWD may also stick with their legacy applications; at the point that they are forced to upgrade (either because of support issues in the future, or because they need newer functionality), they may choose to evaluate other BPMS along with AWD. For DST, this represents a risk that they may lose a customer, or at least the BPMS part of their business, although the existing customer relationship may allow them to combat this.
Customers with no other DST products besides AWD. This is a big risk for DST, since there is little reason for them not to evaluate other BPMS at the point that they need to rewrite their applications. This is also true for new DST customers where they are only looking for BPM/ACM, not the other transactional systems, as they are more likely to find outside North America where the DST transaction processing systems are less commonly used.

DST has a lot of low-hanging fruit in the first two of these categories, and the existing relationship will probably see them through a lot of the third. However, the BPMS-only customers are going to be the challenge, since they will be selling AWD against other BPMS that are further along the technology curve. They do have some strengths, but their biggest strength by far is their existing customer base and the close relationships that they have with those customers.

That’s it for me and AWD Advance; this has been a really interesting view into a very different sort of BPM vendor, and I look forward to seeing how their technology matures and the path of their customers in the future.

Managing People And Work In AWD (with @amv0920 and @Arti_Acharya)

Management of users, roles and groups in AWD is fully featured, but has its roots in functionality that was created decades ago. There are currently 15 different screens used to manage users, roles and groups in AWD today, and in many cases, they need to be visited in a very particular order to make something happen.

DST is in the process of rewriting the user management functions, and Angela Veach and Arti Acharya (the experience designer) presented the wireframe designs in progress. This is greatly simplified in terms of the number of screens and in terms of the language used on those screens, such as:

Create a new user, specifying general attributes such as name, user ID, security level and work group. This can be done using another user or a model user as a template, such that privileges, experience levels and resources are inherited from the model.
Manage what they can work on, by assigning one or more roles, assigning individual privileges such as specific business areas or work types that are beyond the capabilities of the assigned roles, and assigning experience level.
Manage what they can see in AWD, by assigning security group, and additional individual resource access control grouped by product/capability.
Specify resource-specific attributes, which are the additional parameters required for the different capabilities to which they have access, e.g., the signature that will be used for correspondence generation if they have access to the correspondence capabilities.

They’re still working out the details on this, and are actively soliciting ideas from their customers in the audience. There are a lot of options here, such as whether selecting a model user should replace or augment the existing privileges on a user account.

This appears to be a new interface on the existing structure of users, roles, skills and permissions, rather than a new underlying structure, meaning that it doesn’t impact much in terms of operational functions (except a new dialog to select their primary workspace if they have been assigned to multiple), mostly just these administration screens. There is a still a very complex structure that needs to be well-understood by an administrator, but at least the administration screens will make it easier to implement. Lots of happy sysadmins in the audience.

As with case management, this is unreleased functionality still under development, likely to be released in 2013.

This was the last session of this first day of AWD Advance 2012; we’re off to the reception and conference dinners tonight, and will resume tomorrow. I have been assured that dinner will not involved Lipizzan stallions or palaces, although I might see a cow sometime before I leave tomorrow.

Monitoring Dashboards And Reports In AWD

Kim Smyly presented on some of the new monitoring and analytics capabilities in AWD. They now have interactive dashboards, charts and reports that link directly to the underlying transactions, and can include line of business data in the reports. Writing reports in the custom AWD BI engine has been replaced with an OEM version of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, allowing for a more flexible representation and visualization of the information, with actionable links to the processes. With interactive filtering capabilities, this also provides a search interface, such as searching for all active transactions for a specific account number.

This is pretty standard BI in terms of report and dashboard definition: quite a bit of flexibility for visualization and computation in a drag-and-drop interface, no more difficult to use than Excel tables and charts. It includes pivot tables (which you may know from Excel), which are great interactive analytical tools. I’m not sure what the legacy AWD BI looks like, but if it’s like that in most older systems (usually some ancient version of Crystal Reports), this is bound to be a huge improvement.

Line of business data can be included directly as fields in the dashboards and reports; I’m not sure of the underlying data architecture, but it appears that LOB data dimensions are defined in AWD and somehow replicated from other systems (or they are a view on those other systems); because they’re in the AWD data schema, they’re exposed for monitoring and reporting.

A number of questions from the audience on this; DST is porting over from the old to a new schema, and although they will support both for the foreseeable future, I expect that this will eventually force a migration from the old report mechanisms. It seems like the first implementation of this is not as powerful as the old custom BI (although probably significantly easier to use), so they will need to bring the functionality up to match before they can expect a mass migration.

