pegaworld – Column 2

Virtual conference best practices: 2020 in review

Wow, it’s been over two months since my last post. I took a long break over the end of the year since there wasn’t a lot going on that inspired me to write, and we were in conference hiatus. Now that (virtual) conferences are ramping up again for 2021, I wanted to share some of the best practices that I gathered from attending — and in one case, organizing — virtual conferences over 2020. Having sent this information by email to multiple people who were organizing their own conferences, I decided to just put it here where everyone could enjoy it. Obviously, these are all conferences about intelligent automation platforms, but the best practices are applicable to any technical conference, and likely to many non-technical conferences.

In summary, I saw three key things that make a virtual conference work well:

Live presentations, not pre-recorded. This is essential for the amount of energy in the presentation, and makes the difference between a cohesive conference and a just a bunch of webinars. Screwups happen when you’re live, but they do at in-person conferences, too.
Separate and persistent discussion platform, such as Slack (or Pega’s community in the case of their conference). Do NOT use the broadcast vendor’s chat/discussion platform, since a) it will disappear once your conference is over, and b) it probably sucks.
Replays of the video posted as soon as possible, so that people who missed a live session can watch it and jump into the discussion later the same day while others are still talking about it. Extra points for also publishing the presentation slides at the same time.

A conference is not a one-way broadcast, it’s a big messy collaborative conversation

Let’s start with the list of the virtual conferences that I wrote about, with links to the posts:

Camunda: https://column2.com/tag/camundacon/
Alfresco: https://column2.com/2020/04/alfresco-modernize-2020/
Celonis: https://column2.com/tag/celospherelive/
IBM: https://column2.com/tag/think2020/
Appian: https://column2.com/tag/appianworld/
Signavio: https://column2.com/tag/signaviolive2020/
Pega: https://column2.com/tag/pegaworld/
Process Mining Camp (Fluxicon): https://column2.com/tag/pmcamp/
OpenText: https://column2.com/tag/opentextworld/
Bizagi: https://column2.com/tag/bizagicatalyst/ where I also gave a keynote and apparently broke the internet

What I saw by attending these helped me when I was asked to organize DecisionCAMP, which ran in late June: we did the sessions using Zoom with livestreaming to YouTube (participants could watch either way), used Slack as a discussion platform (which is still being used for ongoing discussions and to run monthly events), and YouTube for the on-demand videos. Fluxicon used a similar setup for their Process Mining Camp: Skype (I think) instead of Zoom to capture the speakers’ sessions with all participants watching through the YouTube livestream and discussions on Slack.

Some particular notes excerpted from my posts on the vendor conferences follow. If you want to see the full blog posts, use the tag links above or just search.

Camunda

“Every conference organizer has had to deal with either cancelling their event or moving it to some type of online version as most of us work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of these have been pretty lacklustre, using only pre-recorded sessions and no live chat/Q&A, but I had expectations for Camunda being able to do this in a more “live” manner that doesn’t completely replace an in-person event, but has a similar feel to it. They did not disappoint: although a few of the CamundaCon presentations were pre-recorded, most were done live, and speakers were available for live Q&A. They also hosted a Slack workspace for live chat, which is much better than the Q&A/chat features on the webinar broadcast platform: it’s fundamentally more feature-rich, and also allows the conversations to continue after a particular presentation completes.”
“As you probably gather from my posts today, I’m finding the CamundaCon online format to be very engaging. This is due to most of the presentations being performed live (not pre-recorded as is seen with most of the online conferences these days) and the use of Slack as a persistent chat platform, actively monitored by all Camunda participants from the CEO on down.”
“I mentioned on Twitter today that CamundaCon is now the gold standard for online conferences: all you other vendors who have conferences coming up, take note. I believe that the key contributors to this success are live (not pre-recorded) presentations, use of a discussion platform like Slack or Discord alongside the broadcast platform, full engagement of a large number of company participants in the discussion platform before/during/after presentations, and fast upload of the videos for on-demand watching. Keep in mind that a successful conference, whether in-person or online, allows people to have unscripted interactions: it’s not a one-way broadcast, it’s a big messy collaborative conversation.”
Note that things did go wrong occasionally — one presentation was cut off part way through when the presenter’s home internet died. However, the energy level of the presentations was really high, making me want to keep watching. Also hilarious when one speaker talked about improving their “shittiest process” which is probably only something that would come out spontaneously during a live presentation.

Alfresco

“Alfresco Modernize didn’t have much of a “live” feel to it: the sessions were all pre-recorded which, as I’ve mentioned in my coverage of other online conferences, just doesn’t have the same feel. Also, without a full attendee discussion capability, this was more like a broadcast of multiple webinars than an interactive event, with a short Q&A session at the end as the only point of interaction.”

