Big Hero 6 Trailer; Fresh from Disney

Andy Sinur would be proud to see this clip. I certainly am. This is the project Andy was working on as one of the production supervisors when he passed. Great to see this :)  Links below

Click on the  link below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IdMPpKMdcc





http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/07/god-now-has-one-of-his-gems-back.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/08/thanks-for-prayer-support.html

IoT: Are You Ready For New Management Approaches?

The Internet of Things (IoT) introduces some new ways to manage as the "things" Aka agents can actually negotiate, collaborate, sense, suggest and act on their own. This is a very different mode of operation and I'm not sure folks are preparing themselves to deal with some of the issues. There are ways of dealing with these issues, but thinking about them now will prepare you for this new world of distributed intelligence acting with freedom levels only afforded to trust worthy humans in the past. Even if it is a personal assistant suggesting a course of action to a human, there are some new issues to wrestle with now. The IoT / Agents will change the way you deal with governance, risk and ethics. In fact the IoT will help you manage.

Examples of IoT autonomy:

http://gartnernews.com/stopped-at-the-border-what-happens-when-things-negotiate/
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/06/pegaworld-2014-digital-pressure.html    See Pipeline Inspection

http://www.amazon.com/Business-Process-Management-Next-Wave/dp/0929652223


Governance: 

Today system and machine actions are programmed and hard to change quickly. While the IoT / agents can be given policies/rules and constraints, all of them can change quickly and the negotiation between things / agents can create unforeseen combinations. This will put a premium on simulation and predictive analytics applied to the negotiations between and actions by these things.


Risk:

The control systems or constraints could be faulty even without fore thought. What id one of your thing / agent negotiates with another organizations personal assistant and it gives out faulty knowledge, advice or actions?  What happens if an agent invades someones privacy?  Who is to blame when this autonomy goes to end to end processes involving multiple parties?


Ethics:

How will people feel when these things start taking all the jobs because organizations can get a personal assistant that is an agent / thing to work 24 by 7 without breaks or complaints? . What will happen when some agents can alter other agents in flight? What could these agent flocks evolve to become and will they be benign?


Net; Net:

While I an excited about the days of IoT and distributed intelligence. The kinds of intelligence and knowledge rich processes will multiply and amaze us, but we need to start thinking about the changes in management and the legal ramifications as this rolls out.


Additional Reading:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/agents-have-power-of-intelligent-and.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/10/agents-can-efectively-bid-for-process.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/harnessing-business-complexity-with.html

Behavior Modeling: The Key Missing Context in Processes

There needs to be a shift in an organizations attitude towards customers, if happy customers are the goal. Of course, happy customers will do more business with you yielding revenue increases. Traditional thinking says that the easier you make it for customers to do business with you, the happier customers will be. There is a shift to also anticipate customers needs based on their situation and context to accelerate customer satisfaction, usually measured through scores.

Predicting the State of the Customer:

Knowing about the customer history is a help, but understanding the customer at a specific point in time can help the situation. If your web site has been down or your management has changed a policy affecting certain kinds of customers. Certainly every organization has classes of customers based on past activities, but some times this is a limited view. Having a current state on your client is important and this can be helped by real time analysis leveraging current event patterns and data.

Predicting the Response of the Customer:

Knowing how a customer is likely to respond based on their history, temperament, goals and passions, This is rarely surveyed or modeled thus creating a gap in our understanding our customers. Anticipating is important as we all respond differently based on normal state versus being under duress or pressure. We all have different motivation points based on ease and incentives.

Adjusting Your Actions: 

Based on what we know about the state of a customer and their expected response, processes have to adjust to optimize your organizations advantage at a specific point in time. While you can build all the possible paths into your processes, it might be better to have behavioral context models linked to the processes that custom assemble the proper path for the circumstances at hand. Process technologies are not yet equipped to handle to link to context models yet. See the blog below

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-missing-models-in-process.html


A Hypothetical  Example:

Imagine traveling with a small child arriving late to a hotel because of flight delays. The baby is cranky. Mom is dead tired. Dad is stressed out as after all it is his responsibility to take keep it all together. Imagine the hotel check-in person providing a room upgrade and automatically ordering a bottle of warm milk, a pacifier and a small bottle of campaign for the room. How delighted would this couple be?


