IBM ECM Product Strategy

I finished the first day of IOD in the ECM product strategy session with Ken Bisconti and John Murphy. I was supposed to have a 1:1 interview with Bisconti at this same time, so now I know why that cancelled – the room is literally standing room only, and the same session (or, at least, a session with the identical name) is scheduled for tomorrow morning so there’s obviously a great deal of interest in what’s coming up in ECM.

They started with a summary of their 2011-2012 priorities:

  • Intelligent, distributed capture based on the DataCap acquisition
  • Customer self-service and web presentment of reports and statements
  • Rich user experiences and mobile device support
  • Whole solutions through better product integration and packaging as well as vertical applications and templates

The key deliverables in this time frame:

  • IBM Production Imaging Edition
  • DataCap Taskmaster expansion
  • CM8, FileNet CM updates
  • Project “Nexus”, due in 2012, which is the next generation of web-based user experience across the IBM software portfolio

They stressed that customers’ investments in their repositories is maintained, so the focus is on new ways to capture, integrate and access that data, such as bidirectional replication (including annotations and metadata) between older Image Services repositories and P8 Content Manager, and content repository federation.

Nexus is intended to address the classic problems with FileNet UI components: either they were easy to maintain or easy to customize, but never both. As someone who spent a lot of time in the 90s customizing UIs with the early versions of those components, I’d have to agree wholeheartedly with that statement. We saw a demo of the under-development version of Nexus, which shows three panes: a filterable activity stream for content and related processes, a favorites list, and a list of repositories. Searching in this environment can be restricted to a subset of the repositories, or across repositories: including non-IBM repositories such as SharePoint. Navigating to a repository provides a fairly standard folder-based view of the repository – cool for demos but often useless for very large repositories – with drag-and-drop capabilities for adding documents to the repository. The property dialog that appears for a new document can access external data sources in order to restrict the input to specific metadata fields.

This also provides access to teamspaces, which are sort of like a restricted version of an object store/library, where a user can create a teamspace (optionally based on a template), specify the folder structure, metadata and predefined searches, then add other users who can collaborate within this space. When a teamspace is opened, it looks pretty much like a regular library, except that it’s a user-created space rather than something that a system admin needs to set up.

Because of the underlying technology, Nexus can be surfaced in a number of different ways, including different types of widgets as well as on mobile devices. This style of user experience is a bit behind the curve of some other vendors, but is at least moving in the right direction. I look forward to seeing how this rolls out next year.

They moved on to discuss social content management, which covers a variety of social use cases:

  • Accessing and sharing content in the context of communities
  • Finding and navigating social content and social networks
  • Managing and governing social business information
  • Delivering social content business solutions

This obviously covers a lot of ground, and they’re really going to have to leverage the skills and lessons learned over in the Lotus group to jumpstart some of the social areas.

Next was Case Manager; I’m looking forward to a more in-depth product briefing on this alone, rather than just five minutes as part of the entire ECM strategy, but their content-centric view of case management seems to be resonating with their customers. That’s not to say that this is the only way to do case management, as we see from a number of other ACM vendors, but rather than IBM customers with big FileNet content repositories can really see additional value in the functionality that Case Manager provides on top of these repositories.

The newly announced Case Manager v5.1 aims to make it simpler to create and deliver case-based solutions, and includes a number of new integration capabilities including BPM (as we saw this morning) and data integration. They are also focusing on vertical industry case-based accelerators, and we saw a demo of a healthcare claims case management application that brings together case management, content and analytics to help a case worker to detect fraud. Like most case management scenarios, this is not focused on the actual automated detection of fraud, but on surfacing information to the user that will allow them to make that determination. Doing this in the context of content repositories and content analytics provides an rich view of the situation, allowing the case worker to make better decisions in much less time.