Celonis

“A few notes on the virtual conference format. Last week’s CamundaCon Live had sessions broadcast directly from each speaker’s home plus a multi-channel Slack workspace for discussion: casual and engaging. Celonis has made it more like an in-person conference by live-broadcasting the “main stage” from a studio with multiple camera angles; this actually worked quite well, and the moderator was able to inject live audience questions. Some of the sessions appeared to be pre-recorded, and there’s definitely not the same level of audience engagement without a proper discussion channel like Slack — at an in-person event, we would have informal discussions in the hallways between sessions that just can’t happen in this environment. Unfortunately, the only live chat is via their own conference app, which is mobile-only and has a single chat channel, plus a separate Q&A channel (via in-app Slido) for speakers that is separated by session and is really more of a webinar-style Q&A than a discussion. I abandoned the mobile app early and took to Twitter. I think the Celosphere model is probably what we’re going to see from larger companies in their online conferences, where they want to (attempt to) tightly control the discussion and demonstrate the sort of high-end production quality that you’d have at a large in-person conference. However, I think there’s an opportunity to combine that level of production quality with an open discussion platform like Slack to really improve the audience experience.”
“Camunda and Celonis have both done a great job, but for very different reasons: Camunda had much better audience engagement and more of a “live” feel, while Celonis showed how to incorporate higher production quality and studio interviews to good effect.”
“Good work by Celonis on a marathon event: this ran for several hours per day over three days, although the individual presentations were pre-recorded then followed by live Q&A. Lots of logistics and good production quality, but it could have had better audience engagement through a more interactive platform such as Slack.”

IBM

“As I’ve mentioned over the past few weeks of virtual conferences, I don’t like pre-recorded sessions: they just don’t have the same feel as live presentations. To IBM’s credit, they used the fact that they were all pre-recorded to add captions in five or six different languages, making the sessions (which were all presented in English) more accessible to those who speak other languages or who have hearing impairments. The platform is pretty glitchy on mobile: I was trying to watch the video on my tablet while using my computer for blogging and looking up references, but there were a number of problems with changing streams that forced me to move back to desktop video for periods of time. The single-threaded chat stream was completely unusable, with 4,500 people simultaneously typing “Hi from Tulsa” or “you are amazing”.”
“IBM had to pivot to a virtual format relatively quickly since they already had a huge in-person conference scheduled for this time, but they could have done better both for content and format given the resources that they have available to pour into this event. Everyone is learning from this experience of being forced to move events online, and the smaller companies are (not surprisingly) much more agile in adapting to this new normal.”

Appian

“This was originally planned as an in-person conference, and Appian had to pivot on relatively short notice. They did a great job with the keynotes, including a few of the Appian speakers appearing (appropriately distanced) in their own auditorium. The breakout sessions didn’t really grab me: too many, all pre-recorded, and you’re basically an audience of one when you’re in any of them, with little or no interactivity. Better as a set of on-demand training/content videos rather than true breakout sessions, and I’m sure there’s a lot of good content here for Appian customers or prospects to dig deeper into product capabilities but these could be packaged as a permanent library of content rather than a “conference”. The key for virtual conferences seems to be keeping it a bit simpler, with more timely and live sessions from one or two tracks only.”

Signavio

“Signavio has a low-key format of live presentations that started at 11am Sydney time with a presentation by Property Exchange Australia: I tuned in from my timezone at 9pm last night, stayed for the Deloitte Australia presentation, then took a break until the last part of the Coca-Cola European Partners presentation that started at 8am my time. In the meantime, there were continuous presentations from APAC and Europe, with the speakers all presenting live in their own regular business hours.”
“The only thing missing is a proper discussion platform — I have mentioned this about several of the online conferences that I’ve attended, and liked what Camunda did with a Slack workspace that started before and continued after the conference — although you can ask questions via the GoToWebinar Question panel. To be fair, there is very little social media engagement (the Twitter hashtag for the conference is mostly me and Signavio people), so possibly the attendees wouldn’t get engaged in a full discussion platform either. Without audience engagement, a discussion platform can be a pretty lonely place. In summary, the GTW platform seems to behave well and is a streamlined experience if you don’t expect a lot of customer engagement, or you could use it with a separate discussion platform.”

Pega

“In general, I didn’t find the prerecorded sessions to be very compelling. Conference organizers may think that prerecording sessions reduces risk, but it also reduces spontaneity and energy from the presenters, which is a lot of what makes live presentations work so well. The live Q&A interspersed with the keynotes was okay, and the live demos in the middle breakout section as well as the live Tech Talk were really good. PegaWorld also benefited from Pega’s own online community, which provided a more comprehensive discussion platform than the broadcast platform chat or Q&A.”

Fluxicon

“The format is interesting, there is only one presentation each day, presented live using YouTube Live (no registration required), with some Q&A at the end. The next day starts with Process Mining Café, which is an extended Q&A with the previous day’s presenter based on the conversations in the related Slack workspace (which you do need to register to join), then a break before moving on to that day’s presentation. The presentations are available on YouTube almost as soon as they are finished.”
“The really great part was engaging in the Slack discussion while the keynote was going on. A few people were asking questions (including me), and Mieke Jans posted a link to a post that she wrote on a procedure for cleansing event logs for multi-case processes – not the same as what van der Aalst was talking about, but a related topic. Anne Rozinat posted a link to more reading on these types of many-to-many situations in the context of their process mining product from their “Process Mining in Practice” online book. Not surprisingly, there was almost no discussion on the Twitter hashtag, since the attendees had a proper discussion platform; contrast this with some of the other conferences where attendees had to resort to Twitter to have a conversation about the content. After the keynote, van der Aalst even joined in the discussion and answered a few questions, plus added the link for the IEEE task force on process mining that promotes research, development, education and understanding of process mining: definitely of interest if you want to get plugged into more of the research in the field. As a special treat, Ferry Timp created visual notes for each day and posted them to the related Slack channel.”