Net; Net:

Of course there are organizations whose processes make it more difficult for customers, so that they don't create any transactions. These are organizations usually driven by cost containment.  You can get both revenue increases and cost containment with intelligent processes. Let's start including behavior contexts in processes and anticipating customers needs

The Two Faces of Business Process Discovery

Organizations are represented by their processes that engage customers, employees, partners, stakeholders and the community they operate in on a regular basis. These processes represent the organizations face to each of these constituents. Processes have proven to help organizations operate efficiently at a lower cost, raise revenue in competitive markets and deliver innovation with the collaboration business visionaries. Needless to say processes and the cases they operate on have a great contribution to desirable organizational outcomes. It is important to understand your current processes, at a minimum, to make sure they optimize results. At a maximum, target processes plus transitional plans to get to the target processes for differentiating organizations should be mapped with along with incremental improvements along the way. This is why business process discovery is so important. The confusing part about process discovery is that, today there are two kinds of process discovery. Like the Roman God Janus, there are two faces to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus

Process Discovery; Modeling a New Design:

When trying to create better operations and better flows to support those operations, much vision must be exchanged. Process flows have to created and updated. Some organizations like to start with a blank sheet of paper and throw business visionaries at the task to create innovative operations. Others take a core process and expand and tweak it to create an incremental improvement for better operations. In either case the sharing of the core innovation or core process far and wide helps deliver a better result overall. Process discovery through modeling and analysis helps here as many individuals can be economically added to the collaboration pool in creating the new flows. This discipline of sharing the core idea or flow and all the additions over time help the acceptance of the new and changed processes. BPA technologies add significant value to the definitional efforts. 

Process Discovery; Mapping Reality:

Quite often organizations think they understand their existing flows because everybody knows their own job well and feels that others should as well. In reality, when a combined process flow is created from real life measurements, acquired by instrumentation probes,  across job roles, organizational boundaries and even outside the base organization, the process map tends to point out problems that only appear when you put the big picture together. There ends up being significant benefit to creating a current flow usually revolving around removing unnecessary or old task steps. Quite often, role and goal conflicts can be discussed and resolved to the satisfaction of all parties. These benefits usually come from removing unnecessary work and the benefits can be quite large in large scoped end to end processes such as supply chains and value chains. Over short period of time process discovery proves that you must inspect better to manage better.  

Net; Net:

Over time these distinct approaches will be used together in process efforts thereby driving the need for process vendors to bring the separate technologies together. Right now they are different technology stove pipes for the most part. Process modeling by hand leveraging business process modeling tools and automated business process discovery tools. 

Additional Reading:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/09/processes-you-cant-manage-what-you-cant.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-missing-models-in-process.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/07/end-to-end-processs-transparency-bests.html

Free Webinar on Improving Employee Performance Through Measurement

While the attached description appears to be focused on Healthcare and the back office, this applies to all industries and can help in the front office as well.  This about reality based business operations that are measured and tuned with a small amount of instrumentation effort.

Come and hear Dr Edward Peters and myself talk about how to get visibility and results without a significant amount of effort. This is a super quick payback that can give insights for innovative new approaches as the same time, This is real and proven methods and technology that can help win commitments to do more aggressive projects.

http://www.ahip.org/Webinar/OpenConnect-IEPTM/

Processes: You Can’t Manage What You Can’t See

It is more important than ever that a company understands and optimizes their processes, but until now it was an arduous effort to model expansive processes. Getting bogged down into insular modeling efforts that sub-optimize at best and arm people for change resistance at the worst.  By leveraging business process analysis (BPA) as a service you can have bigger scopes and the consensus to implement change. “BPA for the masses” can span divisions and enterprises.  On-prim BPA has never really achieved this due to cost, politics, or lack of resources.  BPA as a service can remove these roadblocks. 

Organizations are represented by their processes that engage customers, employees, partners, stakeholders and the community they operate in on a regular basis. These processes represent the organizations face to each of these constituents. Processes have proven to help organizations operate efficiently at a lower cost, raise revenue in competitive markets and deliver innovation with the collaboration business visionaries. Needless to say processes and the cases they operate on have a great contribution to desirable organizational outcomes. It is important to understand your current processes, at a minimum, to make sure they optimize results. At a maximum, target processes plus transitional plans to get to the target processes for differentiating organizations should be mapped with along with incremental improvements along the way.  

While model driven change appeals to organizations because of the desirability of visual communications, typically there are tangible benefits during both process development and process execution. First there is reduced time to results in process improvement efforts and can be accomplished in weeks on smaller scales. Secondly, the cost of operations can be reduced in the range of 15 – 30%. Last, but not least, customer response time during operation can be reduced from 20 – 30% allowing for higher customer satisfaction scores. BPA as a service adds an additional savings in that there are savings of 20 -30% over non-cloud approaches.  Here are some of those additional benefits listed below:

•        Time to Market Results Because of Ease of Starting

•         Flexible Scaling of Efforts

•        Mobile for Modeling Anywhere

•        Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd

•        Democratization of Process Knowledge for Faster Cycles of Improvement

•        Leveraging the Cloud for Central Sharing & Availability

•        Location Neutral Collaboration with Multiple Physical Locations

•        Time Neutral Collaboration with Multiple Time Zones

•        Global Compliance with Engaged People

•        Reduced Analysis Paralysis

•        Social Collaboration Enabled

Net; Net:

BPA is an important discipline, but is sometimes considered arduous. BPA as a service makes process analysis speedy and effective.  This will encourage more of the collaborative nature of BPA that is needed to deliver effective change in organizations today. BPA as a service changes the analysis game to more of a “time to market” approach while increasing the scope of participation and collaboration.

