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FeedBurner kills my feed. Again.

When I switched to the new Google-hosted version of FeedBurner (which soon everyone using FeedBurner will be forced to convert to), they screwed up my feed, causing my subscriptions to drop by about 20%.

Since then, my numbers have come back to to around what they were — presumably through organic growth of the people who figured out that it wasn’t updating and re-added me to their feed reader — until yesterday, when they dropped by 25% and even further today. Grrrrrrrr.

Even worse, my feed hasn’t updated in my own Google Reader since my first post of the day, so even if you are still subscribed, you may not be seeing the posts in a timely manner.

If you’re a victim of this, of course you won’t know, you’ll just think that I’m not blogging. If you check on my site directly and see this, try removing and re-adding my feed to your reader, hopefully that will fix it. At least until the next time GoogleBurner screws up.

Update: After two days of the “25% off sale”, subscriptions jump back to normal.

Ultimus: Customer roundtable

I’m in a roundtable session with one brand new Ultimus customer, one who’s six months in and just getting their first processes rolled out, and one who’s done a lot of processes already. As was requested previously, and again not-so-subtly by Chris Heivly who is moderating this session, I won’t be documenting the names of the customers or the details.

Instead, I am forced to blog about my cat:

She’s not much into BPM, but you can see that she’s a bit of an efficiency expert.

Seriously, though, there were a few good nuggets in the session that won’t tell any tales out of school:

Product demos aren’t enough to bridge the gap to understanding what BPM can do for you: you need to prototype your processes in a product to really understand it.
Going paperless is a huge cultural challenge, but once the users get used to it, they wouldn’t give it up.
HR onboarding provides a good opportunity for automation, and can justify the cost of the BPM system alone in a larger organization.
Implementing one relatively straightforward process up front can be used to help bolster the business case for additional implementations. One example that we heard was implementing the approval process for the requirements for the processes that you’re there to build in the first place.
Sometimes it’s worthwhile to implement the current process without reengineering — pave the cowpaths, as it were — in order to start gathering statistics on the bottlenecks in the process and highlight the potential for improvements.
The center of excellence approach is critical for rolling out a large number of processes efficiently, using a small core of dedicated resources, then moving other people in and out of the team as their skills were required.
A rapid, agile-like approach with a minimum of structured requirements works well, especially for getting the initial happy path process up and running; you can go back and fill in the exception cases later in the design and implementation cycle.

Ultimus: Reports and Dashboards

Chris Adams is probably now thinking that I’m stalking him: not only do I attend his first two technical sessions, but when he switches to the business track for this presentation, I follow him. However, I wanted to hear about their reporting and analytics capabilities, and he covered off reporting, dashboards, BAM, alerts and using third-party analytics.

He started out with the underlying premise that you need to have governance over your business data, or your processes won’t be effective and efficient; in order to do that, you need to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to measure the health of your processes. This means both real-time monitoring and historical analytics.

Ultimus iBAM provides a real-time dashboard that works with both V7 and V8. Only in V8, there’s also email alerts when specific KPI thresholds are reached.

For offline reporting, they have three types:

Process reports, automatically created for process instance analytics
User reports, also automatically created for workload and user productivity
Custom reports that allow for filtering of the historical data, filtered by other business data

Reports can be viewed as charts as well as tabular reports; there is a third-party report generation tool invisibly built in (Infologistics?); Chris noted that this is the only third-party OEM component in Ultimus.

If you’re using Crystal Reports or Cognos, Ultimus has now opened up and created connectors to allow for reporting on the Ultimus history data directly from those platforms; by the end of the year, they’ll add support for SQL Server Reporting Services as well.

There will be a more technical session on the reporting and analytics later today.

