Theo Priestley

Theo Priestley is regarded as “one of the thought-leaders in BPM…” and is named as one of the Top 50 influencers in Case Management worldwide. A passionate and outspoken industry analyst rebel, he frequently challenges the BPM industry status quo and writes heavily on his popular BPMredux.com blog which has been referred to as the “seminal blog on the state of BPM“. A regular contributor to industry forums, Techtarget's ebizQ site has called him one of their “most quotable contributors.” He is especially interested in the convergence of multiple verticals such as CRM, BPM, ECM, and the enterprise social workflow impact on traditional business operating models and process methodologies. A keen amateur photographer, Theo was a finalist in Photography Forum’s Best of Photography 2011 (out of 14,000 entries worldwide) using just an iPhone 4. When he has spare time, Theo collects comics and follows the games industry.


Why Predicting Behavior is the Absolute Key to Big Data

April 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Big Data and real-time, predictive analytics present companies with the unparalleled ability to understand consumer behavior and ever-shifting market trends at a relentless pace in order to take advantage of opportunity.

However, organizations are entrenched and governed by silos; data resides across the enterprise in the same way, waiting to be unlocked. Information sits in different applications, on different platforms, fed by internal and external sources. It’s a CIO’s headache when the CEO asks why the organization can’t take advantage of it. According to a recent survey, 54% of organizations state that managing data from various sources is their biggest challenge when attempting to make use of the information for customer analytics.

Harness Data to Master It

Integration is now at the top of the food chain as the best way for organizations to get a better handle on the information sitting in disparate databases in order to build a golden source. Other methods have proven both tricky and unwieldy in the face of the Big Data promise. And while Hadoop is the king of the data world right now, and MapReduce and Cassandra are the Queens, they do not resolve the connectivity problems above. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Integration Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Eve Online and Dust 514′s Groundbreaking Cross-Platform Interactivity

March 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Leveling Up in the Enterprise
This post is part of a series discussing lessons gleaned from the video game industry. Catch the next part next Saturday.

communication5_2

If you’ve never heard of Eve Online, there are 500,000 other people who will gladly tell you about it. Eve is a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game released by CCP Games for the PC. Set in the far flung human future in space, players take on the role of starship pilots and choose their race, political factions, and allegiances. With over 5,000 star systems, multiple online struggles, and 500,000 players, it’s an enormous and potentially limitless playing field.

But this is just the tip of CCP’s vision.

MMO for the Enterprise

Unlike many other MMOs, where there are numerous copies of the game universe intended to run at once (i.e. servers) that splinter the player base, Eve Online is functionally a single-universe game sitting on only one server with thousands of clients. If that wasn’t enough, CCP announced the beta of a game called Dust 514 on the Playstation3, which is directly connected to the Eve universe and takes place in real time. Console players now control ground-based soldiers who are aligned to the same factions that the space-faring PC players are in. Actions and interactions between the two games’ players and between the two platforms directly affect one another. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Integration, Tech Trends Tagged With: , , , , ,

Real Innovation Begins and Ends with Integration

March 27, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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1How often have we engaged in a truly innovative process that leaves us in no doubt that we have entered a new era? Not very often I’d wager, especially on a daily basis. If we look at how business services are designed, there’s a massive disconnect between what happens at the consumer facing front-end and the servicing back-end.

  • A consumer sees an apartment they’d like to buy. They reach for their mobile device and decide to try the new mobile mortgage application process. They proceed through the steps only to be asked to print, sign and send in the form.
  • You need to submit your expense claim. You complete the form online, which requires to be authorized by your boss. Only, when they’ve done this you’re then notified by email to print off the form and post it in with paper receipts stuck to a sheet to be manually scanned in at the office.

Everywhere you look there are broken processes and promises. The disconnected enterprise is all very apparent and so is the lack of true innovation.

Connected trends, disconnected

Look at the graphic at the top of the article. I chose this on purpose because it typically represents how we view integration: a collection of jigsaw pieces that must fit together. Forrester talks of interoperability, integration brokers and interconnection, building and making use of component and business service APIs, and the ever present enterprise message bus, but we are far from delivering a truly connected enterprise. If you followed a consumer process from start to finish you would be amazed at just how many touch points occurred from a system perspective, how many times data is passed from one service to another, and the data transformation needed to make it fit for purpose for each application before moving on. [Read more...]

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What the Award-Winning Video Game “Journey” Teaches Us About the Customer Experience

March 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Leveling Up in the Enterprise
This post is part of a series discussing lessons gleaned from the video game industry. Catch the next part next Saturday.

Journey won eight awards, including Game Of The Year, at the Design Innovate Communicate Entertain (DICE) Summit in February, an accolade which was well deserved for a number of reasons. In the game, you guide a solitary figure through a personal story. Occasionally, along the way you meet other lone figures who are controlled by another player over the internet. But there is no interaction except for the ability to “sing” a note (depicted by a symbol that represents you), run, and jump. You don’t even get to see player avatar names; they are briefly just part of your own journey to the end of the game.

What has this got to do with the customer experience?

The game manages to convey and elicit an emotional response from you towards the character you control, and others you meet along the way despite the complete lack of feedback. You are woven in the story, the experience and, despite never hearing or seeing just who you are interacting with, sharing that experience actually brings an empathic context. [Read more...]

