Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Happy Holidays to Everyone

We wish you the best of the holiday season this year. We, at the Sinur home. celebrate Gods gift to us this Christmas in his Son. We especially count our many blessings this time of year. We hope you have a great holiday season and enjoy your loved ones :) 


Tuesday, December 20, 2016

AI Will Help Leverage IoT at the Edge

It's a given that the number of devices are exploding and the signals, events and patterns coming from these devices are just overwhelming. The speed of response to all of these devices and signals are the key to digital success. Imagine what you could do if you put the intelligence closer and even in these devices? Moving AI to the edge will be a major movement starting in 2017. What might this intelligence help? Here is my take on the opportunities to augment management in the digital era.





A Listening Post for Patterns:

With a multitude of interconnected devices emitting signals, the amount of electronic babble will be more overwhelming than the number of devices or the amount of big data. Devices can emit multiple signals. Not all of these signals will make a central big data lake and must be dealt with at the edge. In fact the patterns of multiple signals delivers the best benefit when caught close to the source and dealt with immediately. Only the signals and patterns of regional and global impact need  to be passed up to a central management point managed by processes, applications and humans unless there is no way to deal with them locally. Adding AI to the edge will push the envelope for "hands off" handling.

A Bidding Service For Work:

With multiple controllers and devices listening for service signals, there will be opportunities for multiple things to respond to the needs. AI will help sort out which device or device network will respond to the needs. AI interacting with AI can determine which devices, applications or processes will lead to optimal multiple goal fulfillment to the goal driven digital world.  This is already happening in smart and parallel manufacturing with bots.

A Change Configuration Assistant: 

AI can be the smarts in figuring out if a change in device code is needed and signal a development source for upgrades. In addition the AI can trigger smart development and parameter setting on the fly through robotic programming assistants(RPA). We can see this emerging in 2017 with smart configurators and auto PROM changes in devices or in the cloud. This can be leverage in the software world as well through RPA in website, processes and application components.

Net; Net:

While the visible aspects of AI will be felt by the consumer at the digital assistant level, there will be a quiet revolution going on as AI finds it;s place in Industry 4.0 and other large scale digital efforts. Watch this AI space leap forward in 2017.


Additional Reading:

Top 7 Uses of AI
AI Assist Decisions
















Friday, December 2, 2016

Awards Night To Remember

Last night there were 170 folks  at the Aragon Awards Ceremony where innovative awards were given to 15 deserving companies who displayed over the top innovation. In addition there 41 hot vendor awards given to providers of unique and compelling software offerings that ranged from platform vendors to new start ups with sizzle. It was an exciting night to see the vendors that help our customers deliver success in this new digital era. We are already looking for our 2017 Hot Vendors, so stay tuned and nominate any providers of interest to us by clicking here.



                         IBM Receiving an Innovation Award for Cognitive / AI



       Bolste Receiving Their Hot Vendor Award for Social Collaboration and Work


Before the lively awards ceremony, there was a informative set of briefings and panels that the crowd was actively listening to for the 2017 predictions in AI & the Future of Work and Harnessing the power of Digital. Both sessions were followed by powerful panels of business leaders giving sage advice on successful implementations and giving advice on steps clients should take for positive results.


All in all, it was Aragons' best awards ceremony yet where we celebrated success and the coming holidays with some of the best fare the Pullman, in Redwood Shores, could offer. We are excited about 2017 and we would like to invite you to hear out 2017 predictions yourself via a webinar on Dec 9th by clicking here .

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.



Thursday, October 6, 2016

Customer Journeys are Just the Beginning

Just like designing a better user experience (UX) has been and continues to be a major focus of  digital efforts,  customer journeys and customer journey mapping are gaining attention as the next investment to attract and retain customers in a hyper competitive world. In a world where the customer is in charge, customer journey mapping will be a key weapon in designing an attractive interaction with your organization. Journey mapping is not a "one and done" effort as mining actual customer experiences will also be mapped for audit purposes. Also journey mapping can be applied to employees and partners. Read more by clicking on this link


Monday, October 3, 2016

Selling Digital Process Efforts to Management

There are any number of ways to sell digitally based process (BPM) efforts to management, but I have found that linking BPM to something management has on its’ plate as a challenge is the best way. Search for the best benefit stream.




