In Business and Love – Opposites Attract: Social BPM and Collaboration

In more than one instance, opposite poles attract each other, from marriages to difficult colleagues at work. One person is usually organized, predictable and manageable, and the other one can turn out to be lazy, moody, or totally unpredictable, but these parings often end up being the best matches. The same is true between the marriage of something standardized and automated like BPM and something as messy as social media. The knot to tie them together is people. Engaging people to collaborate and be a part of the process is the secret to the happy marriage.

Sometimes businesses fail to recognize that one of their most important processes is in the crowd of all its messiness. The only way to get the process right is not asking just one person, but to let the crowd decide what’s right. Twitter and Facebook are just one part of it because to harness employees, the most efficient businesses listen to what they are saying. This does not just impact the operational processes, but also the management processes. [Read more...]

Traditional Marketing is Bad Marketing

In a survey report on customer experiences from a leading consulting firm, they discussed how to “convert opportunities from seemingly lost opportunities” by preventing early defection and identifying what causes churn. Last year the theme of “revenue growth through customer experience” was adopted as a primary initiative across many industries and companies, covering real-time offers and contextually driven real-time campaigns. Many organizations are already on a path to reap the benefits of technology platforms put in place to address customer retention and growth.

Same Old Strategies Lead to the Same Old Results

What are a customer’s immediate purchase needs? Are offers targeted to match customers’ requirements, especially when they want it? What is the conversion rate on an offer? Three out of 100? That’s a 3% offer up-take ratio. Marketing campaigns like this are obviously shooting offers from the hip!

That means 97% of employee resources and money get wasted. Spraying and spamming customers with a traditional marketing offer are hardly relevant to their needs. With enough failures to follow-up at opportune times, the frustrated customer opts-out. That’s just one aspect of customer defection; what about others? Why do customers defect even if the product or the service offered is relevant? [Read more...]

Harvesting Integration to Feed the World

wheat harvestIn the last decade, the world population has increased by more than 700 million to reach seven billion today. And by 2050, there will be two billion more people to feed. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), food insecurity is a major global concern today. With food consumption exceeding the amount grown for six of the past 11 years, countries have run down reserves by more than 30%.

Manage Risk to Increase Food Security

World grain reserves in the United States and other food-exporting countries have gone so low, that severe weather and extended calamities can cripple the food supply chain. Add to this tough scenario, the complexity, risk, and uncertainty inherent in agriculture and commodity supply chains. Managing and mitigating these risks – production, market, macro-economic, regulation – will play a significant role in determining the food security and safety for the billions of our population. [Read more...]

Don’t Have an Integration #Fail, Have an Integration #Success

Stop failing to plan with your integration initiatives and start to plan for integration success. Over the past weeks, we have run precautionary warnings about the risks of failing to integrate systems and common mistakes in bad implementation. Heed our warnings and be careful you do not become a statistic for companies that failed.

Welcome aboard Integration Success

We started this integration ride with companies that often forget to think about the enterprise in the enterprise service bus (ESB). Before getting back on the bus, we have to make sure that infrastructure capabilities are aligned to enterprise-level requirements and the company can put the E back in ESB.

Further down this ride, there were some companies that decided to lie in the path of the oncoming bus. Hiring programmers to write computer code might be a quick fix to a solution, but with different coders using different programming languages, it becomes impossible to attain a holistic picture of the company. Using a bus-based architecture will allow the company to manage connections with applications through one interface. [Read more...]

How Can You Have Any Apps If You Don’t Eat Your Data?

Getting the right apps into the hands of your customers quickly requires an infrastructure that can handle the load. Assembling the components is tricky because there’s a combination of new data and old to manage in the moment for the best customer experience. Telecom companies like T-Mobile need to be able to handle this exponential increase in data volume, and also analyze this new source of data to deliver the right services to each customer.

Anticipating the newest mobile app is like waiting for the next blockbuster movie; it’s become a major event. With top lists of most popular apps published per month and even per week, there is a whole market around interest in apps. Ruzzle, a word game resembling Scramble, earned the top position on iPhone apps charts as the most downloaded game in January, giving us the first big hit of 2013. Of course, the runaway success story of 2012 was Snapchat, a photo-messaging app, where users were sending about 50 million snaps a day. Think about the volume of data these two apps alone are producing. It’s staggering. [Read more...]

Business Process Improvement Just Got Personal

Businesses are personalizing everything nowadays because people want something specially made for them. Quite frankly, they deserve it. No one wants a cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all solution to life, but until recently had to settle for mass-produced goods and services. Our society does not live by the ideas in Ayn Rand’s Anthem, where use of the word “I” would result in deathly punishment.

