Driving the Adoption of Business Process Initiatives With @NimbusIP

Mark Cotgrove and Clark Swain from Nimbus Partners presented in a breakout session on Nimbus and how it fits into the bigger TIBCO picture, as an expansion of the short presentation we saw from Cotgrove at the analyst session yesterday. To sum up the message from yesterday, Nimbus Control provides an essential bit of business-driven process discovery functionality that isn’t really covered in TIBCO’s AMX/BPM offering, but more importantly, the ability to create intelligent operations manuals that can then interact with AMX/BPM in a variety of ways.

Nimbus Control doesn’t do process automation: they do process and procedural documentation that can also be linked to supporting documentation and other content required to perform a manual process. Some of the manual steps may be to interact with systems in specific ways, such as entering an order on an ERP system; others may be to perform purely manual tasks such as having a customer sign a paper document. There are a few competitors in this space, such as BusinessGenetics and Business Optix (formerly ProcessMaster), and there is some overlap with BPA tools such as ARIS and Blueprint in terms of the process discovery side, but not the end-user procedural help.

Swain started on a demo, but due to the late session start (apparently the keynote went way overtime), I had to leave for another meeting, and will have to see a more detailed demo some other time.

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.

TIBCO Acquisitions With Tom Laffey: OpenSpirit, Loyalty Lab and Nimbus

Tom Laffey, EVP of products and technology, moderated a session highlighting three of TIBCO’s recent acquisitions: OpenSpirit, Loyalty Lab and Nimbus.

Clay Harter, CTO of OpenSpirit (which was acquired by TIBCO a year ago), discussed their focus on delivering data and integration applications to the oil and gas industry. Their runtime framework provided a canonical data model over a heterogeneous set of data stores, and their desktop applications integrated with spatial data products such as ESRI’s ArcGIS and Schlumberger’s remote sensing. Due to their knowledge of the specialized data sources, they have a huge penetration into 330+ oil companies and relationships into industry-specific ISVs. In October, they will release a BusinessWorks plugin for OpenSpirit to make oil and gas technical data available through the TIBCO ESB. They are also prototyping a Spotfire extension for OpenSpirit for visualizing and analyzing this data, which is pretty cool – I worked as a field engineer in oil and gas in the early 80’s, and the sensing and visualization of data was a whole different ball game then, mostly black magic. OpenSpirit’s focus is on reducing exploration costs and increasing safely through better analysis of the petrotechnical data, particularly through interdisciplinary collaboration. From TIBCO’s standpoint, they were building their energy vertical, and the acquisition of OpenSpirit brings them expertise and credibility in that domain.

Keith Rose, formerly president of Loyalty Lab and now leading the sales efforts in that area since their acquisition by TIBCO, presented on their event-driven view of managing customer loyalty, particularly loyalty programs such as those used by airlines and retailers. They have a suite of products that support marketers in terms of visualizing and analyzing loyalty-related data, and building loyalty programs that can leverage that information. Their focus on events – the core of real-time and one-to-one loyalty marketing programs – was likely the big reason for the TIBCO acquisition, since TIBCO’s event and messaging infrastructure seems like a natural fit to feed into Loyalty Lab’s analysis and programs. Spotfire for visualization and analysis of data also makes a lot of sense here, if they can work out how to integrate that with their existing offerings. With 99% of their customers on a hosted cloud solution, they may also want to consider how a move to TIBCO’s cloud platform can benefit them and integrate with other initiatives that their customers may have.

Less than a month ago, Nimbus was acquired by TIBCO, and Mark Cotgrove, a founder and EVP, gave us a briefing on their product and why it made sense for TIBCO to acquire them. Nimbus provides tools for process discovery and analysis, including the 80% (or so) of an organization’s activities that are manual and are likely to remain manual. Currently, the automated activities are handled with enterprise applications and automated BPM (such as AMX/BPM), but the manual ones are managed with a mix of office productivity software (Word, PowerPoint, Visio) and business process analysis tools. Furthermore, end-to-end processes range back and forth between manual and automated activities as they progress through their lifecycle, such that often a single process instance ends up being managed by a variety of different tools. Nimbus provides what are essentially storyboards or guided walkthroughs for business processes: like procedures manuals, but more interactive. These “intelligent operations manuals” can include steps that will instruct the user to interact with a system of some sort – for example, an ERP system, or a BPMS such as AMX/BPM – but documents all of the steps including paper handling and other manual activities. Just as a BPMS can be an orchestration of multiple integrated systems, Nimbus Control can be an orchestration of human activities, including manual steps and interaction with systems. There are a few potential integration points between Nimbus and a few different TIBCO products: metrics in the context of a process using Spotfire; exporting discovered processes from Nimbus to BusinessStudio; instantiating an AMX/BPM process from Nimbus; worker accessing a Nimbus operations manual for instructions at the step in an AMX/BPM process; collaborative process discovery using tibbr; and tibbr collaboration as part of a manual process execution. Some or all of these may not happen exactly like this, but there is some interesting potential here. There’s also potential within an organization for finding opportunities for AMX/BPM implementation through process discovery using Nimbus.

