Art Projects for the 1st Quarter 2014

Despite heavy conference activity (PEX, Kofax Transform, DST Advance & bpmNext), I managed to create some new pieces. I love fall colors, so I conjured up a waterfall scene in my mind and added some fall touches. I hope you like it :)

My current collection is available on http://www.james-sinur.com/

                                 Wind Creek

I also completed a couple of new fractals for your enjoyment, hopefully:

                            













                                   Parachutes      

                              Fingers of Light

     












                            Solar Flare 

I also landed a corporate office deal and four of my pieces landed outside the board room. If you are interested, see below:

Past Art Posts 

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/12/art-projects-for-4th-quarter-2013.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/art-projects-for-3q-2013.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/06/art-projects-for-2q-2013.html

bpmNext Had Something for Everybody

This was my first bpmNext and I came away impressed with the level of honest interchange. I was fortunate enough to land the keynote slot, but the real benefit was to see the depth and breadth to the process related technologies and activities (BPM). There were a number of key themes including lowering the barriers to entry plus expanding to new and exciting movements leveraging the new digital assets and form factors. There were interesting sessions for all levels of BPM maturity and types of BPM efforts. There were sessions aimed at expanding the BPM biosphere, making BPM efforts more consistent and expanding the reach of BPM

                   Demo of a SAP Hana driven dashboard for a transportation hub

Expanding the BPM Biosphere:

There were several sessions that showed how the barriers to entry for BPM could be lowered for an expansion of BPM for lower complexity processes. Almost all of the sessions here leveraged social, mobile and or the cloud. These sessions were presented by Colosa, Interneer, BP3, Effektif, Bonitasoft, BPLogix, Camunda and Inswit. The goal for these vendors are to easily handle process creation and execution. Each vendor had their unique way to attract newbies to the process work. The highlight for me was W4s approach that allowed developers to start at the process model, data definitions or UI experience.

Making BPM Efforts More Consistent:

There were several encouraging presentations on making BPMN more consistent through new and resilient methods/guidelines even enforced by a rule driven macro generator. Also there were several sessions demonstrating the interchange of BPMN models between BPM vendors. I was most impressed with the session that aggregated snippets of process models that were created by a geo-diverse set of authors. All of this makes BPMN more stable, consistent and useful. IBM showed possible new approaches for extending BPMN for event condition and patterns combining event management, decisions and processes. Camunda is experimenting with a collaboration environment for checking BPMN diagrams leveraging the collective.

               Whitestein shows an intelligent goal driven AO BPM approach to logistics                        

Expanding the Reach of BPM:

There were a number of themes that showed the delivery smarter processes. There were several sessions on linking architecture to processes (Signavio & Vision Waves). There were several sessions on Agent Oriented BPM besides my opening keynote. Kofax/Kapow presented on data agents and how to leverage them for business results. Enterpriseweb and WhiteStein showed goal driven AO BPM with some impressive presentations. SAP presented the combination of goal mining, analytics, rules and process driven approaches to keeping logistics on track. Keith Swenson of Fujitsu suggested we call agents personal assistants and showed a medical example for sharing information around patient testing using federating sandboxes.

 James Taylor demonstrated his brilliant decision modeling capability that assists in delivering better decisions inside or outside the context of processes. Robert Shapiro of Process Analytica demonstrated his powerful process mining and  process optimization technology.

Net: Net:

There was plenty of evidence that the BPM industry is alive and well. There is something in BPM for everyone and bpmNEXT represented this theme in an exceptional way. I was in learning mode throughout the sessions. Even though the BPM GURUs and key BPM vendors were there, there was plenty of intellectual food for even us normal folks.


Funny Quote of the Week from Jacob Freund of Camunda:

 "BPM is like a roach; it gets everywhere and you can't kill it"

The Digital Organization is Obsessed About Customers

The successful digital organization is laser focused on leveraging digital assets for customers. There has been an explosion of technology options for organizations to leverage towards better customer interactions and self enlightened organizations are smartly applying these options to the delight of the customer experience.

Lagging Customer Engagement Costs:

There is a burning race to delight the customer. In fact, customers are demanding an exceptional experience and those who deliver it will be handsomely rewarded. Each customer interaction should be treated like  "a first date" instead of taking your partner (customer) for granted. There are hard numbers for the cost of dealing with customers properly. The numbers were from a large benchmark conducted by Lior Arussy of Stratvity and they were pretty impressive. The cost of a customer complaint was on average was $458. The cost to resolve that complaint was $1338. The overall economic value of a customer over the long haul was $91,500 and the cost of gaining one new customer was $4995. It doesn't take a lot of calculation to justify spending millions on the right processes to "wow" customers. 

Delightful Customer Engagement Delivers Revenue:

Several research firms have done studies about satisfied customers and have concluded that over 20% of customers will actually pay more for a similar product or service, if they are delighted with the organization that they are about to do "new business" with in the future. Imagine what a great reputation, competitive pricing and seductive processes could do for the digital organization. This means that the digital organization uses technology to greatly improve the customer experience. It does not mean that you pave old cow paths (poor processes) with a thin mobile interface. 

The Customer Journey:

Savvy digital organizations map out the customer journey from their viewpoint in an end to end fashion. This is the kind of holistic approach that goes beyond point online transactions with surveys set to clients before they actually taste the results. Organizations are at a critical inflection point where they decide to transform their customer experience to gain revenue or just add enough technology to live another day. 

