Process Excellence Survey Shows a Radical Shift Emerginig

The Process Excellence Network (PEX) released it's 3rd Biennial PEX report on the "State of the Process Industry" which highlighted trends and success factors in business process excellence and there were early indications of a radical shift occurring.  That shift is accentuated by three major trends. One is a shift towards customer satisfaction, another is sustaining growth and lastly making change a core competency.

About the Survey:

The survey, sponsored by Open Text, K2 and Kimberly-Clark Professional, was across over 25 industries on a world wide basis. While the majority of the responses were from the US and Europe (70%), there was enough "rest of the world" representation (30%) to be "on the mark".  Though the majority of the respondents were process professionals, there was enough executive participation to offset any process bias. I would highly recommend that you read the survey yours self by contacting PEX at info@pexnetwork.com or website http://www.processexcellencenetwork.com/


Customer Satisfaction:

This was an interesting finding;  37.5% of business executives defined their aim of their process programs as to "improve customer satisfaction through a quality experience as well as efficiency". The heterogeneous customer base that businesses have are demanding a better experience or they will take their business elsewhere. Processes represent the face of the business and had better allow a great experience with customization by customer.

Sustaining Growth:

Sustaining growth was cited as one of the top 3 business challenges in the years ahead by 47.7% of the executives responding. This means that processes that capture new business as fast and easy as possible will be those that win the race. This is especially true in industries that are constrained by onerous governance, heavy competition or restrictive business models.

Managing Change:

Executives also pointed to that ability to change often and rapidly was becoming a core competency. In fact, highly successful organizations are leveraging process to wrap slow legacy processes to enable evolutionary transformations as they wrestle with business models and change rates.

Net; Net:

In today's global and hyper competitive economy cost cutting is a base on top of which raising revenue and ability to change rapidly become tomorrow's business core competencies. Processes are not just a necessary evil any more, they are at the front lines of differentiation and innovation. Watch this space closely.

Leveraging Machine Intelligence for Timely & Cost Effective Underwriting

The critical first step in the commercial underwriting and risk management process, gathering and extracting financial data from client submissions, is almost universally a manual, non-responsive, error-prone, non-scalable process.  Timely and consistent application of credit policy across the enterprise is extremely challenging at best and becomes increasingly difficult to operationalize as the organization scales.

Variation in form [electronic files, pdfs, paper statements, etc.], format [unique to every company], language, accounting standards across countries and data delivery methods makes automation a very complex task. XBRL taxonomy, once seen as the panacea of Financial Statement interchange, has gone from being very rigid to virtually no standard structure at all in order to accommodate the unique reporting needs of various constituencies. Adoption rates of XBRL by private companies or by any company outside the United States is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile the challenge of extracting financial data, interpreting it consistently across every conceivable variation, normalizing it to a common standard for credit risk analysis, remains by and large unchanged.

This case study describes the approach taken by a Financial Services major in transforming its operations, dramatically reducing cycle time and establishing consistency and quality in the upstream processes of uploading cleansed and normalized Financial Statements into their internal credit scoring systems and Moody’s RiskCalc.

The Challenge: (Financial Statement Variability):

Variability in Financial Statements covers covered almost the entire spectrum of possibilities. Each statement is unique to the source/company/industry/country it came from. The five major areas of divergence from statement to statement have been organized in to the following categories. 

 Statement form and format variability. Bringing hundreds or thousands Financial  Statements of private [and public] companies, each in their own unique format, which can change without notice, is the first major obstacle to automation 

Variation in content of Financial Statements. There is no standardization in the content of a Financial Statement. Non-standard taxonomies result in inconsistent labels. Analysts often “club” data into the next most appropriate field, without full understanding of the impact.  These issues are amplified for international companies.

 Information embedded in footnotes. Critical information embedded in Financial Statement footnotes need to be identified and applied.  There is not standard or structure for footnotes for Financial Statements.

 Country and Industry specific variation. Wide variation in accounting standards across countries and accounting treatment across industries need to be normalized.