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The 12th Man is Important Not Only in Sports Stadiums, but also in Business

March 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Can you remember when you bought something so good you had a dopamine-fueled ecstatic moment and had to immediately tell friends, family, and co-workers? Then they took your advice, bought the same product, and you all began to gush about just how good it was?

Inevitably, someone objected to the love fest and pointed out it wasn’t actually that good to which you all countered and debated each point they made. Did you realize you had become an unofficial spokesperson and advocate of that brand at that precise moment?

The Collective Power of Groups

This happens all the time and yet, for brands and customers alike, it’s an invisible and often untapped force to be reckoned with. A single customer’s voice can sometimes be lost amid the noise. It’s like throwing a stone in a large body of water. When the voices are joined as a collective, like a crowd in the stands at a sporting event, it suddenly becomes a rippling tidal wave of support that can almost drown out competition and negative feedback.

Loyal Customers Are Like Loyal Sports Fans

Have you seen, or participated in, the now-famous stadium wave that began at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico? That’s exactly the effect a loyal customer has for your product and brand when they cheer and support your business as it gathers momentum. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Loyalty, Retail Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Why Do Companies Find it So Hard to Get Social Media Right?

March 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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In May 2003, LinkedIn was launched, and in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook. In March 2006, Jack Dorsey famously sent the first Twitter message into the electronic ether. These are perhaps our most influential and real-time informational tools, and Twitter has been dubbed the “the pulse of the planet.”

 

As we reach a decade of using social networks and social media as personal and professional tools, companies are still getting even the basics so wrong.

Consider the UK retail chain HMV’s rogue employee live tweeting a mass layoff, or when Burger King was famously hacked and their social media team was inactive for hours. Social media is an incredible way to connect to your customer base, but only if you’re willing to use it as such, and for that to happen, you have to treat it as more than a simplified and cheap customer face of your brand.

Yes, brands need to interact with fans through social media, but they also need to integrate their automated social media tracking system with their back-end systems like loyalty, transaction, and billing to make personalized offers and gain a more complete view of each customer’s wants and needs. In this new social era, customer profiles shouldn’t just have loyalty point totals and past purchase history, but also likes, retweets, check-ins, and shares in context with every other system. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Integration, Social, Tech Trends Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

What SimCity 5 Teaches Us About Big Data

March 9, 2013 by 5 Comments
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Leveling Up in the Enterprise
This post is part of a series discussing lessons gleaned from the video game industry. Catch the next part on Call of Duty and Data Analytics next Saturday.

“What exactly does a new video game release have to do with Big Data?” I hear you ask. The answer is everything.

In SimCity, everything is simulated, and the amount of information in the game is indicative of the complex balancing act that happens around us in real life. The game is essentially a huge civil engineering, Big Data simulator.

Each “Sim” person has their virtual feelings changed in real time based on your actions. Even the buildings have statuses where you can check the owner’s needs. The power grid, water, utilities, public services, healthcare, resources, taxes — they are all interconnected, powered by a constant stream of actionable data and what affects one affects them all, as it does in real life.

Closing the Loop

You might not think manipulating diverse data streams would be a fun game, but you’d be wrong. The fun comes from perfectly closing the loop between data and action. Not only do you have perfect data, which never happens in real life, but your actions and reactions affect the lives of your Sims immediately with no real world lag time. The visual analytics itself is only the basis for seeing how your actions affect the whole integrated ecosystem. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Integration Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Do You Think Tiny Men Power Your Systems? They Might as Well Without a Proper Integration Strategy.

February 28, 2013 by 1 Comment
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I worked with a client once who was looking to implement an automated process for complaints handling. They explained their processes and began to slowly unveil their “integrated” customer system, explaining that over the years they grew to understand how information needs to move from one system to another for a single customer view.

And I froze in a state of shock.

I was looking at a standard application window with seventeen icons when it suddenly dawned on me; integration for this business simply meant the glossy front-end held seventeen manual points of entry into the back-end, which a customer advisor had to navigate in order to fulfill a simple enquiry.

And that’s where all the problems begin.Lost customer information, duplicated entries, half-truths and poor decision-making were all a result of this unnecessarily convoluted system.

Tiny Men Making Things Run Smoothly

Did you ever wonder as a child where the little men were who lived in the radio or television? Let me spin a similar yarn for the challenge of integration. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Integration Tagged With: , , , , ,

You Have Ten Seconds To Turn Your Customers Into Fans

February 20, 2013 by 1 Comment
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It’s a well-worn rule of thumb that you have little more than 10 seconds to impress someone with your website. Its design and, more importantly, your content will either draw in and convert someone into a loyal customer or allow them to remain a digital transient. You only have seconds to convince them.

Brick and mortar faces a dilemma of its own, even if it isn’t an extremely short timeframe. They have a limited number of chances to understand the customer’s psychology in visiting a store and what it takes to turn customers into fans.

This sounds harsh but consumers and retailers have become a blur to each other. The demands of real-time online and in-person activity are a significant challenge that many organizations have yet to rise and meet. Nobody wants to invest in a product or service only to feel the relationship ended as soon as the money was exchanged — customers do not want to feel neglected after the point of purchase. Your chance to turn customers into loyal fans is very, very fleeting. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Loyalty, Tech Trends Tagged With: , , , , , ,