Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Increasing Your Speed in Governance

Why would you want to speed up Governance? Well above all because your organization’s complexity slows it down while the business decisions require to speeds it up: you don’t want to deprive your company from business opportunities that you could not catch just because you’re too slow, do you?



A great deal of governance is backward looking leveraging reporting after the fact. While this will never go away, there are great ways of speeding up governance that need to be considered. This is especially important with many over and under lapping governance efforts that are happening in organizations today. The major thrust in this post is about how to use process management to plan for, prevent and how to quickly catch violations. There is a continuum of process focused governance approaches that can be used independently or together. To read more about how process management can speed up your governance efforts, please click here

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Cognitive AI Will Help Leverage Events and Decisions Encountered

The amount of data and information flying our way is almost to much to absorb much less optimize understanding data and making great decisions leveraging it. The world coming our way will only be more complex and faster, so how can organizations and the people that run these organizations survive and thrive? Cognitive AI is here to help provide better explanations, assist with more predictions and optimize events or decisions. AI will help grokking all that data coming your way by helping you understand, classify and decide using it.




AI Helps Understand Data: 

AI will be of great assistance to understand data, unstructured information, speech, images and video. Certain kinds of AI can help accelerate the understanding of each of these sources alone, but AI also can understand complex combinations of different kinds of information in multiple contexts. Once trained, AI can have a base that can be built on through experience like human learning. Having digital assistants will take on new meaning as AI helps you in understanding these multiple streams and find important and emerging conditions.


AI Helps Classify Data:

Not only can AI help understand the data that is there, it can know what you are interested in based on your past interest, behavior and selections. Even if you are not interested, AI can store the data / information in multiple ontology types for further understanding and classification. Patterns of interest, both planned and emerging, can be noted, stored and expedited for attention, decisions and a bevy of alternative actions.

AI Helps Decide:

Not only can AI help understand and classify data, it can predict and project from data giving decision makers additional alternatives to consider. In hyper speed situations the AI can make decisions equal to or superior to individuals. If there is time to collaborate with AI and other humans in critical situations, it is probably better, however there may be a time and place where AI can do better. There will be an emerging set of experiences with AI over time to decide who decides. Imagine AI assisting in the kinds and sequences of analysis that would be best no matter who dies it.

Net: Net:

We a drowning in large amounts data and information and time for decisions and actions are reducing. We will have to embrace Cognitive AI just to survive. Those organizations that learn how to leverage AI with data and information will be able to differentiate and distance themselves from their competitors.


Additional Reading:

For information on the Top Seven Uses of Cognitive AI  click here



Friday, November 11, 2016

The Business Transformation Field Guide: Experience Led Wisdom

Have you ever wished you had a Business Transformation project expert as a mentor? Have you ever wondered what you could do to be more successful as a BPM project professional? In “The Business Transformation Field Guide” released on Amazon, well-known Business Transformation experts Daniel Morris, Rod Moyer, and Keith Leust share decades of experience to help you avoid pitfalls and understand what it takes to truly lead successful BPM and BPMS enabled BPM transformation projects. This is a perfect companion book to my book on Digital Transformation. The book can be found on Amazon books at:  
https://www.amazon.com/Business-Transformation-Field-Guide/dp/0929652584
 or by searching the book title “The Business Transformation Field Guide”.



Click here for my companion book on Amazon

The field guide contains over 840 best practice “hints” organized following the activity flow of a formal BPM methodology. These hints are designed to be an easy to access “mentor” allowing readers to quickly focus on information that will help them with the specific activities they are working on.  This guidance is easy to consume and includes hints on what to do, what to consider, and what to avoid.

By addressing the entire transformation project life cycle, readers get the information they need on performing a wide range of tasks quickly, at the time they really need it – when it can do the most good.  The hints are designed to help teams pull together and perform activities in a consistent manner, using the same techniques – in the same way.  
The authors of The Business Transformation Field Guide have led numerous transformation projects while working for major international consulting firms such as IBM and Oracle.  In addition, Daniel is a PEX Network columnist and one of the main authors of the Association of Business Process Management Association’s Certified Business Process Professional certification exam and together with Keith Leust, wrote the Business Architect Guild’s initial certification exam.

The book can be found on Amazon books at
https://www.amazon.com/Business-Transformation-Field-Guide/dp/0929652584
 or by searching the book title “The Business Transformation Field Guide”.
Please contact Dan Morris, 630-290-4858 or daniel.morris@wendan-consulting.com  for any additional information on the book.