Ultimus: Dave Ridley, Southwest Airlines on sustaining organizational excellence

I’ve been coached by Ultimus PR that I can’t mention all speakers by name since some of them are a bit skittish about seeing their names and case studies splashed across the internet, but Dave Ridley, SVP of marketing for Southwest Airlines, doesn’t have that problem. He was here today to discuss organizational excellence, and he started with a lot of jokes about how someone from an airline could even think about doing this, given the sad state of the industry over the past several years. However, Southwest has been a success story in the US domestic airline space since not only have they not gone bankrupt, they’ve actually been profitable and have never had a layoff. Furthermore, they have a reputation for great customer service, as well a providing a fun experience for their customers.

He started off talking about how you have to focus on process and metrics, what he calls “the smart stuff”, but that’s not enough to sustain organizational excellence; you also have to be “healthy”. He defines a healthy organization as one with minimal politics, a strong focus on the business that you’re in, low turnover and high morale. His mantra: relationships always precede sustained results. Not just external relationships with your customers, investors and partners, but internal relationships with your employees. I’m totally on board with this: when I ran a 40-person systems integration company in the late 90’s, my mantra was “the customer comes second”, and I always put my own team’s best interests ahead of everything else, which in turn motivated them to put the customers’ best interests first.

He told us some heart-warming stories of Southwest employees going above and beyond the call of duty, making the point that you can’t train people to provide this level of customer services: you have to hire them. Hire for attitude, train for aptitude. He points out that most of us spend much less time and effort hiring people than we do to spend the equivalent amount of money on software — what’s wrong with that? He challenged the audience to find the points of organization excellence that are deeply ingrained in their companies, and look for those when hiring people. Then, as he wrapped up the talk, he said it’s important to ignore the “customer comes first” mantra, and put your own people first. Weird to see the same words that I wrote 15 minutes ago (above) echoed, but it’s too true. He sees successful leadership, at least at Southwest, as being egoless: big titles don’t matter, prima donnas not permitted, everyone is equally important in contributing to organization excellence.

There’s so much that we do in BPM that works towards achieving organizational excellence, but sometimes we get caught down in the weeds and forget about the larger issues. Ridley’s talk was a good reminder of what’s really important in business.

Ultimus: Janelle Hill Keynote

I’m giving my keynote here at the Ultimus user conference in about an hour, but it’s always a pleasure to listen to Janelle Hill of Gartner so I’ve decided that I’ve reviewed my notes enough already. She’s discussing the need for business process competency centers, and how you end up with a series of BPM departmental silos if you don’t consider a competency center. This is a perfect launching point for my “Future of BPM” talk coming up, since one of the challenges that I list at the beginning is siloed departmental BPM systems that exist, in part, because of the lack of a competency center.

So what does a competency center provide? Think of it as a sort of internal consulting group or shared service, a one-stop shop for everything BPM: services, tools and standards. It’s there to support the activities that help to enable and scale BPM adoption. The main goal is to create a repeatable approach for rolling out successful BPM projects, which will may include methodologies (such as Lean), tools (such as modeling tools) and even a repository of shared implementation artifacts.

She walked through the pros and cons of different possible models for how to organize a BPCC: reporting to business, reporting to IT, or a blended model sitting between the two areas; like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the one in the middle is just right. There’s also an issue of whether to have a centralized BPCC or multiple decentralized centers, and how to evolve the BPCC over time as the BPM maturity within the organization increases. She had a few case studies — one of whom happened to be in the room — for BPCC implementations.

An interesting idea that she put forward is establishing a career path in business process competency, with three tiers of participant types ranging from business analysts up to a director/VP of BPCC. Having this structure makes it easier both for external recruiting as well as bringing people into the BPCC from other areas of the organization. She sees the competency center as a training group that people rotate through, not an exclusive club that you never leave once you’re in, which makes it more of an integral part of the organization.

Lessons that Gartner has learned from their customers about implementing a BPCC:

Too much bureaucracy in the BPCC hinders BPM adoption
Plan for the end state, but roll out as needed — don’t wait until the entire BPCC is done before starting on projects, and don’t built a competency center just for the sake of doing so
Sponsorship is critical, particularly for funding
Education and training take time and money

She finished up with a set of recommendations for implementing the BPCC, the services and engagement model, and how it fits into the organization now and going forward.