The Financial Services manual processes had to deal with all this variability and complexity on a daily basis for Financial Statements received from 46,000 companies in 35 countries annually. Processing a single statement could involve hours. The current operation was not set up to deliver the timeliness, compliance and quality required for current operations and even less to support any growth. Automating for this degree of variability was not feasible for the firm.

The Solution: (Patterns, Formulas and Rules)

 Leverage a patented extraction engine handles millions of records from a variety of sources, including paper, across many applications on a daily basis. The engine is not positional, i.e. it does not expect data to be in any specific row or column on a Financial Statement. It is able to process a Financial Statement it is encountering for the first time, throwing out for exception processing what it is not able to process automatically. Real time modification of the business logic and rules made dealing with Financial Statement variability relatively straightforward, as demonstrated time and again during the implementation.  No code was generated; the business user drove the process.

Extensive rules ensure accurate mapping of input labels. Following mapping rules drove the mapping process. If a new label that is not mapped appears in a statement it is thrown out for exception processing and the Quality Assurance team would then add a rule to automate the mapping the next time the label appears in a Financial Statement.

Key Breakups not available in Income Statement are automatically identified and extracted from footnotes and populated in normalized output using RAGE technology to interpret semi-structured data.  

Country Specific Rules allow for appropriate normalization of differences in accounting rules.  Industry Specific Rules allow for appropriate normalization of industry specific items.

Differences in the construction logic of Financial Statements are automatically recognized and handled 

It was not just normalized format, it was normalized meaning in context. This requires knowledge workers with a machine intelligence assist.

The Results: 

Compliance: Standards and credit policies institutionalized. One-offs were also handled as per policy. Risk reviews based on reliable, on-time data Automated controls. Click-back to exact extraction location in source documents.

Cost:                Over 75% cost reduction.  Transaction based pricing.

Speed:             80% of Financial Statements are instantly processed. 

Flexibility:        Major changes are rolled out in hours with minimal to no training. Complete insulation from frequently changing source file formats. 

Scalability:        Fully scalable operations. Doubling the volume at any point can be done instantly. 

Quality:          Consistency and institutionalization of the process. Implement bank specific normalization rules, country specific GAAP treatments, easily and rapidly without any programming

Operating Model:  No peak staffing, attrition, training, quality and inconsistency challenges. 

Net; Net:

The application of processes, pattern matching, analytics and business rules, all managed by business folks really delivers results. Truly a smarter process.

This is a highly summarized and anonymous case study based on Rage Frameworks  technology  

   

PEX Week 2104 Promotes Process Excellence

This was my first time attending the PEX Process Excellence Conference and I came away with a favorable impression and a significant amount of information about what mature process organizations are doing. There were over 500 delegates and 50 plus sponsors (around 600 warm bodies on site), most of which were BPM savvy. The highlight, as always with PEX, was the process excellence awards which was dominated by SingTel (four separate awards).

There were a number of great presentations, but there were five that I found rich with information. The five were Dupont, Pegasystems, Avnet, Lilly Research Labs and Software AG. Keep in mind that were a raft of great presentations given the day before, but I was just able to catch two days. First off, the maturity of the process programs and the individuals representing them was the strongest I have seen to date. There was a significant emphasis on “Big Process” though PEX uses the term “end to end process”.

DuPont Highlights: (Summarized from the Don Linnsennmann talk)

Dupont has a very mature process and proven process program that has evolved over the years and through several generation of CX leadership. The results over the last 15 years has resulted in 14B(billion) in savings and is now delivering 1B a year on a revenue stream of 35B. There are only two people in the Business Process Competency Center (high level executive and an assistant), but through influence of business heads they have delivered spectacular results while DuPont buys and sells business units strategically. By combining BPM, Lean and Six Sigma where possible on “Big Processes”, adding incentives for the black belts and the process participants, and grabbing influence leaders, Don and his side kick have delivered process excellence that more than pays for itself.