Monday, November 7, 2016

The Top Seven Uses of Cognitive AI Today

The world is speeding up and accelerating as you read this article. Big data keeps piling up, new IoT devices are multiplying exponentially, new patterns of threats and opportunities are emerging by the second, decisions are lagging optimal conclusions, the goals keep changing, the governance complexity is growing and your actions had better be on the mark. Your processes can't hang with this pace and you can't collaborate fast enough to get the brain power on the job. It's worse than the game called "Whack a Mole" where the mole heads pop up faster than you can hit them accurately. How will you and your organization keep up?  Cognitive AI will help organizations in at least seven areas of concern and can deal with the endless combinations and permutations facing us. If you want to master Digital, you need Cognitive AI.




Grokking Big Data:

The number of data sources, even without the IoT generating more, and the depth of the data lakes is unknown. Combine this with unstructured data, text, voice, images and video and now you are out-flanked by the size and scope of data. Cognitive AI with or without machine learning can sort through this barrage of data to find patterns of interest and triggers for decisions and actions.

Managing the IoT Population Explosion:

it's clear that the number of devices is exploding and the signals they emit create an even bigger big data problem, but managing these devices without rigid or flexible chips will be an even greater challenge. These devices will be deciding and acting alone or in concert with other devices on the edge driving towards changeable goals and while not violating constraint boundaries. This means that these devices need to to be smart so we can pass control to the edge to create smart and dynamic swarming agents that can be guided by AI.

Leveraging Opportunities & Risk:

Signals and patterns need to be quickly sifted and aggregated into patterns of interests for managers to decide and take action to optimize an organizations opportunities or protect organizations from emerging risks. This sifting, aggregating and learning can be assisted and super charged by cognitive AI. For wise organizations that have anticipated key triggers and patterns and have planned responses on the shelf, they can quickly use cognitive AI to verify appropriate responses.

Divining Great Decisions: 

Today great decisions can be made by having the right set of algorithms applied in the the proper sequence to come up with optimal decisions. Analytics or poly-analytics can be further leverage by using cognitive assists to decide on new combinations and sequences replacing the human trial and error application of filters and algorithms. Even predictive algorithms can be enhanced by machine learning and cognitive AI.

Delivering on Shifting Goals:

Goals not only conflict and compete, they are shifting. As this shifting takes on a new speed of change, Cognitive AI can create the right balance for emerging situations. As processes and swarming agents become more goal directed than flow directed, organizations can acting on shifting goals that leverage constraints. Cognitive AI can play a role in setting these goals and constraints.

Complying with Growing Governance:

The problem with governance standards is that they are stand alone in nature. Organizations are usually barraged with multiple governance standards that have to be mixed with the desired outcomes of the organizations represented in goals and constraints. Cognitive AI can be leveraged in sorting out the complexities of overlapping governance standards while they change in flight.

Keeping Actions on Point:

All of the above contribute to the right action taken at the right time, but also all constituent desires need to be put into the mix. Cognitive AI can represent customer, employee, partner and vendor goals that need to be considered. This give a dimension of satisfaction that can be baked in just in time to keep organizational desired outcomes in dynamic balance with constituent desired outcomes.

Net; Net: 

There is no way we humans can keep up without a little help for our cognitive friends. It will start out with digital assistants, then super-charging the competence of every person and program through the use of COGs (cognitive services) and finally moving control to the edge through smart agile agents  that may include robotics. Don't be late for the digital party coming your way.












Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Business Scenario Planning is No Longer Optional

We are living in unprecedented times, so management as usual will not work. It is important for executives to embrace business scenario planning and start a program recognize emerging patterns that signal the start of the scenarios. Smart business leaders will have responses planned and sitting in inventory for the day they are needed. It may be acts of nature, acts of politics, behavior of markets, the interactions of economies, behaviors of competitors,  or other unusual events, but reacting without a plan is dangerous today.




These kinds of planning processes are starting to happen and there are providers to help the uninitiated to make progress. Real world examples are starting to emerge. Click on this link for an example of a hospital using scenario planning for emergency situations. In this case the hospital used simulation, a commonly used technology for scenario planning.

For all organizations, planning in place or not, recognizing emerging new patterns is a new and essential digital business competency. This may mean working with some new technologies. Click on this link for a blog post on emerging pattern recognition

Net; Net:

Get ready to learn a new set of skills in and around business scenario planning and pattern recognition.