PegaWorld: Barney Frank Keynote

I think that I’m supposed to know who Congressman Barney Frank is, or what the chair of the House Financial Services Committee does, but I didn’t before reading the agenda: apparently, he oversees laws and regulations that apply to financial services and housing sectors in the US. I’m not sure if that means that we can blame him for both SOX and the sub-prime mortgage crisis. 🙂

He gave us the Idiot’s Guide to Sub-Prime Mortgages, a more elegant version of this, and discussed what’s likely to happen in financial markets in the short term (government continues bailing out the financial institutions). He was a pretty entertaining speaker: he joked that he would go to whoever managed to find the funds for the war in Iraq, and ask him to find funds to resolve some of the more pressing domestic issues. He also stated that he believes that the Homeland Security-driven initiatives to put security guards at all big office buildings in New York to check your ID does nothing to actually improve security, to some audience applause.

After seeing a pro-Democrat video at the start of the day that included Barack Obama riding a unicorn, this was a fitting end to the day. I think we know how Pega’s management leans, politically speaking.

Alan Trefler came up to close the conference, summing up the sessions that we’ve seen over the past two days, and showed a video montage of the past two days that (unfortunately) included the chicken dance episode on last night’s cruise.

That’s it for PegaWorld for me. Good content, lots of energy, and definitely worthwhile.

PegaWorld: Paul Kompare on JPMorgan Chase’s agile methodology

Paul Kompare, SVP of commercial banking technology at JPMorgan Chase discussed their Pega implementation of a straight-through processing infrastructure for commercial loans. He gave us a brief view of the current environment and the proposed solution, then moved on to discuss their agile implementation approach. Although they refer to this as Agile, it’s still a bit waterfall-like: the sprints don’t result in released code, but in checkpoint demos, and these are the points when the business representatives interact with the development team rather than being a co-located team (which likely would not have been possible since they rely heavily on offshore development resources). However, it’s a big improvement over their old waterfall methodology.

They delivered the project in two phases, each with three iterations:

Happy paths and primary flows
Exception paths and secondary flows
UI, integration and reports

In each iteration, they establish and sign off on the criteria, then use Pega to directly capture objectives and model the processes. With this relatively agile process, they improved project sponsorship as well as getting early buy-in from the business, since they were able to demonstrate something earlier and more frequently. Using PRPC also gives the business managers more visibility into the business processes and their underlying logic, rather than having those processes locked up inside opaque application code. They found that the tools gave them more agility and flexibility during implementation, greater reusability and faster time to market, as well as allowing potential changes to be identified earlier.

They did have some challenges with adapting to an agile approach: this type of approach assumes that changes to the design and functionality of the system will occur during development, and relies on rolling out a phased series of small, self-contained components. From a funding standpoint, it’s almost impossible to issue fixed-price contracts for agile development, since there is not a really fixed statement of work on which to base the proposed price. I’ve seen cases where a third-party services firm doesn’t really get agile methodology, and there is a huge amount of overhead as they attempt to shoehorn their waterfall deliverables into each iteration of the agile development, or they just abandon the agile approach and go back to waterfall.

There’s also major changes to roles and responsibilities: the business participants have much greater responsibility during design and as the system rolls out, and having them trained in the design tools is critical.

He concluded that adopting agile development methodologies has been a challenge for them, but that it’s definitely helping them to achieve shorter development cycles. There’s very little here that’s specific to commercial loans, Pega implementations, or even BPM; these same factors would be seen in any organization shifting to an agile approach. However, Kompare made the point that they were driven to consider an agile approach because the Pega tools tend to work better in that environment than with a traditional development methodology.