The case worker can create and assign tasks to others, including field workers who use a native iPad app to perform their field review (in the demo, this was a fraud investigator visiting a healthcare practitioner) including capturing new content using the iPad’s camera. Although the version that they demonstrated requires a live connection, they do expect to be delivering apps for disconnected remote devices as well, which is truly critical for supporting remote workers who may wander far beyond the range of their data network.

Moving on to information lifecycle management and governance, some of which is based on last year’s acquisition of PSS Systems, the portfolio includes smart archive (e.g., archiving SAP and other structured data), legal eDiscovery, records management and retention, and disposal and governance management. They’re now providing smart archive as a cloud offering, as well as on premise. The buzz-phrase of this entire area is “defensible disposition”, which sounds a bit like something that happens on The Sopranos, but is really about having an overall information governance plan for how data of all types area maintained, retained and destroyed.

They finished with a bit about IBM Watson for integrating search with predictive analytics, and the industry solutions emerging from this such as IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare which is being shown here at IOD this week. We heard a bit about what this combination of technologies can do in the Seton Healthcare presentation earlier this afternoon, and we’ll see a demo of the actual packaged solution in the Wednesday morning keynote.

IBM IOD ECM Keynote: Content In Motion

Content at rest = cost

Content in motion = value

That was the message that kicked off the ECM keynote, then Kevin Painter took the stage to introduce the winners of the four ECM customer innovation awards – Novartis, Tejon Ranch, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Wells Fargo – before turning things over to Doug Hunt.

IBM defines unstructured data, or content, as pretty much everything that doesn’t fit in a database table. Traditionally, this type of information is seen as inaccessible, cumbersome, expensive, unmanageable and risky by business, IT, records managers and legal. However, with the right management of that content, including putting it into motion to augment systems of record, it can become accessible and relevant, providing a competitive advantage.

We heard from Wells Fargo about their ECM implementation, where they are moving from having scanned documents as merely an archival practice to having those documents be an active part of the business transactions. [This sounds just like moving from post-processing scanning to pre-processing scanning and workflow, which we’ve been doing for 30+ years, but maybe it’s more complex than that.] For them, ECM is a fundamental part of their mortgage processing architecture and business transaction enabling, supporting multiple lines of business and processes. This, I think, is meant to represent the “Capture” slice of the pie.

Novartis was on stage next to talk about their records management (the “Govern” slice), particularly around retention management of their records to reduce legal risk across their multi-national organization.

Next, Hunt addressed “Analyze” with content analytics, joined by someone from Seton Healthcare to discuss how they’re using Watson analytics to proactively identify certain high-risk patients with congestive heart failure to allow early treatment that can reduce the rate of hospital readmissions. With 80% of their information being unstructured, they need something beyond standard analytics to address this.

Case management was highlighted as addressing the “Activate” slice, and Hunt was joined by someone from SEB, a Nordic bank, to discuss how they are using IBM Case Manager as an exception handling platform (i.e., for those processes that kick out of the standard straight-through process), replacing their existing workflow engine.

Hunt did briefly address the “Socialize” slice, but he was so clued out about anything to do with social content, it was a bit embarrassing. Seriously, I don’t want to hear the executive in charge of IBM’s ECM strategy talk about social as something that his wife and kids do, but he doesn’t.

He finished up talking about the strength of the IBM ECM industry accelerators and business partners, both of which help to get systems up and running at their customers’ sites as quickly as possible.

Streaming Video from IBM IOD

You can watch live streaming video of the IOD keynotes, such as this afternoon’s EDM keynote at 2:15PT/5:15ET, plus interviews from the show floor (and hopefully, soon, a replay of this morning’s keynote with Jeff Jonas) here:

Watch live streaming video from ibmsoftware at livestream.com

 

The good news is that I can now watch the keynotes from the comfort of my hotel room, if I want, where the wifi doesn’t suck.