Bizagi

“The broadcast platform fell over completely…I’m not sure if Bizagi should be happy that they had so many attendees that they broke the platform, or furious with the platform vendor for offering something that they couldn’t deliver. The “all-singing, all-dancing” platforms look nice when you see the demo, but they may not be scalable enough.”

Final thoughts

Just to wrap things up, it’s fair to say that things aren’t going to go back to the way that they were any time soon. Part of this is due to organizations understanding that things can be done remotely just as effectively (or nearly so) as they can in person, if done right. Also, a lot of people are still reluctant to even think about travelling and spending days in poorly-ventilated rooms with a bunch of strangers from all over the world.

The vendors who ran really good virtual conferences 2020 are almost certain to continue to run at least some of their events virtually in the future, or find a way to have both in-person and remote attendees simultaneously. If you run a virtual conference that doesn’t get the attendee engagement that you expected, the problem may not be that “virtual conferences don’t work”: it could be that you just aren’t doing it right.

#PegaWorld iNspire 2020

PegaWorld, in shifting from an in-person to virtual event, dropped down to a short 2.5 hours. The keynotes and many of the breakouts appeared to be mostly pre-recorded, hosted live by CTO Don Schuerman who provided some welcome comic relief and moderated live Q&A with each of the speakers after their session.

The first session was a short keynote with CEO Alan Trefler. It’s been a while since I’ve had a briefing with Pega, and their message has shifted strongly to the combination of AI and case management as the core of their digital platform capabilities. Trefler also announced Pega Process Fabric that allows the integration of multiple systems not just from Pega, but other vendors.

Next up was SVP of Products Kerim Akgonul, discussing their low-code Pega Express approach and how it’s helping customers to stand up applications faster. We heard briefly from Anna Gleiss, Global IT Head of Master Data Management at Siemens, who talked about how they are leveraging Pega to ensure reusability and speed deployment across the 30 different applications that they’re running in the Pega Cloud. Akgonul continued with use cases for self-service — especially important with the explosion in customer service in some industries due to the pandemic — and some of their customers such as Aflac who are using Pega to further their self-service efforts.

There was a keynote by Rich Gilbert, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Aflac, on the reinvention that they have gone through. There’s a lot of disruption in the insurance industry now, and they’ve been addressing this by creating a service-based operating model to deliver digital services as a collaboration between business and IT. They’ve been using Pega to help them with their key business drivers of settling claims faster and providing excellent customer service with offerings such as “Claims Guest Checkout”, which lets someone initiate a claim through self-service without knowing their policy number or logging in, and a Claims Status Tracker available on their mobile app or website. They’ve created a new customer service experience using a combination of live chat and virtual assistants, the latter of which is resolving 86% of inquiries without moving to a live agent.

Akgonul also provided a bit more information on the Process Fabric, which acts as a universal task manager for individual workers, with a work management dashboard for managers. There was no live Q&A at this point, but it was delayed until a Tech Talk later in the agenda. In the interim was a one-hour block of breakouts that had one track of three live build sessions, plus a large number of short prerecorded sessions from Pega, partners and customers. I’m interested in more information on the Process Fabric, which I believe will be in the later Tech Talk, although I did grab some screenshots from Akgonul’s keynote:

The live build sessions seemed to be overloaded and there was a long delay getting into them, but once started, they were good-quality demos of building Pega applications. I came in part way through the first one on low-code using App Studio, and it was quite interactive, with a moderator dropping in occasionally with live questions, and eventually hurrying the presenter along to finish on time. I was only going to stay for a couple of minutes, but it was pretty engaging and I watched all of it. The next live demo was on data and integration, and built on the previous demo’s vehicle fleet manager use case to add data from a variety of back-end sources. The visuals were fun, too: the presenter’s demo was most of the screen, with a bubble at the bottom right containing a video of the speaker, then a bubble popping in at the bottom left with the moderator when he had a question or comment. Questions from the audience helped to drive the presentation, making it very interactive. The third live demo was on user experience, which had a few connectivity issues so I’m not sure we saw the entire demo as planned, but it showed the creation of the user interface for the vehicle manager app using the Cosmos system, moving a lot of logic out of the UI and into the case model.

The final session was the Tech Talk on product vision and roadmap with Kerim Akgonul, moderated by Stephanie Louis, Senior Director of Pega’s Community and Developer Programs. He discussed Process Fabric, Project Phoenix, Cosmos and other new product releases in addition to fielding questions from social media and Pega’s online community. This was very interactive and engaging, much more so than his earlier keynote which seemed a bit stiff and over-rehearsed. More of this format, please.