 If it’s a better user experience, show that BPM can help by surrounding old transactions. If it’s better revenue opportunities by attracting and new prospects, leverage BPM to show customer journeys that would attract. If it’s operational improvement, use BPM dashboards and process intelligence to show opportunities for improvement .If it is governance monitoring and enforcement, show management how BPM can be leveraged to watch and guide the right behavior. After the first success, incrementally use it in a larger context or for a more complex problem. I have seen this approach work where there is little executive vision and support to win to live another day until an executive gets how BPM is beneficial and reliable for fast changing conditions.





If you are lucky enough to have a high level visionary, then ask that visionary for a chance to educate the rest of the folks and start with a meatier and larger scoped effort. Back this visionary with education, usually from an outside source, and great results. If the rest of the executive team rejects the idea, then make the visionary a hero with a set of projects that has significant impact. This works as well, but the risk level is higher. A digital transformation program is an ideal umbrella cover for BPM.

Net; Net: 


There are many ways of winning management, despite swimming upstream with political debris floating your way. If you can find a visionary, leverage that situation otherwise, win each little battle until it delivers an overall victory. Keep in mind that there are many process and case types and apply the right process style to the right problem. BPM supports easy to use and change delivery that can be leveraged quickly to show the change resistant that BPM works. Sand-boxing and incremental delivery seems to help either a bottom up or a top down BPM effort. I have personally used both in each kind of BPM program with good success.  

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Art for 3Q 2016

This quarter was mostly about experimentation, so I tried a bunch of new things. If you like any of it, let me know. I completed three paintings. One was created with Alcohol Inks. Another was an attempt to try glow in the dark paint over Acrylic and the last one was alcohol interacting with Acrylic. Some interesting results from my perspective.


Web Presence:




Air Supply




Winter Island



Bronco Orange 




Previous Quarters Pieces:


2Q 2016 click here
1Q 2016 click here 
4Q 2015 click here
3Q 2015 click here
2Q 2015 click here  

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Blog Activity for 3Q 2016

The topics of interest in this quarter were around Customer Experience, IoT, Cognitive, Digital Transformation and the Power of Process in the Digital Era. The monthly totals are hovering over 20K hits even with a cut back of posts on my part because of work load balancing. I am heads down working on a Digital Business Platform rating and starting a Customer Journey Mapping rating. While my readership is world wide, the US dominates the hit count. You might find it interesting what the rest of the world is doing the chart below.


                                                                 TOP POSTS






                                                             UPCOMING TOPICS







                                                        ACTIVITY BY COUNTRY




Thursday, September 22, 2016

Journey / Experience Mapping Isn't Just for Customers

We all know mapping the customer journey / experience is one of the linchpins of digital transformation. If you are a planning organization, you map the journey before designing the customer experience. If you are a measurement focused organization you mine the experience and map it for analysis. If you are an organization that pursues excellence, you map the journey before you design, test the new experience with focus groups and keep measuring the satisfaction with customer experience audits. The often lost idea is that you can also complete journey maps for employees, partners and managers.












Employee Experience Mapping:

How your employees feel can often affect how the customers feel about your organization, so creating a pleasing journey for your employees as they service their customers can be as important as the customer journey itself. If this is not motivation enough for organizations, consider how difficult it will be to attract the new and tech savvy generations to your organization, if the experience is not pleasing and effective. Organizations are not only competing for the hearts of customers, but also for the hearts of employees and recruits.

Manager Experience Mapping:

While employee journeys lead to happier employees and increase the effectiveness of your organizations operations through employee workbenches or personas, managers are often left to fend for themselves. As the speed of business increases in velocity and the emergence of new signals and patterns happen more frequently, managers will struggle without some journey mapping for recognizing opportunities / threats, making effective decisions and taking appropriate actions. Organizations will be dependent on managers doing the appropriate thing in any number of business scenarios, so the managers journey will become more important over time.

Partner Experience Mapping:

Like it or not the end to end process or journey to deliver a product or service will become important over time as well. Even if you are outsourcing parts of the experience, you will want to consider the overall effectiveness of the journey for the partner and your customers affected. If you have intimate partners that really add significant value to your product or service, making them happy is just smart business practice. The days of "big dogs" dictate to partners is evaporating, so partner experiences are growing in importance.