IBM IOD Keynote: Turn Insight Into Action

This is a big conference. We’re in the Mandalay Bay Events Center, which is a stadium that would probably hold a hockey rink, and although all the seats are not full, it’s a pretty big turnout. This is IBM’s centennial, which is a theme throughout the conference, and the opening session started with some key points in the history of IBM’s products. IBM might seem like a massive, slow-moving ship at times, but there is no doubt that they’ve been an innovator through the entire age of modern computing. I just hope to be seeing some of that innovation in their ECM and ACM products this week.

The keynote session was hosted by Katty Kay, a BBC news journalist in the Washington bureau, who added a lot of interesting business and social context to the presentations.

Jeff Jonas spoke about analytics, pointing out that with the massive amounts of data available to enterprises, enterprises are actually getting dumber because they’re not analyzing and correlating that data in context. He used a jigsaw puzzle metaphor: you don’t know what any particular piece means until you see it in relation to the others with which it fits. You also don’t need all of the pieces in the puzzle to understand the big picture: context accumulates with each new observation, and at some point, confidence improves while computational effort decreases.

He looked at two sides of analytics – sense and respond, and explore and reflect – and how they fit into the activity of achieving insight. If the keynotes are available online, definitely watch Jonas’ presentation: he’s funny and insightful in equal measure, and has a great example of a test he ran with jigsaw puzzles and human cognition. He went much too fast for me to keep up in these notes, and I’ll be watching it again if I can find it. The only problem was that his presentation ruined me for the rest of the keynotes, which seemed dull in comparison. 🙂

Sarah Diamond was up next to talk about the challenges facing financial institutions, and how analytics can support the transformation of these organizations by helping them to manage risk more effectively. She introduced a speaker from SunTrust, and IBM customer, who spoke about their risk management practices based around shared data warehousing and reporting services. Another SunTrust speaker then talked about how they use analytics in the context of other activities, such as workflow. A good solid case study, but not sure that this was worth such a big chunk of the main keynote.

Mike Rhodin spoke about how innovation across industries is opening new possibilities for business optimization, particularly where analytics create a competitive advantage. Analytics are no longer a nice-to-have, but an imperative for even staying in business: the performance gap between the winners and losers in business is growing, and is fueled in part by the expedient use of analytics to generate insights that allow for business optimization. Interestingly, marketing and finance are the big users of analytics; only 25% of HR leaders are using analytics to help them with hiring an effective workforce.

Robert LeBlanc discussed how the current state of information from everywhere, radical flexibility and extreme scalability impacts organizations’ information strategy, and challenged the audience to consider if their information strategy is bold enough to live in this new environment. Given that 30% of organizations surveyed reported that they don’t even know what to do with analytics, it’s probably safe to say that there are some decidedly meek information strategies out there. Information – both data and unstructured content – can come from anywhere, both inside and outside your organization, meaning that the single-repository dream is really just a fantasy: repositories need to be federated and integrated so that analytics can be applied on all of the sources where they live, allowing you to exploit information from everywhere. He pointed out the importance of leveraging your unstructured information as part of this.

The keynote finished with Arvind Krishna – who will be giving another full keynote later today – encouraging the audience to take the lead on turning insight into action. He summarized this week’s product announcements: DB2 Analytics Accelerator, leveraging Netezza; IMS 12; IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare; IBM Case Manager v5.1, bringing together BPM and case management; InfoSphere MDM 10; InfoSphere Information Server 8.7; InfoSphere Optim Test Data Management Self Service Center; Cognos native iPad support; Cognos BI v10.1.1. He also announced that they closed the Algorithmics acquisition last week, and that they will be acquiring Q1 Labs for security intelligence and risk management. He spoke about their new products, InfoSphere BigInsights and InfoSphere Streams, which we’ll be hearing about more in tomorrow’s keynote.