Pegasystems Highlights: (Summarized from a skit and demo of a real process from Bruce Williams & Setrag Khoshafian)

They showed a demo that leveraged real processes in combination to produce a client delighted process based on the “Internet of Everything”. It showed that there could be real time response to emergency conditions. It started with a trigger from a water leak sensor and notified a service company who notified Setrag in the tropics (vacationing and sipping umbrella drinks) and a plumber to fix the problem. The service provider unlocked the property for the plumber who finished job. Setrag was notified, billed and summed up with a survey. Setrac, was delighted, of course. This demo showed the future of real time processes that serviced customers better than a generation before that was real today.

Avnet Highlights: (Summarized from the Derinda Ehrlick talk)

Avnet is growing very fast through M&As and they have to consolidate and expand processes. They found that "people change" was getting in the way of success, so they adapted ADKAR methods (http://www.change-management.com/tutorial-adkar-overview-mod3.htm)  to plan and execute process projects. This allowed for a focus on people and sponsorship that is giving them a much higher success rate on process projects no matter the scope.

Lilly Highlights: (Summarized from the Dr. Martin Hynes III talk)

Lilly is using process improvement to cut time and costs out of the drug approval process which is amazingly slow and expensive. It takes over 9 years from the time a drug is invented to the time it reaches approval and the market. The costs have increased by 62% in the last 7 years, so it seems the drug companies are on a burning platform with regulation fueling the fire. Process savings is slowing down the costs and just starting to slow the time delay. With the advent of DNA driven compounds, change is bound to affect this industry in a big way. Meanwhile, process improvement is allowing Lilly to cope.

Software AG Highlights: (Summarized from SAG Panelists)

A panel of experts dealt with the topic of intelligent business operations(IBO) which consists of sensing opportunistic and threatening patterns (sensed by complex events), analyzing alternatives for decisions(process mining & intelligence), deciding and acting out adjustments(business rules and iBPMS) with feedback in the each of the previous steps. The panelists shared case studies and contributing technologies.

Net; Net:

PEX has evolved to meld Lean Six Sigma, Big Process and BPM together. Consequently, they are bringing together deep and rich business driven process programs and the emerging intelligent business process technologies. This bold move should put them in a position to stay relevant for years to come. The process excellence awards program cements it all together.

 

To find out more about PEX, See www.pexnetwork.com

To find out more about PEX Week, www.pexweek.com

Is Better Best or is Best Better

When processes and applications were handcrafted or configured, the end game was to create a best practice and tweak it over time to bolt down a true best practice. While the best practice could evolve over time, it stayed relatively stable. ERP is an example of these kinds of efforts. Because of the rate of change and the increase of unstructured knowledge work, a new approach to creating a multitude of evolving better practice patterns is also emerging. This is putting a spotlight on emergent better practices.

The Case for Best Practices:

Where decisions and actions are stable, best practices make a lot of sense. This way a standard process can be established for further optimization. For problem domains that are known and rarely change, best practices make great sense. This is where packaged and hand crafted applications make sense. Once implemented, optimization leveraging methods such as Six Sigma and process improvement make a lot of sense. Polishing the jewels of best practices is a great way to cut costs and raise revenue. One could argue that if this kind of processing or applications is that stable and non-differentiating, maybe it should be outsourced to more cost effective vendor than preforming it internally. Many organizations are aimed at keeping this approach going.

 

The Case for Better Practices:

Well as processes and systems reach for more knowledge intensive arenas, the need for a new approach becomes necessary.  Much of this kind of work requires collaboration and the sequence of actions are not the same every time. In fact sometimes there may not be exact duplicate of action sequences ever. This is often referred to as “case management” or “adaptive case management”. Where there are not best practices, accumulation of multiple success patterns to choose as a starting point makes more sense. This is called better practices. There may be several ways to approach desired outcomes based on studying successful patterns. This is where process or action mining comes into play. Better practice approaches are common in collaboration and social interactions where knowledge and wisdom is need to be applied to a case.

 

Finding the Balance:
 

There is no one approach that will work for all of your work streams. In fact as work evolves, there will be a need for both approaches. Emergent better practices can also evolve into best practice over time. Know when to leverage each approach and in combination will be the challenge for the business process director as well the process manager. Building skills and methods for creating both kinds of practices will be a key to process success.