An interesting view of three different acquisitions, based on three very different rationales: industry vertical; horizontal application platform; and expansion of core product functionality. TIBCO is definitely moving from their pure technology focus to one that includes verticals and business applications.

TIBCO Product Strategy With Matt Quinn

Matt Quinn, CTO, gave us the product strategy presentation that will be seen in the general session tomorrow. He repeated the “capture many events, store few transactions” message as well as the five key components of a 21st century platform that we heard from Murrary Rode in the previous session; this is obviously a big part of the new messaging. He drilled into their four broad areas of interest from a product technology standpoint: event platform innovation, big data and analytics, social networking, and cloud enablement.

In the event platform innovation, they released BusinessEvents 5.0 in April this year, including the embedded TIBCO Datagrid technology, temporal pattern matching, stream processing and rules integration, and some performance and big data optimizations. One result is that application developers are now using BusinessEvents to build applications from the ground up, which is a change in usage patterns. For the future, they’re looking at supporting other models, such as BPMN and rule models, integrating statistical models, improving queries, improving the web design environment, and providing ActiveMatrix deployment options.

In ActiveMatrix, they’ve released a fully integrated stack of BusinessWorks, BPM and ServiceGrid with broader .Net and C++ support, optimized for large deployments and with better high-availability support and hot deployment capabilities. AXM/BPM has a number of new enhancements, mostly around the platform (such as the aforementioned HA and hot deployment), with their upcoming 1.2 release providing some functional enhancements such as customer forms and business rules based on BusinessEvents. We’ll see some Nimbus functionality integration before too much longer, although we didn’t see that roadmap; as Quinn pointed out, they need to be cautious about positioning which tools are for business users versus technical users. When asked about case management, he said that “case management brings us into areas where we haven’t yet gone as a company and aren’t sure that we want to go”. Interesting comment, given the rather wild bandwagon-leaping that has been going on in the ACM market by BPM and ECM vendors.

The MDM suite has also seen some enhancements, with ActiveSpaces integration and collaborative analytics with Spotfire, allowing MDM to become a hub for reference data from the other products. I’m very excited to see that one-click integration between MDM and AMX/BPM is on the roadmap; I think that MDM integration is going to be a huge productivity boost for overall process modeling, and when I reviewed AMX/BPM last year, I liked their process data modeling stated that “the link between MDM and process instance data needs to be firmly established so that you don’t end up with data definitions within your BPMS that don’t match up with the other data sources in your organization”. In fact, the design-time tool for MDM is now the same as that used for business object data models that I saw in AMX/BPM, which will make it easier for those who move across the data and process domains.

TIBCO is trying to build out vertical solutions in certain industries, particularly those where they have acquired or built expertise. This not only changes what they can package and offer as products, but changes who (at the customer) that they can have a relationship with: it’s now a VP of loyalty, for example, rather than (or in addition to) someone in IT.

Moving on to big data and analytics technology advances, they have released FTL 2.0 (low-latency messaging) to reduce inter-host latency below 2.2 microseconds as well as provide some user interface enhancements to make it easier to set up the message exchanges. They’re introducing TIBCO Web Messaging to integrate consumer mobile devices with TIBCO messaging. They’ve also introduced a new version of ActiveSpaces in-memory data grid, providing big data handling at in-memory speeds by easing the integration with other tools such as event processing and Spotfire.

They’ve also released Spotfire 4.0 visual analytics, with a bit focus on ease of use and dashboarding, plus tibbr integration for social collaboration. In fact, tibbr is being used as a cornerstone for collaboration, with many of the TIBCO products integrating with tibbr for that purpose. In the future, tibbr will include collaborative calendars and events, contextual notifications, and other functionality, plus better usability and speed. Formvine has been integrated with tibbr for forms-based routing, and Nimbus Control integrates with tibbr for lightweight processes.