In general, I didn’t find the prerecorded sessions to be very compelling. Conference organizers may think that prerecording sessions reduces risk, but it also reduces spontaneity and energy from the presenters, which is a lot of what makes live presentations work so well. The live Q&A interspersed with the keynotes was okay, and the live demos in the middle breakout section as well as the live Tech Talk were really good. PegaWorld also benefited from Pega’s own online community, which provided a more comprehensive discussion platform than the broadcast platform chat or Q&A. If you missed today’s event, you should be able to find all of the content on demand on the PegaWorld site within the next day or two.

Pega 7 roadmap at Pegaworld 2016

I finished up Pegaworld 2016 at a panel of Pega technology executives who provided the vision and roadmap for CRM and Pega 7. Don Schuerman moderated the panel, which included Bill Baggott, Kerim Akgonul, Maarten Keijzer, Mark Replogle and Steve Bixby.

Topics covered:

OpenSpan RPA and RDA is the most recent technology acquisition; by next year, the workforce intelligence will be a key differentiator for Pega to help their customers analyze user behavior and detect patterns for potential improvement and automation
Questions about Javascript “flavor of the month” technologies come up a lot in competitive situations; they are keeping an eye on what’s sticking in the marketplace and what they can learn from it, selectively including technologies and capabilities where it can add value and fits into their framework
Digital channels are now outpacing call center channels in the market, and they are enabling chat and other social capabilities for customer interaction but need to consider how to integrate the text-based social channels into a seamless experience
Developing with Pega 7 models isolates the applications from the underlying cloud and/or containerization platforms, so that new platforms and configurations can be put in place without changing the apps
New data visualizations based on improved analytics are evolving, providing opportunities for discovery of business practices
A simpler modeling environment allows non-technical designers to create and configure apps without accessing the Designer Studio; at this point, technical developers are likely needed for some capabilities
They are looking at newer data management technologies, e.g., NoSQL and blockchain, to see how they might fit into Pega’s technology stack; no commitments, but interesting to hear the discussion of the use of blockchain for avoiding conflicts and deadlocks in active-active-active scenarios without having to build it into applications explicitly
Some new technology components, developed by Pega or third parties, may be available via Pega Exchange as add-on apps rather than built into the product stack directly
They hope to be able to offer more product trials in the future, which can be downloaded (or accessed directly in the cloud) for people to check out the capabilities
DevOps is seen as more of a cultural than technology shift, where releases are sped up since code isn’t just thrown over the wall from development to deployment, but remain the responsibility of the dev team; a container strategy is an important component of having this run smoothly
UX design is critical in creating an appropriate customer experience, but also in supporting developers who are developing apps; Pega Express is regularly fine-tuned to provide an optimal modeling/design experience, and Pega Design provides insight into their design thinking initiatives
All of the data sources, including IoT events, contribute to analytics and machine learning, and therefore to the constant improvement of Next Best Action recommendations
They would like to be able to offer more predictive and intelligent customer service capabilities; lots of “wish list” ideas from the entire panel

This is the last session on day 2; tomorrow is all training courses and I’ll be heading home. It’s been a pretty full couple of days and always good to see what Pega’s up to.

American Express digital transformation at Pegaworld 2016

Howard Johnson and Keith Weber from American Express talked about their digital transformation to accommodate their expanding market of corporate card services for global accounts, middle market and small businesses. Digital servicing using their @work portal was designed with customer engagement in mind, and developed using Agile methodologies for improved flexibility and time to market. They developed a set of guiding principles: it needed to be easy to use, scalable to be able to manage any size of servicing customer, and proactive in providing assistance on managing cash flow and other non-transactional interactions. They also wanted consistency across channels, rather than their previous hodge-podge of processes and teams depending on which channels.

AmEx used to be a waterfall development shop — which enabled them to offshore a lot of the development work but meant 10-16 months delivery time — but have moved to small, agile teams with continuous delivery. Interesting when I think back to this morning’s keynote, where Gerald Chertavian of Year Up said that they were contacted by AmEx about providing trained Java/Pega developers to help them with re-onshoring their development teams; the AmEx presenter said that he had four of the Year Up people on his team and they were great. This is a pretty negative commentary on the effectiveness of outsourced, offshore development teams for agile and continuous delivery, which is considered essential for today’s market. AmEx is now hiring technical people for onshore development that is co-located with their business process experts, greatly reducing delivery times and improving quality.

Technology-wise, they have moved to an omni-channel platform that uses Pega case management, standardizing 65% of their processes while providing a single source of the truth. This has resulted in faster development (lower cost per market and integration time, with improved configurability) while enabling future capabilities including availability, analytics and a process API. On the business side, they’re looking at a lot of interesting capabilities for the future: big data-enabled insights, natural language search, pluggable widgets to extend the portal, and frequent releases to keep rolling this out to customers.

It sounds like they’re starting to use best practices from a technology design and development standpoint, and that’s really starting to pay off in customer experience. It will be interesting to see if other large organizations — with large, slow-moving offshore development shops — can learn the same lessons.