Mutual Fund Processing With AWD 10 And DST Vision

My history with DST started in 1994, when a mutual fund customer in Toronto hired me to conduct an evaluation of imaging and workflow systems. They were certain that they wanted DST, but we went on to evaluate and select FileNet (now IBM). In the course of that evaluation, I spent about a week each with DST and FileNet building an application, with my DST time spent here in Kansas City including a tour of their massive mutual fund transaction processing outsourcing operation. I hadn’t had a lot of interaction with DST again until recently, and obviously things have changed a lot in their technology (as well as in Kansas City).

A big chunk of DST’s core business is still with mutual fund processing companies, since they provide both the TA2000 transfer agency system (for transaction processing and shareholder recordkeeping) and AWD for the imaging, workflow, correspondence generation and other related capabilities. For those companies using TA2000, which is really a mutual fund industry standard in the US, the natural fit has been to use AWD as well since there is some deep integration between them, and DST is pushing hard to ensure that AWD 10 continues that tradition.

Their consistent message at their user conference this week is transforming business (through, of course, the implementation of AWD 10). Part of this is to treat transactions not just as independent transactions any more: many transactions represent life events such as births, deaths, marriages and divorces. How you handle the transactions related to a life event – which usually required initiating and managing transactions and tasks that the customer didn’t think of – can make or break that customer relationship, and that viewpoint can be transformational for how you run your business. This requires a case management approach to that life event, where directed dialogs (wizard interfaces) collect information that can be used to spawn additional tasks required for case completion.

They’re also enabling additional transparency by allowing financial advisors – those people and companies who actually sell the mutual funds – to participate directly in an existing AWD workflow through the DST Vision portal application. For mutual fund transactions, this is primarily to report on transactions that are not in good order (NIGO) so that the advisor can provide additional information in order to complete the transaction, usually related to transfer of assets. This presents a filtered view of the back office information, since advisors are not permitted to see all information about shareholders and transactions, and may include images of the original documents provided.

It’s difficult to tell how well the transformation message is going over with the customers, but based on the audience questions, the functionality provided by DST Vision is much more relevant to them right now. Although all of the DST full-service clients (that is, those where DST or one of their related companies are doing some or all of the processing) are operating on the AWD 10 infrastructure, that doesn’t mean that they’re using the emerging capabilities, and the self-serve mutual fund clients in the room may be slow to follow.

Introduction to AWD 10

I’ve had a bit of a remote demo of AWD prior to the conference, but wanted to see how DST presents AWD at a basic level to their customers. They highlighted a number of features:

Inbound scanned documents, faxes, emails, tweets and other sources
Forms builder for data capture user interface
Process design (apparently with BPMN), including service calls and subprocesses
Work assignment
Audit and quality review history
Correspondence generation, based on templates for standard parts of the letter, and allowing for ad hoc text
Integration with customer database and business rules
Monitoring dashboards for individuals and teams

I’m not seeing any unusually innovative BPM capabilities in AWD 10 compared to other BPMS, but this reminds me a lot of how BPM is presented at SAP conferences, for much the same reasons: these customers are using DST products that run their current business effectively, and the agile process-centric BPM environment is new (and likely a bit scary) to them. However, by focusing on things that really matter to these BPM newbies – transaction processing, ability to quickly change process models, quality, work monitoring – they’re showing the inherent value in a more flexible environment over their older AWD code-driven environment.

The challenge for DST will be whether these customers will make the jump to AWD 10, or decide to evaluate other BPM systems if this is a complete application rewrite from existing AWD platform versions. If there is a great deal of customer loyalty, or the customers are bound to other DST systems that will integrate more easily with AWD 10, this may not be a case of offering the best BPMS on the market, just the best BPMS for existing DST customers.

AWD Advance Opening Keynote

AWD from DST Technologies is one of those well-kept secrets in BPM: I know about them because I’ve done a lot of implementations with mutual fund companies, which is one of their primary markets due to DST Systems’ transfer agency solution and their involvement in business process outsourcing (do not ask me to explain the web of companies that make up DST and its parents/children/siblings). When you mention DST and AWD to most people in the BPM space, however, you’ll get a faintly puzzled look. And when I mentioned that I was going to be attending their conference in Kansas City this week, I got a few raised eyebrows, because it appears that analysts aren’t usually invited along. It’s like a secret society or something. I’m still waiting for the initiation ritual.

John Vaughn, VP of business process solutions, gave the opening keynote about business process and customer experience as competitive differentiators: if you do it better, and make your customer while you’re doing it, you have a killer combination. If you read about my experience with Zipcar, you’ll know that this is true. Competitors in the future aren’t necessarily going to be who you think they are now; they’re going to come from places that you don’t expect, in terms of geography, company size and current industry focus. DST’s customers here today, many of them financial services and business process outsourcers, aren’t going to just be competing with other current financial services and BPO companies: at some point, Walmart is going to start selling mutual funds, free agents are going to develop financial planning software, and China’s going to ramp up their outsourcing capabilities. All of this is going to be seriously disruptive for companies that aren’t expecting to compete outside their current base of competition.