If you want to hear more tune in here for a webinar announcement

 http://www.softwareag.com/blog/reality_check/index.php/authors-for-home/processes-you-cant-manage-what-you-cant-see/

Large Independent Restaurant Operator Leveraging Learning Processes

Starting simple and leveraging an intelligent process management system, this organization was able to grow a rich process portfolio gleaning benefits of various types in short period of time. It is now poised to attempt larger scoped process projects. 

Emerging Set of Challenges:

At the beginning this organization just wanted to implement solution just to manage incoming paper mails. It was important to control receiving documents, passing them to recipients and acknowledging receipt.  This humble beginning enabled by agile methods and an auto-optimizing capability grew to a larger portfolio of processes because of the ease of development, operation and optimization.

Solution:

It soon became more important to select the right process project rather than concentrate on the implementation.  The organization was quoted “In the past IT projects we were involving a board member or head of department as a project’s business owner. But now we changed our approach. We want end users to become project’s business owners. It is much better approach because they know exactly their processes and can describe them very quickly. Management board is also supports this approach because doesn’t involve them so much in projects.” This organization decided to spend 80 % the time on choosing the right process, and only 20 % on its implementation.

Benefits:

There were significant savings in developing process projects. The goal was to shorten time-to-market and deliver new process to business users as soon as possible. “Using previous solutions it was taking up to 5-6 months to deliver new process – starting with process analysis, purchasing consulting services, implementation and deployment. And sometimes afterwards we had to change it anyway. It was too long.”  New system shortened it from few months to few days. “For example creating a workflow process for submit and accept new projects took just 3 days. Then we moved it to production environment. We also implemented for legal department a process for gathering opinions and accepting agreements. It took one week.”  There are plans to implement around 50 processes including complex process of opening new restaurant, which involves most departments in the company.

It is very important that new process can be very quickly implemented without costly process analysis. It can be done in one meeting in 2 to 4 hours. Business users can start using it immediately and observe how it works in practice. The process platform shows them real flows and finds bottlenecks. Users can very quickly analyse how to improve and optimize their process.

Net; Net:

BPM technologies are easier to use than traditional development, but when combined with auto-optimization, leveraging a form of artificial intelligence, the maturity cycle of the process accelerates as the business professionals learn. 

This is a highly summarized case study provided by Amodit http://blog.amodit.com/

Why You Should Attend BPM in Banking, Finance and Insurance

Learn how to leverage BPM to grow business and please customers, not automate back office operations. If your organization doesn't take advantage of the new digital platform, it will fall behind. This event is different than any process conference you have attended to date. See highlights below:

Driving Digital Transformation and Operational Excellence in Banking and Financial Services

BPM in Banking, Finance and Insurance is fast-paced, high-touch, expert-led event focused on risk reduction, optimizing outcomes, and delivering superior user and customer experience through the leverage of Business Process Management. Featuring ground breaking sessions including:

Business Interaction Changes Forever, Starting Today!  Jim Sinur, BPM Thought Leader BPM, Dodd-Frank, and What’s Next  Andrea Kramer, McDermott Will & Emery Collaborating with Customers to Co-Create Cross-Functional Solutions at Citi  Raj Shroff, Senior Vice President, Citi NAO&T Client Experience Engaging External Customers at Credit Suisse  Jim Ostry, Managing Director, Credit Suisse

Using BPM to Increase Revenue and Meet Customer Demand Dan Rosen, Director, Center of Process Excellence, PSCU Leveraging BPM for Customer Excellence and Revenue Growth  Lou Brothers, Senior Manager, WeiserMazars Scaling Morgan Stanley's Delivery Capabilities Through the Use of a Sophisticated Idea Targeting and Measurement Framework  Jeff McMillan, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management Introducing Business Logic with The Decision Model into BPM Practices  Alan Holsztynski, Senior Vice President, Cole Taylor Mortgage

Why You Should Attend BPM in Banking, Finance and Insurance

Develop a clear understanding of BPM technologies and implementation. Gain ideas and perspectives that will assist you in defining process architecture and implementation tactics. Participate in collaborative networking sessions to engage with peers and other industry players.

Benefit from the expert-designed BPM Assessment Framework, providing comprehensive guidance on which technologies and products are most relevant to your specific requirements. Gain invaluable expertise and actionable take-aways that ensure you leave ready to go, with a plan in place, and best prepared for success.