Rethinking personal data: Pegaworld 2016 panel

I attended a breakout panel on how the idea and usage of personal data are changing was moderated by Alan Marcus of the World Economic Forum (nice socks!), and included Richard Archdeacon of HP, Rob Walker from Pega and Matt Mobley from Merkel.

The focus is on customer data as it is maintained in an organization’s systems, and the regulations that now drive how that data is managed. The talk was organized around three key themes that are emerging from the global dialog: strengthening trust and accountability; understanding usage-based, individual-centric frameworks; and engaging the individual. Thoughts from the panel:

Once you have someone’s data, you remain responsible for it even as you pass it to other parties
Customer data management is now regulation-driven
It’s not enough to restrict values in a customer data set; it’s now possible to derive hidden values (such as gender or race) from other values, which can result in illegal targeting: how much efforts should be put into anonymizing data when it can be easily deanonymized?
Organizations need to inform customers of what data that they have about them, and how it is being used
Consumers want the convenience offered by giving up their data more than they fear misuse of the data
The true currency of identity for organizations is an email address and one other piece of data, which can then be matched to a vast amount of data from other sources
The biggest consumer fear is data privacy violation from a security breach (about which is there is a high level of hysteria), but possibly they should be more afraid of how the companies that they willingly give the data to are going to use it
Personal data includes data that you create, data that others create about you, and data that is inferred based on your activities
Many people are maintained multiple identities on social media sites, curated differently for professional and personal audiences
Personal health data, including genetic data, has an additional set of concerns since it can impact individual healthcare options
Unresolved question of when personal data is no longer personal data, e.g., after a certain amount of aggregation and analysis occurs
Issues of consent (by customers to use their data) are becoming more prominent, and using data without consent will be counter to the regulations in most jurisdictions
Many smaller businesses will find it difficult to meet security compliance regulations; this may drive them to use cloud services where the provider assumes some degree of security responsibility

Food for thought. A lot of unresolved issues in personal data privacy and management.

Pegaworld 2016 day 2 keynote: digital transformation and the 4th industrial revolution

Day 2 of Pegaworld 2016 – another full day on the schedule.

The keynote started with Gilles Leyrat, SVP of Customer and Partner Services at Cisco, discussing how they became a more digital operation in order to provide better customer service and save costs. Cisco equipment provides a huge part of the backbone of the internet, supporting digital transformation for many other organizations, but this was about how they are transforming themselves to keep pace with their customers as well as their competitors. They are using Pega to digitize their business by connecting people and technology, automating processes, and using data for real-time analytics and process change to support their 20,000-strong sales team and 2M orders per year.

Their digitization has three key goals: operational excellence, revenue growth, and “delightful” customer experience. Customer experience is seen as being crucial to revenue growth, with strong causal links showing up in research. He compared the old world — offshore customer service centers augmented by onshore specialists — with the new digital world, where digitization is a means to achieving their customer experience goal by simplifying, automating and using analytics. By reducing human touch in many standard processes, they are able to reduce wait time for customers while allowing workers to focus on interacting with customers to resolve problems: 93% of cases are now handled with zero touch, saving 2M hours of wait time per year and reducing order resolution time to 6 hours. The employee experience is improved through integrated workplaces and actionable intelligence that support their work patterns. He ended with the advice to understand what you’re trying to achieve, and linking your digital transformation initiatives to those goals.

Next was a panel on digital transformation moderated by Christopher Paquette, Digital Principal at McKinsey, including Alistair Currie, COO at ANZ Bank; Toine Straathof, EVP at Rabobank; Kevin Sullivan, SVP and Head of the Decision Sciences Group at Fifth Third Bank; and Nicole Gleason, Practice Lead for Business Intelligence & Analytics at Comet Global Consulting. A few notes from the panel (I mostly haven’t attributed to the specific speaker since the conversation was free-ranging):

Digital transformation is being driven by rapidly-changing customer expectations
Banking customers prefer mobile/online first, then ATM, then branch, then call center; this aligns well with operational costs but requires that the digital platforms be built out first
Moving internal stakeholders off their old methods and out of operational silos can be more difficult than dealing with regulators and other external parties
Making IT and business people responsible for results (e.g., a guiding business architecture) rather than dictating their exact path can lead to innovation and optimal solutions
Employee incentives need to be consistent across channels to lessen the competition across them
A lot of current digitization efforts are to bridge/hide the complexity of existing legacy systems rather than actual digital transformation

Alan Trefler returned to the stage to introduce the concepts of the fourth industrial revolution and workforce disruption; he sees what is happening now as a step change in how society works and how we interact with technology. We heard from Alan Marcus, Head of the Technology Agenda at the World Economic Forum, on this topic, and how new categories of jobs and the required skill sets will completely transform employment markets. Lots of opportunities, but also lots of disruption, in both first world and emerging markets. He covered a timeline of changes and their impacts, and stressed that skill sets are changing quickly: 35% of core skills will change by 2020. Companies need to expose workers to new roles and training, and particularly open doors to women in all roles. Creativity will become a core skill, even as AI technologies gain acceptance. Governments and education systems need to innovate to support the changing workforce. Organizations need to reinvent their HR to help employees to move into this brave new world.