AWD as a product has been around for 20 years, and I expect that many of the customers in this room are still on older versions, wondering why they should convert from the old system that runs their business perfectly well to something new and potentially risky. This disruptive business and economic environment is exactly why you can’t just upgrade your server and keep doing business as usual.

Lisa Williams, officer of product management for AWD business process solutions, followed on from that to talk about where they’re taking AWD in the future: empowering knowledge workers, customer engagement through mobile and social, and generally enabling business transformation. AWD 10, which we’ll be hearing more about later today, provides a lot of capabilities to move this forward, but you also need to consider reinventing the customer journey rather than just incremental improvement. Then, you can use the AWD 10 capabilities that you already have to implement that platform to engage your customers.

Mike Lovell, director of product management, finished up the opening keynote with a focus on supporting knowledge workers by getting the technology out of the way and allowing them to engage with the customers. Productivity, throughput and quality are table stakes with AWD, and will never be compromised; rather, you need to up the ante with case management for a more flexible yet powerful environment to support those workers with prioritized task lists, activity feeds and team collaboration. There are also new monitoring and analytics capabilities for better visibility and more intelligent processing.

Good kickoff to the conference, and lots of interesting things to come.

Focus on Customer Experience with @maxjpucher

Another week, another conference. Instead of 9,500 people in Las Vegas at IBM Impact, however, this week I’m amongst a group of about 200 in the outskirts of Vienna for the ISIS Papyrus open house and user conference. Last night’s conference event included Lipizzan stallions doing dressage set to music, dinner in a palace, and Viennese waltzing to a string quartet. The conference itself is held in the ISIS Papyrus offices, full of natural light and greenery. About the only thing in common with Impact and Vegas is that the wifi is misbehaving, bumping me offline for most of the morning.

The first day opened with Max Pucher, CTO of ISIS Papyrus, talking about the necessity for a focus on customer experience, and you need to invest in technology to empower your workers, not replace them. Customer experience – and brand loyalty – is heavily influenced by the customers’ interactions with your people, not just your products. Understanding how systems of engagement work with systems of record is key, and brings focus on the number of different systems that you use in order to conduct business; this array of technology actually makes it harder to enable change, since there are often very rigid interfaces between them.

He maintains that you can’t start transforming your business with the process: you start with people, then planning, then programs, then projects and finally process. In understanding the systems of record, it’s important to start with business architecture to define objectives, map those to capabilities and end-to-end processes: the business language of process. Then, business information can be mapped to the underlying systems, and business transactions can be modeled as services against those systems. The true flexibility, however, needs to be in the systems of engagement: this is where business people need to be able to adapt processes to meet the needs of the customers.

He finished up with a bit about their product: the Papyrus platform started as inbound/outbound content management, including content-centric process management, and has expanded to include capabilities for adaptive case management (ACM), business process management (BPM), process analytics and more. The product positioning is as an integrated system of engagement, interfacing with systems of record, but providing adaptive processes that can be defined and modified by the business. Although initial projects to establish the infrastructure and environment require IT, the idea is that once it is set up, the business can work within the case structure to define their own customer engagement models.

The core functionality, and what seems to be the sweet spot for many of their customers, is inbound and outbound document processing, although this is much more than just scanning paper documents and generating correspondence: it’s ingestion of content from a wide variety of sources, the case management capabilities required to process that content, business rules to constrain and inform the case, and a significant amount of pattern recognition and machine intelligence to provide automated recommendations for the next best action to the user along the way. Work in a case is structured around goals, with activities identified (either up-front or on the fly) that are required to fulfill each goal. The goals, in turn, are linked to strategic objectives in the business architecture as well as tactical targets (KPIs). All of this is within a single integrated system, meaning that you don’t need to worry about integrating content ingestion, case management, business rules, analytics, correspondence generation and other functionality.

Although Max and I have been ~~sparring~~ engaging online for a few years, this is my first real introduction to the ISIS Papyrus product, and I’m looking forward to learning more about it over the next two days.

The Future Of BPM

I was on a panel yesterday afternoon on the future of BPM with Phil Gilbert of IBM and Derek Miers of Forrester, where we ranged across topics from BPM programs to achieving process maturity to the impact of social. No slides or recording, unfortunately, and that meant that I didn’t go to other sessions to blog about.

I’m headed home to Toronto for a couple of days, then this weekend I’m off to Vienna for the ISIS Papyrus open house and user conference. Watch for my coverage from there (Max, do we have a hash tag yet?).