Net; Net: 

While the case for customer journey mapping is pretty obvious today, there are other opportunities to create a better digital organization. I think that journey mapping will become a staple for organizations in many ways in our new digitally focused world that is constantly changing and improving. How can you compete over time without journey / experience mapping?


Friday, September 16, 2016

Digital is an Opportunity to Design Excellent Customer Experiences

It's easy to just "pave cow paths" when attempting digital transformation. Many organizations are just putting old transactions into a new mobile experience without considering if the customer really wants that as a customer experience. Maybe that works for the short term and buys time, but today's educated tech savvy customer wants something else. Don't get caught by your competitors designing traditional customer experiences by leveraging customer journey mapping. See this research note for some advice on customer journey mapping. If you are not into reading, please attend this webinar


Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Do You Really Know Your Customer?

The days of just pleasing the bottom line are over. The power has shifted to the customer and organizations that just try to solve this with technology only are in for a surprise. Yes a great mobile experience is table stakes and social like collaboration is appealing, but you have to get into the head of your customer and really understand the moments of truth that happen at customer touch points. If this sounds a little fluffy, keep in mind that it costs 4 to 10 times as much to acquire a customer than it does to maintain one. By the way, your competition is making it easy to switch. In this blog we will dig a little into the seven things customers want. If you want to hear more, sign up for this free webinar.



The Customer Wants Now and May Demand in the Future

Wants You to Know Them:

No longer can you just interact with a customer online or over the phone in the way that you want. Since they have been kind enough to give you their business, you should know what they have done in the past, how to service them in with a great experience now and what they might want in the future. This goes far beyond cross selling and up selling, though this should be the prize. This time you will have to win them with your user experience, knowledge of them and leaving them with a feeling of "You made my day". If you don't. somebody else will. 

Wants a Painless Interaction:

You just can't push customers to weirdly designed voice recognition(VR) menus that name your departments (billing, technical support and online experience). Customers want it in their lingo like "I have issues with your product/service" or "I don't understand why I have to pay this now" or "Your competition has a better offer" or "Why am I getting all these offers from you". While the smart digital assistant is a ways off, these unfriendly implemented VR menus have to go. 

Wants Fast Turnaround:

Your customer does have time to fool around with your complicated user experience or wait in line to get a single minded specialist with a script. They are under pressure to get things done as fast as possible and you do not have the right to steal their time, hoping they calm down before someone attempts to deal with their issue or transfer them to the right person. Patience is a virtue that modern times absolutely wants to obliterate. Remember customers do not necessarily have only one thing to accomplish with your organization and they don't respect your departmental stove pipes. 

Wants Complete Visibility:

The idea of only giving status when you thinks it's right is no longer acceptable. Have you ever tried to refill a prescription that needed a doctors authorization? All you know is either it works or it doesn't. If something goes wrong, you have no data to resolve it. The pharmacy blames the doctor and the doctor, who is not rewarded for refill authorizations, blames the pharmacy. With the proper visibility up and down the value and supply chains, customers will be well informed and can help you resolve things with the expected outcomes are not coming in time. 

Wants You to Beat Expectations:

It is no longer good enough to solve my immediate need, because it is probably boring at best and infuriating at the worst. Organizations have the opportunity to make the customer experience better than great. Imagine adding some entertainment options to a online servicing opportunity that leverages immediate rewards and maybe a gaming or a virtual reality experience. This would please a number of your younger prospects and customers while getting ready for their future demands of an engaging experience. 

Wants a Feeling of Well Being:

Nobody wants to be treated as a revenue annuity for your organizations, but yet this happens all the time. What is the sense in making people feel used so that you get a great bonus or an increased stock price. How about finding ways of making them feel valued and respected? 

Wants You to Care About Them:

While real business is based on buyer beware, why make it easy to leave your organization. Unless you are a sole source or a monopoly, you really need to pay attention to your customers and care for them. No you are not their mother or father, but you do need a heart. 