 

Net; Net:

There are pockets of best practice bigots and pockets of emergent better practice bigots. We truly need both and these folks need to get along for process success. Yes Cats and Dogs can get along.

 

 

 

 

 

2014 Go Big or Go Home Part III: Agent Infused Processes are a Game Changer

Trying to keep your business edge in today's change prone world is a constant challenge.  See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/01/2014-go-big-or-go-home-part-i-business.html

In order for organizations to flourish, there is a premium on becoming a digital tech savvy organization.

See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/01/2014-go-big-or-go-home-part-ii-tech-for.html

Organizations that have started business transformation efforts are turning to business processes to incrementally transform their business. Since processes represent the "face of the organization" to customers and prospects, businesses are investing into agile and smart processes. Some strategic case studies below:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/12/telstra-is-aiming-at-wow-factor-by.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-mid-sized-bank-getting-to-revenue.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/jabil-circuit-inc-fast-growing-global.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/01/leveraging-complete-supply-chain.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/07/incremental-transformation-is-here-today.html

       For more Fractal Images, see http://www.james-sinur.com/

These kinds of processes have to smartly manage people, systems and machines. To participate in the digital economy, the business tasks we must ask of computers move from back-office record-keeping to the front line operations of the business. We are automating very different kinds of things: business processes and workflows that are human, knowledge-based phenomena; and opening our core business systems for direct interaction with customers, suppliers, and sometimes with competitors (i.e., the airlines industry). New forms of pervasive communications have allowed forward thinking business people to blur industry boundaries and create virtual corporations, whose core competencies are information and knowledge management, taking much of the operational information once in workers’ heads and codifying it into executable software. This creates complexity that is hard to handle centrally. 

To manage the inherent complexity in enterprise or value chain business processes, smart companies will demand smart processes that go far beyond today’s typical business rules engines. But “smart” doesn’t mean some Orwellian thinking machine; it means agent technology.What’s an agent? Backing away from

technology for a moment, the everyday term, agent, provides a starting definition: “one who acts for, or in the place of, another.” A software agent is a software package that carries out tasks for others, autonomously without being controlled by its master once the tasks have been delegated. The “others” may be human users, business processes, workflows or applications. A basic software agent stands on three pillars, three essential properties: autonomy, reactivity, and communicationability. The notion of autonomy means that an agent exercises exclusive control over its own actions and state. Reactivity means sensing or perceiving change in their environment and responding. And, even the most basic software agents have the ability to communicate with other entities: human users, other software agents, or objects.

Add to this definition the ability to plan and set goals, to maintain data and data models (often called “belief models” in academic literature) to reason about the actions of itself and other agents (including humans), and the ability to improve its knowledge and performance through learning, you then have the core ingredients of an “intelligent agent.” An intelligent agent represents a distinct category of software that incorporates local knowledge about its own and other agents’ tasks and resources, allowing it to operate autonomously or as a part of a community of cooperative problem solvers (including human users), each agent having its own roles and responsibilities. Agents can be integrated into process (BPM) frameworks that contain, in one package, specific problem-solving functions, data, and control. Intelligent agents support a natural merging of BPM and knowledge-based technologies. Intelligent agents can facilitate the incorporation of reasoning capabilities (e.g., encapsulation of business rules within agents). They permit the inclusion of learning and self-improvement capabilities at both infrastructure (adaptive routing) and application (adaptive user interfaces) levels. Intelligent user interfaces (supporting task-centered user interfaces and intelligent assistance to end-users) can be a boon to productivity in a complex world of multi-company business processes. With the complexity of tasks inherent in multi-company business processes, we will certainly need a little help from our knowledgeable friends, software agents. These agents can be embedded into existing processes for support or collaborate to create situational processes. See supporting blog posts below:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/harnessing-business-complexity-with.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/agents-have-power-of-intelligent-and.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-wave-of-distributed-intelligence-is.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/10/agents-can-efectively-bid-for-process.html

Net; Net:

To handle the growing challenges of keeping businesses and their supporting processes in synchronization with goals and customer needs, intelligent agent infused processes will be a game changer. This trend is starting in 2014 and I expect agents to be crucial in big change for the foreseeable future.