Elmer Sotto of Facebook Canada at DemoCamp Toronto 30

Unbelievably, the 30th edition of DemoCamp happened in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and I was there to hear the keynote from Elmer Sotto of Facebook Canada, as well as see the short, live demos from four local startups. I’ll post my notes on the demo in a subsequent post, but I’ve been thinking about Sotto’s exploration of the question of what is social: although he was focused on the consumer market, I saw a lot of parallels with social business. He saw three basic drivers for a social environment:

  • You are proud of what you do and want to share it
  • Others want to see what you have to share
  • You specifically share with your social network

He spoke about having a social platform that is optimized for telling stories, where those stories are for the purpose of building identity, sparking conversation or deepening relationships. Or, as we might say in the social enterprise world: stories for reputation, collaboration or building our social graph.

To be truly social, a platform must be social by design, not just have share/like buttons tacked on after completion. Software that has social in its very DNA must be shared to be fully functional; can you imagine Facebook if you were the only one on it? It must also mimic real social norms in order to be successful: amplifying existing social or cultural activities, not trying to create new ones, and extending an existing social graph rather than creating a new one.

It’s interesting that Facebook is taking on the challenge of replacing the mostly unstructured data of notes with more structured semantic data to allow the surfacing of that data to parts of your social graph: instead of just “liking” something, they are allowing applications to create the structure of user/action/object for users to interact with that application.

The latter part of his presentation turned into a bit of a Facebook ad, including video from the F8 conference about the new Timeline feature, but I found some of his points were surprisingly useful in an enterprise context.

TUCON 2011 Day 2 Keynote

Today’s keynotes were 1.5 hours less than yesterday’s, but still a hefty 2 hours long. Some of the highlights:

Ashok Vemuri of Infosys gave the opening keynote on innovation. He discussed how technology is making a difference in the developing world, such as mobile branchless banking in Kenya, and how the human qualities of mind, mindset, character and luck can have a huge impact if properly leveraged. Innovation is critical to maintain a competitive edge in any industry: new products, services and processes can lead to increased efficiencies and increased revenues. In many cases, innovation can end up transforming industries or even creating entirely new industries, and it’s necessary to take risks in order to embrace these sorts of disruptive conditions. To foster innovation, Infosys focuses on simplification, adaptability and collaboration as pervasive values within their own organization, and with their customers and partners. Although this was basically one big advertisement for Infosys, it was a good summary of some of the factors and environments that contribute to innovation. Not, however, particularly inspiring or uplifting (as Vinnie tweeted).

Continuing on the hit parade of major partners, Chris Robinson of KPMG was up next to talk about innovation in banana peeling. No, really. His point – which was one of the points also made by Vemuri – was that some of their important innovations come from their youngest employees. Instead of focusing on innovation, however, Robinson talked about recruiting and retaining employees, and the impact of social media on that. This was the usual pro-millennials crap: boomers are too old to learn the new ways of doing things, only digital natives can live comfortably with social, blah, blah, blah. It was exactly this argument that led me to abandon the Enterprise 2.0 conference over a year ago and stop attending Don Tapscott keynotes. The fact is that if you reward people for maintaining the status quo, as KPMG undoubtedly does with their partners and senior employees, then they will work hard at doing things in exactly the same way as they have been doing for years. Different incentives and different motivations lead to different results. News flash: even we old people can embrace and thrive on social media.

David Calhoun of Nielsen was the first customer on stage today, discussing how consumer behavior is changing. As a company that tracks what consumers watch and buy, they collect a massive amount of data on this and provide analytics and expertise about it. They have long relationships with customers (over 70 years in the case of P&G, for example), helping them to craft their marketing and promotion efforts based on multi-year domain knowledge. For Nielsen, information is money, quite literally. Calhoun talked about their road to innovation, which involved replacing some of their batch-oriented legacy systems in order to provide faster, better information to their employees and customers, including leveraging new platforms such as Facebook. He had a great quote on business transformation: make sure that the corporate culture supports your desired outcomes. Really good keynote, definitely the best of the morning.

As the time got a bit long and the Accenture speaker came to the stage, I ducked out. Only so much keynoting I can take at one time.