The keynote finished with Gerald Chertavian, Founder and CEO at Year Up, an organization that helps low-income youth prepare for a professional job. There’s a social justice goal of helping young adults who have no college degree (and no path to get one) to become hireable talent through practical training and internships; but there’s also the side benefit of feeding skilled workers into the rapidly-changing technology-heavy employment market that Marcus discussed earlier. Year Up was contacted by American Express, who needed people trained in Java and Pega in order to re-onshore some of their development work; they created a curriculum targeted at those jobs and trained up a large number of people who then competed successfully for those jobs. Year Up is now in 18 cities across the US, working with large organizations to identify skills gaps and train people to suit the employment pipeline. They’re changing tens of thousands of lives by providing a start on the path to upward mobility, and feeding a need for companies to hire the right skills in order to transform in this fourth industrial revolution.

OpenSpan at Pegaworld 2016: RPA meets BPM

Less than two months ago, Pega announced their acquisition of OpenSpan, a software vendor in the robotic process automation (RPA) market. That wasn’t my first exposure to OpenSpan, however: I looked at them eight years ago in the context of mashups. Here at PegaWorld 2016, we’re getting a first peek at the unified roadmap on how Pega and OpenSpan will fit together. Also, a whole new mess of acronyms.

I’m at the OpenSpan session at Pegaworld 2016, although some of these notes date from the time of the analyst briefing back in April. Today’s presentation featured Anna Convery of Pega (formerly OpenSpan); Robin Gomez, Director of Operational Intelligence at Radial (a BPO) providing an introduction to RPA; and Girish Arora, Senior Information Oficer at AIG, on their use of OpenSpan.

Back in the 1990’s, a lot of us who were doing integration of BPM systems into enterprises used “screen scraping” to push commands to and pull data from the screens of legacy systems; since the legacy systems didn’t support any sort of API calls, our apps had to pretend to be a human worker to allow us to automate integration between systems and even hide those ugly screens. Gomez covered a good history of this, including some terms that I had hoped to never see again (I’m looking at you, HLLAPI). RPA is like the younger, much smarter offspring of screen scraping: it still pushes and pulls commands and data, automating desktop activities by simulating user interaction, but it’s now event-driven, incorporating rules and machine learning.

As with BPM and other process automation, Gomez talked about how the goal of RPA is to automate repeatable tasks, reduce error rates, improve standardization, reduce requirement for knowledge about multiple systems, shorten worker onboarding time, and create a straight-through process. At Radial, they were looking for the combination of robotic desktop automation (RDA) that provides personal robots to assist workers’ repetitive tasks, and RPA that completely replaces the worker on an unattended desktop. I’m not sure if every vendor makes a distinction between what OpenSpan calls RDA and RPA; it’s really the same technology, although there are some additional monitoring and virtualization bits required for the headless version.

OpenSpan provides the usual RPA desktop automation capabilities, but also includes the (somewhat creepy) ability to track and analyze worker behavior: basically, what they’re typing into what application in what context, and present it in their Opportunity Finder. This information can be mined for patterns in order to understand how people do their job — much the way that process mining works, but based on user interactions rather than system log files — and automate the parts that are done the same way each time. This can be an end in itself, or a stepping stone to a replacement of the desktop apps entirely, providing interim relief while a full Pega BPM/CRM implementation is being developed, for example. Furthermore, the analytics about the user activities on the desktop can feed into requirements for any replacement initiative, both the general flow as well as an analysis of the decisions made based on what data was presented.

OpenSpan and Pega aren’t (exactly) competitive technologies: OpenSpan can be used for desktop automation where replacement is not an option, or can be used to as a quick fix while performing desktop process discovery to accelerate a full Pega desktop replacement project. OpenSpan paves the cowpaths, while a Pega implementation is usually a more fundamental innovation that may not be warranted in all situations. I can also imagine scenarios where a current Pega customer uses OpenSpan to automate the interaction between Pega and legacy applications that still exist on the desktop. From a Pega sales standpoint, OpenSpan may also act as the camel’s nose in the tent to get into net new clients.

There are a wide variety of use cases, some of them saving just a few minutes but applicable to thousands of workers (e.g., logging in to multiple systems each morning), others replacing a significant portion of knowledge work for a smaller number of workers (e.g., financial reconciliations). Arora talked about what they have done at AIG, in the context of processes that require a mix of human-required and fully automatable steps; he sees their opportunity as moving from RDA (where people are still involved, gaining 10-20% in efficiency) to RPA (fully automated, gaining 40-50% efficiency). Of course, they could just swap out their legacy systems for something that was built this century, but that’s just too difficult to change — expensive, risky and time-consuming — so they are filling in the automation gaps using OpenSpan. They have RDA running on every desktop to assist workers with a variety of tasks ranging from simple to complex, and want to start moving some of those to RPA to roll out unattended automation.

OpenSpan is typically deployed without automation to start gathering user analytics, with initial automation of manual procedures within a few weeks. As Pega cognitive technologies are added to OpenSpan, it should be possible for the RPA processes to continue to recognize patterns and recommend optimizations to a worker’s flow, becoming a sort of virtual personal assistant. I look forward to seeing some of that as OpenSpan is integrated into the Pega technology family.