Net; Net:

There is more to your digital customer experience than providing mobile access. The customers journeys need to be understood in light of touch points. What are you doing to your customers? Are you driving them away or are you working all your assets to please them? This is a huge change that digital brings. See and hear more on this webinar this Friday 







Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Box Breaks out of the Box at Boxworks

While it is exciting to see 5000+ attendees at Boxworks, here in San Francisco and it is great to hear all the great features and additions that Box is adding to it's secure content management capabilities including 3D images, 360 images and video, there is a not so subtle change in what Box is doing. Box in aiming to be a digital destination with the addition of a Box/IBM built process/workflow capability called Relay and the recent acquisition of Wagon Analytics. Combine these new pieces with an emphasis on ease of use, an API to everywhere attitude, a strong reach out to developers and a pension for security in the cloud, Box is headed for something bigger in a mid range time frame.




Now it is going to take some time to mature each of these pieces, but Box has assembled some great pieces to offer it's droves of current customers which now stands at 65K+ and 60% of the Fortune 500. While the CEO, Aaron Levie, appears to be a young and enthusiastic guy, he is making the right moves to be a long term player in the digital era. This is good, but I was even more impressed with the speed that some of the box customers have implemented and delivered positive business outcomes. There were case studies a plenty for business types and workshops a plenty for the developers.

Net; Net:

Box has progressed from file sharing to secure enterprise content management in the cloud in a short period of time. Now that Box has made the content richer and they will be able to process and analyze it new ways, I can't wait to see the kind of digital platform they become over time.

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

What's Stopping You from Going Digital?

Many organizations want to go digital, but they don't feel prepared from a business change, skills and knowing what technology to leverage for early payback. The problem is that waiting is not an option because your young employees will jump ship if you aren't pursuing a believable digital transformation effort. Though we can all agree that digital will disrupt yet 75% of organizations feel mature enough to push forward with vigor. While internal culture and ability to absorb change will hold organizations back, there are some early signs of success.


The following youtube video can shed some light on the issue

I have identified some early safe bets and early high benefit areas in this research note 

I'd love to converse on your experience with digital to date, but comments are appreciated as well.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Business Drivers For Digital Transformation

Should organizations invest in Digital Transformation? Looking at the drivers should give us an answer. It's a common fear that emerging technologies are just looking to land in the business and get "forced fit"in the organization without the total cost of ownership considered. Let's flip this around and look at the issues that face business and see if there is a "real fit". Here are the top seven business trends that have surfaced as of late.



Uncertainty:

We are in a period of uncertainty. Politics, weather and rumors of wars are enough to shake everyone from a big picture perspective. This means that laws and traditional boundaries can change quickly. Competitors can pop up and dominate with a new business model enabled by technology. We certainly have shifting patterns and contexts. Digital can help with predictive analytics, simulation and cognitive assists. Organizations are can leverage digital in scenario planning successfully and there are emerging case studies to prove it.

Complexity:

Organizations are generally arranged by division of labor creating pools of specialty that speak in their own languages and are driven by their focused goals. This creates the need for meetings and emails flying through the organization trying to solve issues for customers, partners and other departments. On top this dis-function, new products and services are getting more features and options to manage with policies and rules. Digital can help with it's aim to follow customer journeys with processes and collaborations that are driven by customer goals. In addition digital affords better and visible work management and collaborations that can easily support change across the organizational stove pipes. Granted new digital technologies bring their own set of new complexities, but the trade off favors digital.

Increased Need for Speed:

If you snooze, you lose in today's world. This means the speed of response for making changes, creating new products and responding to operational problems is increasing at a very fast rate today. Organizations that can respond quickly with the right answer will win the day. Digital can help because it makes changes quickly because of easy change features that are aimed at low level developers and business pros. In addition, digital promotes composition over creation, but when new code is needed development environments are visually driven. Since signal and event patterns are measured in real time, digital gets to the issues quicker.

Lack of Educated & Skilled Workers:

Even if you don't believe there are enough workers to fill the void, the skill sets are certainly changing to a much higher level than in the past. This means that organizations cherished staffs might have to be augmented. Digital can help by augmenting human skills to enable a nice balanced response of a mixture of human and machine learning / cognition to solve business issues. In addition, digital can respond to the increasing costs of low skilled labor by replacing them with robots.