For further reading on Agents see http://www.amazon.com/Business-Process-Management-Next-Wave/dp/0929652223/ref=aag_m_pw_dp?ie=UTF8&m=A16IAGG0Q8TTTG

2014 Go Big or Go Home Part II: Tech for Digital Savvy Organizations

We are in an era of big change driven by an emerging new business climate and the need to be digitally strong to swim the business current. See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/01/2014-go-big-or-go-home-part-i-business.html. The good news is that budgets for technology investments are going up and leveraging the cloud can free up funds to invest in more tech. The bad news is there are lots of choices and any number of competing shiny objects to reach out to grab. If you work for a "cash cow", you can try many new digital approaches, however most organizations have to prioritize. If you haven't embraced mobile, cloud and knowledge collaboration with vigor, you need to up your game before you look out too far on the horizon. While I believe the things we see at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) are important overall (3D printing, drones and self driving cars), I'd like to point to three technology areas to consider in 2014 with your new found funds.

The Internet of Everything: (For Observation)

There is an explosion of sensors, devices, touches, state changes, environmental conditions to respond to for organizations. This will put a premium on extending the range of organizations to sense conditions that are worthy of taking advantage off offensively or responding to defensively. This means taking on new sources of sensors and making sense of the patterns of senor activity. It could be a simple as matching market conditions or it could be as complex as watching the response of groups of customers. Mobile and mass customization just accelerates the need for this area. This puts a premium on complex event recognition and smart sensors to help optimize organizational awareness.

Machine Assistants: (For Orientation and Decisions)

We hear plenty about big data, poly analytic efforts and process intelligence to sort out the right decisions and setting up the proper responses to these emerging patterns mentioned above. There aren't enough eyes, brains and time to collaborate to respond properly and quickly with a measured outcome simulated response. There aren't enough data scientists on the planet, so wee need to augment humans with machine learning. The learning could be deciding what analytic approaches to take or sorting out scenario response combinations. This will start out slowly, but there is more decisions and actions than can be handled by the folks we employ or use as stringers. This puts a premium analytic capabilities, big data and machine learning.

Real Time Response: (For Action)

If you sense the right patterns and make the right decisions considering all of the contexts, you have to respond within time frames that are accelerating. There is truth to the old saying "the early bird gets the worm". Organizations need to be optimizing the cycle of action to intercept and respond in the most timely manner. In addition, organizations will have to tweak their responses quickly and closer to the business. This means that infrastructure investments that speed all aspects of business are crucial. This puts a premium on in memory data, process management and business policy/rule management.

Net; Net:

Money is flowing back into technology, so picking the right areas of investigation and investment will make a significant difference when matching against expected business outcomes. The best digital organizations will be able to aggregate and string together technologies in ways to out perform the competition and constituents expectations. Heaven help those organizations that ignore this opportunity.

Leveraging Complete Supply Chain Visibility for Happy Customers & Revenue

A major quick serve restaurant chain with over 10,000 store locations spread across more than fifty countries set itself a goal to improve visibility across its supply chain processes so as to prevent customer dissatisfaction and revenue loss as a result of stock-outs and missed shipments.

The Challenge:

This organization was not able to track purchase orders completely as they moved across an array of siloed ERP systems and other IT applications, from suppliers to distribution centers to store locations. When dealing with hundreds of fresh ingredients and thousands of order variations, delayed shipments, shortages and even overages can result in significant losses in revenue as well as unhappy customers.

The Solution:

The global restaurant chain leveraged visual process intelligence to help them continuously monitor the progress of fresh food and other order items through their end-to-end procurement process. The solution gives them real-time insight into bottlenecks and delays and immediately alerts their corporate procurement personnel to issues related to specific orders. In addition to monitoring orders related to replenishing supplies, the restaurant chain tracks and traces all the orders related to building out new stores – from fresh ingredients to light fixtures! The procurement team has been able to easily define and track service level agreements (SLAs) with each of their suppliers and get alerted when established thresholds are met or exceeded.