OpenSpan is Windows-only .NET technology, with no plans to change that at the time of our original analyst briefing in April. We’ll see.

Pegaworld 2016 Day 1 Keynote: Pega direction, Philips and Allianz

It seems like I was just here in Vegas at the MGM Grand…oh, wait, I was just here. Well, I’m back for Pegaworld 2016, and 4,000 of us congregated in the Grand Garden Arena for the opening keynote on the first day. If you’re watching from home, or want to catch a replay, there is a live stream of the keynotes that will likely feature an on-demand replay at some point.

Alan Trefler, Pega’s CEO, kicked things off by pointing out the shift from a focus on technology to a focus on the customer. Surveys show that although most companies think that they understand their customers, the customers don’t agree; companies need to undergo a serious amount of digital transformation in order to provide the level of service that today’s customers need, while still improving efficiencies to support that experience. One key to this is a model-driven technology environment that incorporates insights and actions, allowing the next best action to be provided at any given point depending on the current context, while supporting organizational evolution to allow constant change to meet the future demands. Model-driven environments let you create applications that are future-proof, since it is relatively quick to make changes to the models without changing a lot of code. Pega has a lot of new online training at the Pega Academy, a marketplace of third-party Pega applications at the Pega Exchange, and the continuing support of their Pega Express easy-to-use modeler; they continue to work on breaking free from their tech-heavy past to support more agile digital transformation. Pega recently sponsored an Economist report on digital transformation; you can grab that here.

Don Schuerman, Pega’s CTO, took over as MC for the event to introduce the other keynote speakers, but first announced a new partnership with Philips that links Pega’s care management package with Philips’ HealthSuite informatics and cloud platform for home healthcare. Jeroen Tas, CEO of Connected Care & Health Informatics at Philips presented more on this, specifically in the context of the inefficient and unevenly-distributed US healthcare system. He had a great chart that showed the drivers for healthcare transformation: from episodic to continuous, by orchestrating 24/7 care; from care provider to human-centric, by focusing on patient experience; from fragmented to connected, by connecting patients and caregivers; and from volume to value, by optimizing resources. Connected, personalized care links healthy living to disease prevention, and supports the proper diagnosis and treatment since healthcare providers all have access to a comprehensive set of the patient’s information. Lots of cool personal healthcare devices, such as ultrasound-as-a-service, where they will ship a device that can be plugged into a tablet to allow your GP to do scans that might normally be done by a specialist; continuous glucose meters and insulin regulation; and tools to monitor elderly patients’ medications. Care costs can be reduced by 26% and readmissions reduced by 52% through active monitoring in networked care delivery environments, such as by monitoring heart patients for precursors of a heart attack; this requires a combination of IoT, personal health data, data analytics and patient pathways provided by Philips and Pega. He ended up stating that it’s a great time to be in healthcare, and that there are huge benefits for patients as well as healthcare providers.

Although Tas didn’t discuss this aspect, there’s a huge amount of fear of connected healthcare information in user-pay healthcare systems: people are concerned that they will be refused coverage if their entire health history is known. Better informatics and analysis of healthcare information improves health and reduces overall healthcare costs, but it needs to be provided in an environment that doesn’t punish people for exposing their health data to everyone in the healthcare system.

We continued on the healthcare topic, moving to the insurance side with Birgit König, CEO of Allianz Health Germany. Since basic healthcare in Germany is provided by the state, health insurance is for additional services not covered by the basic plan, and for travelers while they are outside Germany. There is a lot of competition in the market, and customer experience for claims is becoming a competitive differentiator especially with new younger customers. In order to accommodate, Allianz is embracing a bimodal architecture approach, where back-end systems are maintained using traditional development techniques that focus on stability and risk, while front-end systems are more agile and innovative with shorter release cycles. I’ve just written a paper on bimodal IT and how it plays out in enterprises; not published yet, but completely aligned with what König discussed. Allianz is using Pega for more agile analytics and decisioning at the front end of their processes, while keeping their back-end systems stable. Innovation and fast development has been greatly aided by co-locating their development and business teams, not surprisingly.

The keynote finished with Kerim Akgonul, Pega’s SVP of Products, for a high-level product update. He started by looking at the alignment between internal business goals and the customer journey, spanning marketing, sales, customer service and operations. The Pega Customer Decision Hub sits at the middle of these four areas, linking information so that (for example), offers sent to customers are based on their past orders.