Transparency Needs:

The need for visibility into processes and their ability to accomplish results in a most compliant manner is only growing exponentially. Organizations are having to balance many compliance programs simultaneously. This is on top of the customer demands for progress of their outcomes. Digital gives fantastic visibility through dashboards and score cards, but through work / process management, compliance can be enforced through process audits and inline rules /constraints.

Reduced Organizational Lifespans:

It is not secret that companies are becoming extinct at a faster rates. Nobody wants to be "uberized" in months nor does an organization want it's edge marginalized slowly. Digital can help create new business models and experiment with them at the maximum, but it can help add advantage over time to stay int the game or even dominate.

Emerging Technical Opportunities: 

By definition, digital is creating a constant flow of new technologies and new technology combinations. The trick is to figure out the risk of each of these technologies and consider them in your organizations tolerance for risk.

Net; Net:

We can debate forever if business drives technology or if technology drives business. I think there is an interplay of both, but I am in the camp of solving high priority business problems with appropriate technology. The issue I wrestle with is timing, priority and getting ahead of the curve instead of chasing it. I think the case is clearly weighted heavily for Digital Transformation, so get ready to invest in digital.





Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Trends in Digital Transformation: Technical

Early trends in digital transformation included a mobile first for new revenue opportunities and getting to the cloud for cost reasons. While these trends still continue, the activity has gained momentum with new streams of effort. I have identified seven additional areas of digital action that are gaining momentum in the digital transformation arena we all find ourselves in at the moment.



1. Excellence in the  User Experience (UX):

Organizations now understand the importance of the user experience with the advent of  ever improving experiences with the likes of Amazon and Uber. It now starts with wrapping the of the customer journey with an enticing and effective experience.

2. Surround Legacy Portfolios for Better Leverage:

Organizations usually leveraging existing systems assets before they replace them. This puts a premium on wrapping and composition of the old with the new.

3. Analytic Lead Efforts:

Organizations want to discover what is actually happening, so data visualization of new sources of data like signals / events / patterns and process actions is accelerating. Once a base line is set, they make improvements and watch the numbers. Add cognitive assists to deal with the increasing speed of digital and now management by measurement works better in digital.

4. Process and Application Improvement:

Digital isn't free, so finding funding sources is a challenge. This puts a premium on optimizing processes and applications to wring out more money for future improvements and better profits. Process intelligence through mining is solid contributor here.

5. The Exploration of  the IoT / Software Connection:

IoT works well for contained situations like braking on car. Now IoT will broaden it's impact, the combination with software and firmware to produce innovative solutions that can combine machines, software and humans in new ways. More control can be put on the edge and only involve human intervention as needed.

6. Hyper Convergence:

Convergence is already happening in the cloud with reduction of cloud specialists and the growth of cloud biospheres. This convergence will continue for infrastructure plays such as big data and integration, but it will really accelerate to include business differentiating technologies such as process / work management, analytic / cognitive intelligence, integration, the internet of things and business applications. The digital business platform, which has high levels of convergence, is beginning to emerge and will gain momentum.

7. Real Digital Identity:

Digital identity is not focused on the customer, from the customers perspective, and is deeply embedded in many places. Where it exists, it is mostly aimed at supporting a specific technology or group of related technologies. This is inside out and must change and converge. This is starting with true digital identity vendors emerging now.

Net; Net:

The speed and complexity of digital transformations is increasing as organizations are pushing digital to the edge as they see the positive results. The trends are strong and expanding as we move closer to 2020.

Additional Reading:  

Digital Maturity
Digital Business Platforms







Monday, August 15, 2016

Aragon Research is Celebrating Its' Five Year Anniversary !!!

Help us celebrate :) 




We're Turning 5!
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Aragon Research is celebrating 5 years of trusted research and advisory, and we're kicking off our birthday with a store wide sale!

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Friday, August 12, 2016

Free Webinar !!! Want a Better Customer Experience?

Sure customer experience is about better mobile access and clean processes, but there are other approaches that easily boosts the bottom line and gives your customer a better experience. Hear about DTM and how it can help your customer and your organization.