Quinn finished up discussing their Silver Fabric cloud platform to be announced tomorrow (today, if you count telling a group of tweet-happy industry analysts) for public, private and hybrid cloud deployments.

Obviously, there was a lot more information here that I could possibly capture (or that he could even cover, some of the slides just flew past), and I may have to get out of bed in time for his keynote tomorrow morning since we didn’t even get to a lot of the forward-looking strategy. With a product suite as large as what TIBCO has now, we need much more than an hour to get through an analyst briefing.

TIBCO Corporate Strategy Session with Murray Rode

I’m in Vegas this week at TUCON, TIBCO’s user conference, and this afternoon I’m at the analyst event. For the corporate strategy session, they put the industry analysts and financial analysts together, meaning that there were way too many dark suits in the room for my taste (and my wardrobe).

Murray Rode, COO, gave us a good overview presentation on the corporate strategy, touching on market factors, their suite of products, and their growth in terms of products, geographies and verticals. Definitely, event-driven processes are a driving force behind businesses these days – matching with the “responsive business” message I saw at the Progress conference last week – and TIBCO sees their product suite as being ideally positioned to serve those needs.

Rode defined the key components of a 21st century platform as:

  • Automation (SOA, messaging, BPM) as core infrastructure
  • Event processing
  • Social collaboration
  • Analytics
  • Cloud

Their vision is to be the 21st century middleware company, continuing to redefine the scope and purpose of middleware, and to provide their customers with the “2-second advantage” based on event processing, real-time analytics and process management. They see the middleware market as taking a bite out of the application development platforms and out of the box suites by providing higher-functioning, more agile capabilities, and plan to continue their pure-play leadership in middleware.

Looking at their performance in verticals, financial services is now only 25% of their business as they diversify into telecom, government, energy, retail and other market segments. This is an interesting point, since many middleware (including many BPM) vendors grew primarily in financial services, and have struggled to break out of that sector in a significant way.

From a product standpoint, their highest growth is happening in CEP, analytics and MDM, while core stable growth continues in BPM and SOA. They are starting to see new growth in cloud, tibbr, low-latency messaging and Nimbus to drive their future innovation.

They see their key competitors as IBM and Oracle, and realize that they’re the small fish in that pond; however, they see themselves as being more innovative and in touch with current trends, and having a better pure-play focus on infrastructure. Their strategy is to keep defining the platform through a culture of continuous innovation, so as not to become a one-hit wonder like many other now-defunct (or acquired) middleware vendors of the past; to maximize sales execution strengths for growth by setting vertical go-to-market strategies across their product suite; to organize for innovation particularly through cross-selling the newer products into mature opportunities; to cultivate their brand; and to manage for growth and continued profitability, in part by branching beyond their direct sales force, which has been a significant strength for them in the past, to invest in partner and SI relationships to broaden their sales further.

Rode spoke briefly about acquisitions (we’re slated for a longer session on this later today), and positioned Nimbus as having applicability to core infrastructure in terms of analytics and events, not just BPM. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. In general, their focus is on smaller acquisitions to complement and enhance their core offering, rather than big ones that would be much harder to align with their current offerings.

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.

Empowering The Customer Through Process Improvement And BPM

Nick Deacon of Nokia Siemens Networks (they do the mobile networks for 65M users, not the phones) gave a presentation on empowering the customer through process improvement and BPM. With the recent acquisition of Motorola networks, they have almost 80,000 employees in 150 countries, with over half of their employees in service areas. Telecom is pretty volatile these days, with telecom, IT and media eco-systems mixing to create a data traffic explosion. This means that the networks needs to be both efficient and resilient while delivering the desired customer experience, so that we can all watch YouTube on our smartphones.

It used to be that you could just make your customer work the way that you needed them to work within your predefined efficient processes; now, however, the customers need more control over the services that they consume. NSN looks as their customer interaction points – much like what we heard from Bill Band this morning on analyzing the customer journey – and focus on improving those interaction points that are the most critical to improving the customer perception.

They are a big SAP customer, but find that they use Appian BPM to fill the gaps that SAP just doesn’t do without major customization, and to bridge between different systems. They’ve implemented BPM in five major business areas with more than 22,000 users. By reusing some components but adapting to each particular business area, they’re able to roll out new systems in a matter of months. They are pushing into social capabilities to facilitate faster decision-making, and mobile platforms to better support remote users.

As Deacon said in his summary, BPM enables them to react quickly to meet business needs and to respond effectively to better serve their customers.

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.