By establishing a monitoring layer that tracks the progress of every activity in the procurement process, stakeholders are immediately made aware of delays at any particular step in the process so that they can course correct. The new system tracks the time taken to approve an order, communicate the details with a supplier, get an expected receipt confirmation from a distribution center, receive a shipment notification, confirm receipt at a distribution center, update the corporate system, as well as close the PO.

Procurement planners can easily interact with the system and mark specific orders as high priority – for instance, for stock replenishment or promotional products for the holiday season and these orders are flagged as priority within the dashboards used by the distribution and transportation personnel as well.  Previously, shipment priorities were communicated using spreadsheets. Process intelligence gives the restaurant chain the ability to uncover actual supply chain patterns, analyze these processes and arrive at the optimal path. It helps them easily define and monitor service level targets for every step in the procurement process and immediately alert teams to delays and bottlenecks that can result in unsatisfied customers and potential revenue loss.

The Results:

Today, their procurement personnel benefit from the following:

·        The ability to easily track purchase orders across multiple siloed ERP and other IT systems – from suppliers to distribution centers to store locations

·        They can continuously monitor the progress of orders and reroute shipments to prevent stock-outs

·        They can easily track shortages and overages in received quantity

·        They can get immediately alerted to delays in high priority, seasonal products

·        They can get alerted if receipt of goods are scheduled on non-work days for a specific distribution center and immediately take action

·        Decrease costly emergency replenishment processes

Net; Net:

Catching emerging problems in a near real time fashion can add significant monetary results in time and customer sensitive supply chains.  By observing inflight results, immediate and significant benefits can occur, however this approach was also used to mine and visualize the paths of many orders for potential process improvements. The combination of real time monitoring and process mining for process improvement discovery is powerful and unique for supply chains.

This is a highly summarized and anonymous case study based on Vitria’s technology  

2014 Go Big or Go Home Part I: Business Climate

The stock markets have been expecting a brighter future for finances for a while now, the unemployment rate is pegging for the new normal of around 7% for healthy employment and there is a sense of optimism that is growing. The future is bright, so businesses are taking on a more assertive approach to revenue generation and investment. This is the good news, but the challenge will be to keep the ball rolling. Five issues businesses need a leadership mode on have surfaced that I think are crucial for 2014 and beyond. In Part II, I will be talking about the about the role of technologies in this digital age and in Part III, I will be talking about the role of business processes.

Business Uncertainty:

For organizations that want to not just thrive, but capitalize on emerging conditions, there are practices that need to be put into place to deal with the uncertainties we face today. Uncertainty is all around us with Geo-political events, non-productive politicians and emerging sources of competition. An important practice to put in place around scenario planning with prepared responses for organizations with planning cultures.Even at an operational level using predictive capabilities have proven profitable for cross selling and determining next best actions. For the vast majority of organizations that are more reactive, in nature, building explicit agility levers, goals, policies and rules into every aspect of the organizations processes, procedures and systems is a must. See what one group of health related organizations did to plan optimal health networks:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-new-executive-approach-to-change.html

Business Acceleration:

Like it or not, change is accelerating and the rewards go to the organizations that can respond to or intercept the effect of expected change. Time to market product or service introduction is a key piece of this as well as being responsive to change within markets. The organizations with the most intelligent business operations are aiming towards real time response to change. This ends up being long term journey that can be taken in incremental steps towards targeted transformations. This means learning new ways of sensing patterns, analyzing options and acting in faster ways over time. Consider what on major European airport has done with one of their first steps:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/06/smart-ground-operations-processes.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/01/time-to-market-pressure-is-putting-on.html

Business Innovation:

It is well documented that the longevity of organizations has reduced significantly and there are smarter people than me that predict this trend to accelerate. We can all think of companies that did not innovate or change whose bones are no buried inside another company or just plain long gone and forgotten. There is a line of thinking that says "you must add innovation to your business model or face a spin down over time". This places a premium on looking for emerging business models, practices and technologies that can help organizations not only survive, but go beyond it. I can think of stable companies that have accelerated asset growth by expanding their product lines to stay current with emerging trends. Northwestern Financial Network just used to sell whole life insurance, but look what it has done to expand it's presence. NML has always wanted to be innovative to save costs, but it turned out to use business and technical innovation to expand it's business while staying a low cost leader. Just saying. See what Jabil has done to expand it's business and increase revenue through innovation.