FREE Webinar:  https://aragonresearch.com/webinars-2/ on August 19th at 10 PST. Listen in

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Digital Assistants: They are Here to Stay

Most folks think of a digital assistant as someone who manages their calendar appointments and completes those nasty travel and expense forms. Well think again. Digital assistants are going to be doing much more than most of us dreamed or thought about. What does this mean for business and when can we expect this to happen?



1. Better Customer Service: 

Digital assistants will be able to understand what your customer wants in context and provide needed answers quickly. In order to do that, there will have to be a very natural conversation that leverages how the digital assistant interprets your customers emotional state, at the moment, to give appropriate answers for the situation. Now this will have to be pretty seamless for customers not to detect that they are working with a digital assistant and accept the outcomes.

2. Picking the Right Process and Complete it:

At first, digital assistant will be able to call up rule based and structured processes and complete them on behalf of the customer following the policies set up by specific industries, value chains and specific organizations. Later digital assistants will be able to add cognitive capabilities to complete fuzzy and emergent processes.

3. Creating Unexpected Value:

Imagine if the customer wants to do several connected processes that span the typical functional specialties that businesses historically have had. Digital assistants could easily handle this complex kind of service without exposing the artificial boundaries with an organization. Digital assistants could also employ machine learning to suggest tweaks to the policies rules and constraints that organizations set up.

When will this be available? 

According to Aragon Research, based in Silicon Valley, it will be sooner rather than later. Aragon predicts" By the year end 2019, Digital Assistants will talk with and complete many electronic tasks for their human counterparts" Also Aragon predicts that "By year end 2020 will leverage Predictive and Cognitive Applications to deliver critical knowledge to employees and customers.

Net; Net:

More sophisticated digital assistants will emerge over the next two to three years as the demands for great customer service at a lower cost hits full stride. These digital assistants and lower level assistants, called chat bots, will become software or robotic agents for the good of many, This is a crucial trend to watch as organizations transform to digital.


Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Cognitive and Process; Better Together

It matters not what style of process you are working with from very structured and stable processes to emergent and case based processes, cognitive can add significant boost to the effectiveness of a process. Even if you have small snippets of process that get composed together in advance or instantly, cognitive can add significant value. I'd like to explore the value streams of cognitive and process together yielding higher thinking applied to process in this post.




Better Customer Relationships:

Customers love when you know about them and what they are trying accomplish. A cog (short for cognitive service) could be employed against customer preferences to give them a user experience online or over the phone that matches the customer. A cog could be used to listen to the customers words (written or spoken) to measure mood at the moment and match it against history for their personal tendencies (also determined by a cog). The customer service rep could be given dynamic instructions from a circumstance based cog to enhance the experience for a specific customer in a specific situation.

Better Employee Satisfaction: 

We ask our employees to be pretty specialized which pretty boring for most people. Imagine what people could do is cogs could be assisting employees to help with all kinds of tasks that would normally be out of their normal "wheel house" of activities. Most employees would appreciate learning new knowledge, skills and actions delivered just in time for the context in front of them. This makes employees more satisfied and qualified to advance to more challenging work.

Better Outcomes From Actions:

People aren't able to keep up with the speed and complexity of emerging work types without some help. With the help of cogs, process mining, machine learning and compound analytics, people and software can be supercharged to find optimal outcomes for all parties involved under many circumstances. As business becomes more complex and fast when linked with the Internet of Things(IoT), cognitive will play a bigger role. In fact innovation will likely be spurred on by cognitive opportunities.

Better Resource Leverage:

Resources can be dynamically linked with decisions or actions to find the best resource at any point in time to deliver results. In situations that are goal driven, cogs can apply intelligence to work allocation and completion. The cogs can slide the goals up or down and balance conflicting goals while leveraging optimal use of resources.

Dynamically Optimized Processes:

Processes can be cobbled together just in time to optimize multiple goals. In fact smart cogs can swarm to bid to service cases or process instances. For processes are designed to deal with emergent conditions cogs, process mining, machine learning and compound analytics could bid to serve the goals on the edge (distributed control) instead of reporting to central process control .

Net; Net:

Cognitive can be pretty powerful to serve managing work in all kinds of processes. The innovation coming out of this combination of digital technologies in pretty exciting. These two will be included in most digital business platforms offered in the market place eventually.