Each individual has a specified role at your job and companies need to see the importance in each individual. We have the capability to complement complex infrastructure needs with a solution that helps human collaboration and documents the people and the process of a business.

There Should Be an “I” in “Team”

There never was a company with all of their employees doing the exact same job. No matter how big or small, each business assigns roles to people, and each of these processes need to be managed effectively. [Read more...]

Fighting Tomorrow’s BPM Battles Today

Companies experience significant inefficiencies and they know it. Too often, the decision is made that it’s too difficult, too political, and too disruptive to operations to do more to manage how work gets done. Just as often, people won’t stop to capture process in flight because they believe it will change by the time it gets published. People learn to live with these problems and think, “It will always be that way.” We’re going to show you why that statement isn’t true.

Becoming Lean is the New Battle Strategy

Under pressure from global economic challenges, many countries are making huge defense cutbacks, including the UK and US. The Pentagon, for example, is facing a spending reduction of nearly $500 billion over a decade, with an additional $110 billion in automatic cuts to military. With this in mind, defense companies like BAE Systems must become leaner in everything they do. So that’s exactly what BAE System’s Finance Services did. As a part of a shared services initiative at the company, they documented over 280 processes and 330 work instructions to facilitate their Finance Transformation program.

Shared Services Play a Major Role

Every large business has services common to many departments across geographies, so it makes sense to integrate these services into a single entity, commonly known as a Shared Service Organization(SSO). In the early days, when SSOs were being formed, the main role was to increase operational efficiencies and reduce costs. These objectives still remain, but as SSOs have made ground as independent bodies, their focus has shifted to matters necessary for growth. Employees want easy-to-understand, rich process content delivered through a personalized, role-based portal that enables them to do the right thing at the right time; what one might call an “Intelligent Operations Manual.” This provides a better understanding of process by giving stakeholders a single source of the truth that aligns business with IT.

What Were BAE’s Results?

The result (which BAE calls “How2″) offers continuous improvement and service excellence as well as process and control governance for their customers. It’s helped them achieve significant savings in cost per finance transaction. With easy-to-use software, capturing and deploying best practices as a codified business processes is logical. By deploying a best of breed business process management platform for a single and integrated version of truth, you can detect, register, and unify processes.

“To bring How2 into BAE systems was extremely easy. It has actually been one of the easiest implementations I have seen for a while . . . we could trust it.”
- Guy Keough, P2P Manager.

For more information on BAE Systems, click here

For more on how to integrate your systems to leverage Big Data, check out these Gartner reports:

Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic SOA Infrastructure Projects

Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic Application Integration Projects

Just How Random is Your Workplace?

Companies put a great deal of focus on goals and strategies and, often, less effort goes into the tactics and guidance for how work actually gets done. In reality, there’s a personal aspect to what we do that should be understood so that it gets done right and quickly. If you’ve seen the viral video for the Harlem Shake, it illustrates what too many companies look like under their corporate covers.

Doing the Harlem Shake

Enjoy this short video (you may want some sound):

Doing your own thing

What makes the video so entertaining is that everyone is doing his or her own thing. Water cooler guy? …is that guy punching a giraffe? Some have great moves while others look like dancing isn’t really their “thing.” Just like how the company logo can be the only commonality, the beat is in this video is the only thing uniting this group of people. [Read more...]

You Are Micromanaging and Need to Stop

Business Process Improvement

Continuous improvement, consistency and collaboration are the ways process is managed effectively. Without it, you’re just a micromanager.

Making it Better

Business Process Management (BPM) is absolutely necessary to any company, but what’s the point if you don’t use what you know to improve? There also needs to Business Process Improvement that takes managed processes and makes it better. There is always room for improvement. Everything can get better and with the right tools, help and support, anyone and anything can improve.

Strengthening Weakest Links

Employees may or may not have the same skill-set, but they should all have a firm understanding of their position and role within the company. It is vital to ensure that business processes are handled in a way all employees easily understand. Work becomes easier, faster, and more rewarding when all your company’s employees know they are following the right process, at the right time. [Read more...]

Integration #FAIL – Part 2: Lying in the Path of an Oncoming Bus

Point-to-point integration can be a quick fix for getting information from system to system. All it takes is a bit of code and voilà – connection complete!

But what happens when the programmer who wrote the script falls off the face of the planet? Inevitably, a change will be submitted by the business. Just how long will it take to find the keys that unlock the black box?

A single instance might be manageable but if you’re like most organizations, dozens of hard-coded, point-to-point interfaces run beneath the surface of application development projects.

And chances are, developers used different technologies over the years, making it difficult to know where issues lie, let alone what could be causing a problem.

It could take an army to overcome a situation like this on a larger scale, not to mention escalated cost. So the question becomes: how much of your business’ agility and resources are you willing to put at risk? [Read more...]