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/jabil-circuit-inc-fast-growing-global.html

Customer Focus: 

There is a great emphasis on gaining new customers and keeping them engaged that started to emerge in the second half of 2013. While CRM practices have gone a long way to help operationally, business organizations need to go beyond simple CRM and expand the scope of customer to constituencies such as partners, vendors, employees and the collective set of informal interactions with the public. There is a rush to add new customers to gain revenue lift. This will  not only be done with better and innovative products and services, but by the way organizations allow constituents to have better visibility into processes that touch them. In addition, the organizations that allow constituents to customize their interactions with said organization, will win in the long run. People do not want to be treated as standard commodities and kept in the dark. They want real time visibility and adjustment features that make them feel important. See what Telstra is doing for their first step in their customer journey

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/12/telstra-is-aiming-at-wow-factor-by.html

Organizational Responsibility:

As was indicated earlier in this post, the longevity of organizations are being challenged by the changing business environment today. Intelligent organizations are embracing the measurement of factors that could enhance or threaten the organization. While most organizations are good at measuring risk, the premium on expanding the measurement to more factors of wellness. This should include measurements on sustainability, citizenship, levels of distraction, culture and workforce happiness.


Net; Net:

Organizations that step up to the challenges emerging in 2014 will likely reap the rewards. Those that don't risk the consequences in the long run. Go big or go home. Stay tuned for Part II & Part III of this series.

Time to Market Pressure is Putting on the Squeeze

The beginning of the year is always a reminder of the passage of time. In 2014, I expect an acceleration of a trend to doing business faster (controlled speed). This is going to have some down stream effects that may change how technologies interact and integrate. This is especially true for processes and business process management (BPM).

Time to Detect:

Organizations will be under pressure to detect events and patterns that may imply the need to decide and act. Many organizations are not only setting programs to react with pattern detection, they are also seriously pursuing prediction and forecasting to be proactive as well. Enlightened organizations are doing scenario planning across shared processes, such as value and supply chains. Detection tends to mash up technologies such as complex events, simulation, predictive analytic formulas and business intelligence capabilities.

See
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-new-executive-approach-to-change.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/06/events-and-process-are-powerful-and.html


Time to Decide:

Organizations are going to have to balance a lot of complexity and time pressure to make good decisions. This means that processes will have to support two kinds of decision methods. The first will be initiated by someone outside the process like a process director or manager. This is what I call "on demand" decisions. This is where someone notices an opportunity or threat during the operation of a process. The second will be recognized by the process through notification, pattern detection or pre-built analytics or optimizations. Either way the premium will be on making faster decisions with emerging and complex processes.

See
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/10/top-trends-in-process-today.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/harnessing-business-complexity-with.html


Time to Direct Actions:

In a world that requires quicker and more intelligent actions, intelligent processes that can enact quick actions will create clear differentiation for organizations. This puts a premium on processes that have the agility and flexibility to respond to business professionals. This means that pre-built outcome visualizations and process behavior levers, such as explicit rules will become the norm for anticipated behaviors. It also means agile process development and maintenance will be an expectation for process technologies. This is best seen in the examples of such processes in production today:

See
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/06/smart-ground-operations-processes.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/05/smart-medical-process-rated-on-cpiq.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/06/smart-retail-process-measured-on-cpiq.html


Net; Net: 

The pressure for more speed will require the integration of many technologies to serve the business in a way that delivers smart differentiation.  In a era of better customer relationships and revenue generation, speed will become more important.  Because of the pressure to respond in a timely fashion, there will need to bring decision making and processes closer together (BPM, Events & BI).

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/jabil-circuit-inc-fast-growing-global.html