PegaWorld: George Colony, Forrester

When Pega invited me to attend the conference, I took a quick glance at the agenda and thought that it said that George Clooney would be speaking. I immediately accepted. On second look, I noticed that it was actually George Colony, founder and CEO of Forrester Research.

The somewhat less famous George talked about business technology (BT) in the format of 8 things that he would tell your CEO over coffee:

It’s not Information Technology any more, it’s Business Technology. As he pointed out, you can’t separate business and technology in most businesses, and what we’re now calling “IT” is an inherent, critical part of business.
To get BT right, you need four players: you (the CEO) + technology-knowledgeable business executives (TKBE) + CIO + a techie on the board. It’s no longer cool for a CEO or any business executive to not understand at least some basics of the technology that runs their business, and a techie on the board of directors will help to drive that agenda.
Process + Organization + Technology. He stated it as when technology changes, process and organization must also change, but it’s clear that when you change any one of these, the other two will have to change: these three are always involved in technology implementations.
Technology has changed your customer, and your customer will change your business. In particular, the new generation of customers are focused on different channels such as mobile devices and social networking. This is a generalization, of course, since there’s plenty of us older types who are also using these, but Forrester’s surveys are showing trends in the demographics. If you don’t embrace the channels and technology of this generation, then you’ll lose them both as customers and employees.
Don’t let Hal destroy your business. By “Hal”, he’s referring to the omniscient computer in the 2001: A Space Odyssey; the intent here is that if you can’t let the systems outstrip your understanding, common sense and risk systems. He posits that if more CEOs of financial institutions really understood sub-prime mortgages, then they wouldn’t have allowed the situation to happen at their companies.
Business Technology will enable one of the most important business models of the next 10 years: Bowties to Diamonds. This refers to the structure of economic models: instead of a vendor tapering off their involvement as a product is delivered, then the customer ramping up their responsibility and involvements, the vendor increases their involvement after the initial sale through ongoing maintenance and follow-on services in more of a partner model. Colony discussed how new technology that enables diamond relationships, particularly SOA (which allows vendor and customer systems to be easily integrated) and the extended internet (which supports the communication between vendor and customer).
Great marketing + great technology is the only way forward. If these aren’t both great and working together, you can’t effectively dissolve the boundary between you and your customer.
The only way out of the current financial meltdown is innovation and transformation. Instead of just hunkering down and doing more (or less) of the same, you have to change your business and how you use technology to do it.

He envisions CIOs being absorbed into the business, and eventually more CIOs becoming CEOs, especially in financial services companies.

PegaWorld: Customer Panel on Building for Change

Abbie Lundberg, editor-in-chief of CIO magazine, chaired a panel on what it means to “build for change”, including Carol Rizzo (CTO at Kaiser Permanente), Tom Vicknair (SVP of centralized transactions operations payment strategy at JPMorganChase) and Carole Berndt (managing director, global head of client delivery at Citi). It’s great to have a panel that is 75% women at a BPM conference, where usually the best part of the gender split is that there’s no lineup in the women’s restroom.

It started with each of the panelist giving a brief overview of their business and the challenges that they are facing (that can presumably be solved, at least in part, with BPM). Vicknair got a big laugh when he drawled “we’re expanding…the government’s helping us”, but also pointed out that they’re the biggest payment transfer processor in the US because they have a 97% straight-through rate and are constantly looking at how they can reduce that remaining 3% using tools like Pega. Rizzo’s challenges are focused on government regulations in the health care industry and the integration of new biomedical devices onto their network while dealing with a widely varying base of constituents; Berndt’s are about the globalization of their business in providing service to multinational clients.

Despite the differences in their types of businesses, all are facing increasing demand to partner with their customers, providing them with better access to information and system; that level of transparency also requires agility to meet ever-changing customer needs. They all rank customer-centricity as their #1 priority, especially in an economic downturn since it’s even more critical to keep all those customers happy (even if they’re not as wealthy as they used to be).