Marketing: A recent Forrester report stated that Pega Marketing yields an 8x return on marketing investment (ROMI) due to the next-best-action strategies and other smart uses of analytics. Marketers don’t need to be data scientists to create intelligent campaigns based on historical and real-time data, and send those to a targeted list based on filters including geolocation. We saw this in action, with a campaign created in front of us to target Pegaworld attendees who were actually in the arena, then sent out to the recipients via the conference mobile app.
Sales: The engagement map in the Pega Sales Automation app uses the Customer Decision Hub information to provide guidance that links products to opportunities for salespeople; we saw how the mobile sales automation app makes this information available and recommends contacts and actions, such as a follow-up contact or training offer. There are also some nice tools such as capturing a business card using the mobile camera and importing the contact information, merging it if a similar record is found.
Customer service: The Pega customer service dashboard shows individual customer timelines, but the big customer service news in this keynote is the OpenSpan acquisition that provides robotic process automation (RPA) to improve customer service environments. OpenSpan can monitor desktop work as it is performed, and identify opportunities for RPA based on repetitive actions. The new automation is set up by recording the actions that would be done by a worker, such as copying and pasting information between systems. The example was an address change, where a CSR would take a call from a customer then have to update three different systems with the same information by copying and pasting between applications. We saw the address change being recorded, then played back on a new transaction; this was also included as an RPA step in a Pega Express model, although I’m not sure if that was just to document the process as opposed to any automation driven from the BPM side.
Operations: The Pega Field Service application provides information for remote workers doing field support calls, reducing the time required to complete the service while documenting the results and tracking the workers. We saw a short video of Xerox using this in Europe for their photocopier service calls: the field engineer sees the customer’s equipment list, the inventory that he has with him, and other local field engineers who might have different skills or inventory to assist with his call. Xerox has reduced their service call time, improved field engineer productivity, and increased customer satisfaction.

Good mix of vision, technology and customer case studies. Check out the replay when it’s available.

Top 10 Trends of Digital Enterprise with @setrag at PegaWorld 2015

I finished my visit to PegaWorld 2015 in the breakout session by Setrag Khoshafian, Pega’s chief BPM evangelist, on the top 10 trends for the adaptive digital enterprise:

Context matters. Analyze and understand the information about your customers and your interactions with them.
Connecting customers to operations. Think of your customers’ actions online as part of your business process, and implement your processes accordingly.
The rise of things. Specifically, the process of things: devices becomes actors in sense-and-respond processes, and channels for customer engagement, across the seven levels of the IoT World Forum reference model.
Design time blurs with runtime. Model-driven development, and moving from explicit requirements collection to having the business make changes on the fly.
The digital executive. Making it so simple that even a C-level executive can understand it. Or better yet, finding executives that actually have a digital clue.
Two-speed IT. Setrag talked about mapping business KPIs and value streams directly onto case phases; being able to do this using Agile model-driven development while still doing more traditional maintenance on underlying legacy systems allows for fast-tracking strategic projects.
The database is dead, long live the database. Moving from transactional SQL-based RDBMS to the new crop of NoSQL databases optimized for big data, analytics and more dynamic applications.
Smart enterprises avoid the app-pocolypse. Allow for native apps as well as responsive web for the most flexibility.
The hybrid cloud. Well, that goes back to what we can really call “cloud”.
The rise of design. Users expect beautiful design; if you don’t live up to those expectations, you degrade the customer experience and therefore your relationship with them.

He was joined by Adam Field from Pega’s technology innovation area to see some examples of what Pega is doing in mobile user experience and device management.

Fast-paced and fun view of what’s driving the digital enterprise, and a bit of how Pega is helping its customers meet those needs.

That’s it for PegaWorld 2015: it was a quick but information-filled trip. I’ll be at the IRM BPM conference in London next week, then the BPM and Case Management Summit in DC the week following, watch for my coverage from those events.

The Personology of @RBSGroup at PegaWorld 2015

Andrew McMullan, director of analytics and decisioning (aka “personologist”) at Royal Bank of Scotland, gave a presentation on how they are building a central (Pega-based) decisioning capability to improve customer engagement and change their culture along the way. He started with a personal anecdote about how RBS did the right thing for a family member and gained a customer for life – a theme echoed from this morning’s keynote that also included RBS. He showed a short video of their current vision, which stated goals of making RBS easier to do business with, and to work for, in addition to being more efficient. In that order, in case you other banks are following along.

RBS is now government owned, having been bailed out during the financial crisis; I’m not sure how much this has allowed them to focus on customer engagement rather than short-term profits, but they do seem to be talking the right talk.

RBS uses Pega’s Chordiant – primarily the decision management components, if I am reading it correctly – although are implementing Pega 7 for an August 2015 rollout to bring in more robust Next Best Action capabilities; they also use SAS Visual Analytics for reporting. This highlights the huge role of decisioning as well as process in customer engagement, especially when you’re applying analytics to a broad variety of customer information in order to determine how to interact with the customer (online or IRL) at any particular moment. RBS is proactive about having their customers do things that will save them money, such as renewing a mortgage at a lower rate, or choosing a package of banking services that doesn’t overlap with other services that they are paying for elsewhere. Contrary to what nay-sayers within RBS said about lost revenue, this tends to make customers more loyal and ultimately do more business with them.

There was a good question from the audience about how much of this was changes to organizational culture, and how much was the data science: McMullan said that it’s really critical to win the hearts and minds of the employees, although obviously you need to have at least the beginnings of the analytics and recommendations to get that started. Also, they use Net Promoter Score as their main internal metric, which tends to reward relationship-building over short-term profits; having the right incentives for employees goes a long ways towards helping them to do the right thing.