There are several good breakout sessions today that I plan to attend, including ones on Nimbus and AMX/BPM, plus a few 1:1 meetings with TIBCO customers, so watch for more on that. Also, you can follow the Twitter at three different hashtags: the official one is #tucon2011, but people have been using #tucon11 and #tucon as well, so you may want to use a compound search for all of them.

Increasing Business Value From Customer-Centric Business Processes with @AlexPForrester

The last session of the day at Forrester Business Process Forum (and the last for me, since I’m headed home tonight) is Alexander Peters on increasing business value from customer-centric business processes. Looking at a case study from the energy trading and retail sector, he described how the speed of change requires new ways of thinking, and how processes need to become more responsive and cross-functional.

He believes that process discipline – e.g., Lean, Six Sigma, change management and governance/COE – is the critical differentiator, combined with business knowledge and smart technology such as BPM. His focus is definitely on change management, and sees a change approach based on the level of process maturity, beginning with a maturity assessment. Being at a higher process maturity level means that an enterprise has moved from being fragmented, reactive and tech-driven to a more holistic, business-driven approach to BPM. There’s quite a bit of variability in process maturity levels within organizations, with business architecture receiving the lowest maturity score.

It was a bit late in the day (after a somewhat late night) to be using a lot of my brain on governance, but the basic idea is that governance establishes the roles, responsibilities and interactions of the process stakeholders, and the COE provides support to the business operations and projects. Also, apparently, Lean Six Sigma tools are critical to drive improvements at key points of the maturity curve. I’m not sure that there was anything strikingly new in this message; I also had the sense that the “customer-centric” message was overlaid on existing research and presentations that really didn’t have that orientation in the first place, making the titles a bit incongruous in some instances.

Delivering Exceptional Customer Service at Citigroup

Hosted by Global 360 (now Open Text), Tim Burns of Citigroup Fund Services discussed their customer-centric dynamic case management. As the fund services end of the business, performing transfer agency, trust accounting and fund accounting services, their customers are not end-consumers, but rather fund companies for whom they provide those services. That means that the customer experience equation is a bit different from most of the case studies that we’ve been hearing about so far today, but even more critical since losing a single customer is a huge event for a fund services firm such as this.

Although he’s fairly new to Citi, he’s been working in BPM (from the technology side) in financial services for a number of years, and has seen movement from the old way of doing business – paper-based, manual processes with a lot of disconnects – to the new way, which is flexible and adaptable for each customer through integration, provide skills-based work routing regardless of geographic location, and include audit and compliance.

They’ve implemented Global 360’s dynamic case management as part of varied portfolio of other operations systems, providing visibility into client transactions and enabling collaboration for their knowledge workers. In spite of the focus of the presentation on customer experience, Burns discussed the benefits as mostly around FTE reduction, the ability to handle more work without adding staff, and reduced disaster recovery costs: none of which are related to customer experience. Interestingly, when I first implemented a system very much like this almost 20 years ago at CI Mutual Funds, the focus was on improving their DALBAR rating for customer service (which we did, from #9 to #2 in a year); I’m sure that someone in Citi is looking at numbers like this, although Burns is more focused on implementation efficiencies.

Customer Experience And Business Processes with @waband

I left Progress Revolution behind and headed across town to Forrester’s Business Process Forum for the day, where we’re seeing a strong focus on improving customer experience instead of just improving business processes. In line with that, Bill Band, who covers CRM for Forrester, presented on how business process professionals can help deliver breakthrough customer experiences. As we saw earlier in the keynotes, we’ve moved from the age of manufacturing of 1900-1960, through the age of distribution of 1960-1990, the age of information of 1990-2010, and have entered the age of the customer. Consumers now have too many choices for you to expect them to stay with you if you provide a bad customer experience.