Berndt sees room for improvement in Citi’s agility, and that the biggest hurdle is the organizational change required to get the various silos to collaborate around improving the customer experience. She also discussed the problems with moving a large number of divisions onto the same technology platform, which meant that some people end up with less functionality than before the conversion, and how they had to focus on the people/culture as well as the processes. JPMorganChase is also sold on the idea of one system for any given function, which has been an issue over the years of mergers and acquisitions as they moved from 3 down to 1 deposit system.

Rizzo says that although Kaiser Permanente is top in the processes and systems used by hospitals and doctors for diagnosis and treatment, they are working to improve the processes around health plans. Also a product of some mergers and acquisitions, they see different processes across different regions, making it more challenging to support with a single technology platform.

In response to a question about how budgets are tightening in these economic times, Vicknair pointed out that they have a $7B budget for IT and operations, and they’re going to spend it one way or another, so it’s best to push on with the BPM projects that can make a big difference in their agility.

As always, it’s difficult to blog about a panel since the conversation meanders around quite a bit. Lundberg did a good wrap-up at the end, with the focus mostly on people issues, including getting executive buy-in.

PegaWorld: Mhayse Samalya, Farmers Insurance

The next keynote was Mhayse Samalya, EVP of Farmers Group and president of Farmers Business Insurance, discussing how to create agility in small business insurance. They write a lot of insurance business in the US, operating under various brands including Farmers and Zurich. They’re better known for their personal insurance and larger commercial business, but have been building their commercial lines for small businesses of less than 50 employees: a $96B opportunity that is not dominated by any particular insurer. Samalya took this as a challenge to become #1 in small business insurance through a number of factors:

Good product lines
Expertise in the small speciality businesses
Predictive analytics to understand and model the market
Improve underwriting sophistication relative to small business
Create targeted offerings by agent segments (captive versus independent)

A big part of this was creating the right agent experience: simplifying and demystifying it with pre-filled forms that eliminate some questions, and automate the pass-through rate with automated underwriting decisions and automated pricing. This dramatically reduced the time required to achieve a bound policy, and freed up the underwriters’ time for dealing with more complex interactions.

They focused on incremental success, and achieved a number of significant milestones in agent expansion and new business growth during 2007 and 2008:

Restaurant product: reduced time to bind a policy from 14 days to 14 minutes
Auto product: increased close rate by 5%
Umbrella product: increased new business by 70%
1000 new agents writing commercial business

Next, they’re focusing on improving efficiencies by rolling out endorsements and renewals processes directly to the agents in the coming quarters, with an expected pass-through rate of more than 60%. It’s important to note that they focused on building their business first, then on efficiency.

Their lessons learned have relevance far outside of insurance, and could be applied to any BPM initiative:

Focus on the desired business results
Eliminate the non-value added business steps, noise and red tape
Put business change in the hands of the business
Rapidly prototype and iterate the targeted solution
Test, monitor and respond quickly to the market

They found it critical to build the right team, with a single empowered owner across business and IT (they had a VP-level position here that was actually part of the team, not a distant oversight position), a dedicated cross-functional core team, and in-depth participation from agents and underwriters. He also alluded to a relationship with Pega that had part of their compensation linked to Farmers’ business success metrics (e.g., pass-through rate).

The result: small business commercial insurance has gone from being a non-starter to the fastest-growing, highest-profile product line at Farmers; they’ve moved from a 2% market share to a 3-4% market share, which ties them with the biggest players in this market.

I work a lot with insurance so found all this to be fascinating, but Samalya made it interesting for everyone. If this is an indication of the caliber of presentations that we can expect at PegaWorld, it’s going to be a great conference.

I really like the presentation screens: most of the screen is taken up with the slides, but there’s a window near the top with the live video of the speaker in case you can’t see him directly at some point. This will also make it easy for Pega to publish these presentations with slides and video feed; it would be great to have some of these publicly available on demand.