Net; Net:

The string of years of cutting costs to bolster profits by delivering 10% returns to boost stock prices is coming to an end. It is time to raise real revenue. A successful digital organization will map the customer experience and transform it. What will your company do? 

The Millennials & Processes: The Engine for Creative Collaboration

1) Generation Y aka the Millennials:   The networked generation place a great importance on communicating and sharing at each stage of their decision-making processes in their personal lives, what is this generation looking for when it comes to Business Process Management? 

The experts say Generation Y is marked by an increased use of and familiarity with communications, media and digital technologies and is willing to trade high pay for fewer billable hours, flexible schedules and a better work-life balance. I think this translates to better collaboration on knowledge intensive work. This might allow organizations to leverage creative collaboration and the cognitive surplus on the Internet. Since gamification appeals, organizations could insert machine intelligence as part of this collaborative opportunity. 

2) What are the specific challenges with case management vs. process automation.  Is there an increase in Case Structures vs process structures, and how does that affect the tools used for automation?

Traditional processes were historically dominated by structured processes (doing by design), but more of the work today is much less structured (design by doing) and aimed at customer pleasing and knowledge intensive work. This leads to more of a balanced approach to process management. Over time more collaboration between people and machines as well will tip the balance towards case management as work becomes more complex and processes expand in scope. Process models will be used more as visualizations of what really happened rather than a map to always follow. This will kick off a “better practices era” and goal driven technologies.

3) How important are integrations for process automation, and can BPM be used with core apps to engage users and add flexibility and agility to an organization? 

As process expand in scope (aka Big Processes), there will be a need to integrate more resources including systems resources. Since processes are being leveraged as a strategy to incrementally transform organizations by tying people engagement to systems of record, integration that can flex over time becomes essential.

4) How quickly are organizations deploying new applications to introduce new processes?  And, is the deployment speed meeting expectations? 

Since organizations do not readily embrace “big bang” approaches, they will likely implement incrementally starting with customer pleasing approaches with high visibility for business goals. This strategy is quite successful for a good number of organizations. This way the benefits can be gleaned to fund down-stream process efforts.  Incremental transformation, through agile processes, seems to be successful, but this approach puts strains on change management efforts.

DST's Advance 2014: Insight Plus Actions Equals Results

Advance is being held in Orlando Florida as I write this blog and I have to say that DST is showing it's extremely loyal clients the way forward. Traditionally, DST was quite focused on the financial industry, but now is widening it's appeal to many other industries in order to drive growth. To that end, DST has accelerated it's features in AWD (BPM technology) to be more friendly, more analytic and inclusive of case management features.

To move it's conservative client base to the new world, DST is showing how new revenue can be added to the mix by leveraging "Big Data Analytics". DST now has significant resources for service engagements around revenue generation and will be enhancing it's new technologies to work "hand in hand" with AWD to generate the "Next Best Actions"  These actions can not only raise revenue, but help with "Delighting Customers" and specific smart packaged process based applications. Since DST is fantastic at serving it's loyal clients, these words ring true.

Now DST has invested heavily in this approach by buying the Lateral Group and focusing them on packaging services, extending "Big Data"  functionality and build smart applications. This combines the strength of DSTs analytic capabilities with the strength of DSTs process capabilities. This should leverage the big investment that DST has added to AWD in case management and role based work. The temptation for their clients is not to think the same old way and get innovative in applying these new capabilities over time.

The challenge for DST is to encourage their existing client base to take advantage of the great investments that DST has completed in AWD and by buying and incorporating Lateral Groups fantastic technical and people assets. The new clients, that DST has gotten recently, seem to focused on the new products and services. DST is working hard to see that the existing client base sees the value and moves forward with them as a trusted partner. I am impressed with the thoughtful way DST is handling this transition to the new and agile world that is focused on revenue growth, customer care and efficiency.

Kofax Transform Day 2: Deeper Dive

After digesting a number of sessions, it is clear to me that Kofax not only has the executive vision to play deep in the smart process world, it also has the technology. I tried to taste sessions around all of the Kofax technologies and came way feeling good about their technology. The technology pieces that I would deem as minimal to draw together over time with traditional Kofax capture technology would be as follows:

Total Agility(KTA)           Business Process Management
Kapow                            Synthetic Data APIs or Bots
Altosoft                            Real Time Business & Process Intelligence

I was able to find proof of stable use of all of these product lines and progress towards a future road map that is aimed at adding features and integrating. I was actually impressed with a number of case studies on each separate technology. Kofax now has all the pieces to complete intelligent processes that leverage social, mobile, cloud, analytic and real time response. Just yesterday Kofax announced Total Agility in the cloud with full multi-tenancy, so the progress continues. 

Impressive Case Studies:

VISA Leveraging Kapow Bots (minions) and KTA for data gathering from partners in an approachable manner instead of a forced march to a VISA dictated format

Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania building nested and overlapping Altosoft dashboards by role for better business results with better patient care

BAE leveraging Kapow to sniff multiple social, operational and internet sources to find cases of child abuse in less than 24 hours

Net; Net: 

Kofax has carefully crafted a solid tech portfolio to match it's vision. They will be encouraging their client base to upgrade to smart processes to delight their respective customer bases. I fully expect to see double the impressive case studies a year from now.

Got Smart Processes?

I thought you might enjoy this audio interview about smart processes.

Audio Interview

More Reading on Smart Processes

 http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/05/measuring-cumulative-intelligence-of.html