Forrester’s research shows that only 7% of customer experiences are rated as excellent, and Band encouraged us to put customer experience at the heart of any process transformation efforts. He has a bit of a strange view on business process professionals: I have the sense that he thinks we’re all Lean Six Sigma black belts who like to enforce rigid, structured processes. There’s a huge variability between good and bad customer experience, and that difference can result in huge differences in revenue opportunities. He pointed out that customer experience is what the customer perceives, not what you design for them, as they move through stages of discovering, buying, getting support and other steps along the customer journey. Furthermore, that customer journey may happen across multiple channels, for example, as the customer moves from a web order to telephone customer support.

Looking at processes in customer experience, we need to use Lean principles to eliminate waste from the customer viewpoint, not just the company viewpoint. We need to understand the full customer journey and all of the touchpoints that need to be managed, and ensure that the end-to-end customer processes are properly defined and orchestrated. This can lead to businesses reorganizing to eliminate business functional silos in favor of process-focused organizational models. This process-centricity that is starting to emerge in organizations puts more pressure on business process professionals, since we’re expected to be the change agents for customer experience while continuing to improve efficiencies.

Some of the lessons learned for improving your customer experience (CX) IQ:

  • Centralize customer experience governance
  • Create or enhance voice-of-the-customer programs
  • Tap into the voice of the employee
  • Implement customer centric-design processes
  • Measure customer experience consistently across the enterprise
  • Reward customer-centric behavior

It’s important to find and communicate your business case for customer obsession, and understand the customer journey. As process professionals, we have a big role to play in this.

There was a great Q&A – Bill has a great manner of providing thoughtful and informative answers on the fly, obviously based on a lot of practical experience.

Also, be sure to track the conference hashtag, #BPF11, since there’s lots of great activity going on over there.

State of the Insurance Industry

Since I have a lot of insurance clients, I attended this afternoon’s panel on the state of the insurance industry, hosted by Cindy Maike of Progress, and including Dan Benton of Kemper Corporation (former underwriter, now in IT), David Brandeis of Strongwood Insurance Holdings (IT), and Roy Ausberger of Virtusa (formerly IT within insurance and financial organizations, now consulting).

It’s always a challenge to blog panels, and I’ve just captured a list of unattributed points that came out during the discussion:

  • The business has to own the process, not IT, in order to have successful technology implementation projects.
  • The idea that as soon as your insurance policy is bound, you should be able to do anything such as make changes or have ID cards issued, is placing a lot of stress on current batch-based IT systems (and the people who support them). These systems need to become more real-time and event-driven, provide better information faster, and provide mobile interfaces for the end customers.
  • Social media is useful for insurance fraud investigations, but more importantly, can provide the sales agents with social media platforms such as Facebook integration to push into new markets. This requires a more robust and open platform to support integration with external platforms such as this. There’s still a search in many insurance companies to figure out how to make money with social media, rather than just the “cool” factor. One of them said “are we really going to go out and create a [insurance] quoting app in Facebook?”, which implied that that would happen shortly after hell froze over. Good luck with that.
  • My observation is that there’s a lot of confusion between social and mobile: when Maike asked the question about social media, two of the three panelists included mobile platforms as part of their answer, although that’s a bit of a different vector.
  • Progress Software gives them a lot of flexibility, but in general they focus on buy rather than build, then integrate using tools such as Progress. The value of industry-specific accelerators or components from the BPM/middleware vendor depends a lot on how close that component is to what is required, and what customization would have to be done. It’s more important to have the knowledge and understanding internally than to expect a vendor or consultant to provide industry-specific models. Not surprisingly, that created an interesting conversation between the two insurance guys and the Virtusa guy.
  • With the economy tanked, it’s becoming easier to hire good IT and analytical skills into insurance; previously, it was nearly impossible. Insurance doesn’t have a reputation as a glamorous career path, and they are still finding it difficult to hire. They are tending to be more flexible with their IT workforce with respect to geographic location in order to attract the right people.
  • There was not a lot of trust in the public cloud as a platform, primarily for audit reasons.
  • Real-time data is becoming critical for insurance to be able to track events as they unfold, such as natural disasters. Operational insight is the hot topic right now.

Some good insights here.