Security is the Boat Anchor to Digital Progress

Have you ever tried to row a boat whose anchor is still stuck on the bottom of the lake or  the ocean? It's really a fruitless and frustrating experience. This is how I would describe the effect that the lack of great and easy security is having on the whole digital experience today. In the coming weeks, I expect to dig a little deeper into the nature of the problems and write specifically how the lack of easy and great security has on our progress toward a better digital experience enabled by great process leveraging cognitive resources. Security is holding back a better customer experience, a more powerful and cognitive set of processes and process sharing to enable seamless value / supply chains.

Security and the Customer Experience:

Why in the world do we have to remember user IDs and passwords for each organization that we do business with these days? Every organization has a different set of rules for passwords ergo causing us to remember IDs and passwords galore. To fight this and weak memory moments, we create lists of IDs and passwords and squirrel them away in some remote spot on our computers or paper file drawers which have their own security risks. This is pure insanity and starts us off with a sour attitude towards the customer experience nearly every organization we do business with even though the processes might be OK. This sets a lousy tone for the whole customer experience. Add the fact the processes don't really know what we want and how we want to be treated. and you have a mess. You can make this misery mobile as a first step, but the point is that the customer journey starts off on a bad foot. It's time for a change !!

Security and the Powerful Processes:

Why in the world should we have to deal with dumb processes with a simple mobile access that knows nothing about us and our preferences? Processes should know who we are based on additional data, policies and rules we give organizations. Based on our history with an organization, the processes should orient themselves around us and give us the knowledge to service ourselves or be serviced by representatives that are not so specialized as to have us pick the right department to work with for results. This kind of powerful process will create a higher promoter score for the organizations. This again is dependent on better security of IDs, passwords, data and rules. It's time for a change !!

Security and Shared Processes: 

Why in the world do we have to stitch together sub-processes and the manage the result of each to contribute to a set of end goals and outcomes? As cognitive and intelligent processes get shared across organizational lines (internal or external), processes will have to have bullet proof security protecting all the policies, data, rules, constraints and authorizations. As end to end processes act in a seamless manner across legal entities, the value of air tight security raises to a critical level. When this includes shared resources such as intelligent devices like smart sensors,  robots or cognitive services (COGS) in the cloud, security is one big issue to wrestle with in the future. This kind of process is starting to emerge in adaptive case management and large scoped end to end processes.
It's time for a change !!

Net; Net:

We have been sweeping security under the rug like that fact that we left the anchor out on our new digital boat. We can't row our way out of this one. It's time to pull the anchor and make some progress navigating the new digital sea. Why can't security become easy and fool proof?

The ROI of Illuminating the Digital Darkness

Dark events, data, processes and patterns all have enormous potential to add new insights into how an organization approaches its mission. Spending some time finding dark events can pay back operationally in a quick fashion, but these events and patterns can help make better decisions and avoid risks. 

It may be But as with any source of information, the value it generates depends upon a number of factors that generally focus on the value of the end result of some desired action, outcome or provides a more detailed content about a known event.  In this way, it is revealing the “unknown within the known event” adding significant richness that can provide real value to decision makers as well as automated rule-based decision systems.   The example described below uses the depiction described in Dark Event Post # 2 and walks through a simple example of how unproductive time can be both discovered and re-covered. 

See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/05/dark-events-introduction-to-unexplored.html

As mentioned previously, we can see in the Figure 1 below the known steps (shaded in light blue) in a typical transaction system.  However, between steps 4 and 5 (Transaction Paid) are a number of other steps that are happening (shaded in gray) that detail a customer service intervention process that corrects the data on the customer transaction so it can process to conclusion.

Figure 1

So, the question some questions we might ask here are:

·         How much time did each newly discovered event consume?

·         Were all actions taken in compliance with standards?

·         Were there other actions taken that are not part of the process?

The answers to these questions can be found by examining the new event log, either created from new collectors or through an “event mining” exercise, that includes the time spent on all events, including the newly illuminated dark events.  When we look at Figure 2 below we see that a total of three customer records were reviewed and updated for a total time of 30 minutes, however in that time-frame, a number of different issues were addressed, some with potential ramifications as described below.

Figure 2

Specifically, we can see:

1.         In the first record addressed, the agent used Google Maps to look up and validate the address.  This may be privacy violation that can be quite costly to the organization. 
2.         In the second situation, the agent used instant messaging to contact another unit within the organization validated the address.  This is the correct procedure; the communication remained inside the secure firewall however the action was not captured by the transaction system.
3.        In the third case, the agent used the correct procedure to update the balance, however, the time was increased by 15 minutes due to time being spent on the ESPN NCAA Bracket Challenge. This is an instance of “empty labor” that would be normally be seen as active transaction time. 

Here we see that two of the three cases involve situations where the actions either expose the organization to some type of risk that can drain value from the organization.  I call these situations Value Leaks. 

As mentioned earlier, unless they are truly random, business events are encapsulated by business processes.  The processes in turn are designed to provide some type of value to the business to the organization that is quantified by some means (number of widgets per hour, etc…) and converted to a monetary format (Dollars, Euros, Yen, etc..).  Therefore, each process has an expected value it needs to deliver to the organization.  When it is delivering something less than that expectation, it is in essence “leaking “ some of that expected value and is therefore a value leak.  Value leaks can also be seen as waste (or in lean terms muda), which adds costs and drains value from a process.  A good example is the U.S. healthcare system which has an estimated value of $2.7 Trillion per year, of which $1.35 Trillion had been attributed to waste!  On a smaller scale, we can see in Figure 2 above that of the time between 8:00 AM and 8:30 AM, 20 out of the 30 minutes of work time were spent on activities other that those that add value.  While this is normal a rather trivial example, imagine that event occurring multiple time a day and not just to one agent but to 1,000 agent or more!  In Figure 3 below we can see the potential value of improvements in value leak reduction, not including the potential leak associated with the potential privacy violation uncovered with the first record being reviewed!

                                                                            Figure 3

Net; Net: 

Dark events can be costly in multiple ways.  The effort to understand dark events and the associated value leaks represent pays for itself many  times over and in some instances,  can be the catalyst for major productivity and profitability gains. If you have questions or a need to discuss this ROI opportunity further contact Dr Edward M L Peters whom I thank for sharing this series with me and helping folks understand the opportunities and threats involved with Dark Events.

Additional Reading on Dark Events:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/05/announcing-new-series-on-dark-events.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/05/dark-events-introduction-to-unexplored.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/06/dark-event-discovery-and-analysis.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-trifecta-of-digital-darkness.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/06/dark-patterns-recognizing-them-in-real.html

2015 BPM & Case Management Conference

There was a strong surge of energy in this conference which has grown 20% over last years inaugural conference. The content was rich for all in the audience. If your angle was linking new digital efforts to business architecture, there was a rich vein of content. If your interest was in modeling there was a strong thread of modeling sessions around process, case and decision modeling. If your interest was around emerging digital technologies such as big data, the IoT, robotics, process mining, machine intelligence and the man/machine interface, there were sessions to please. If you wanted success stories, they were there. If you wanted to understand the opportunities in case management & BPM, there were sessions to please. The content available at this conference was as rich as any I have seen to date. I will highlight some of my favorite sessions and hope you might find the descriptions useful.

Linking Business Architecture to Processes:

There was a keynote session presented by Mathias Kirchmer on his BPM - D method for identifying the processes that differentiate an organization and how to link them to results and outcomes. While there were many great sessions on business architecture, this session emphasized completing the architecture in a more complete way for business differentiation. The most interesting tool vendor, for me, was Trisotech as they had a dynamic integrating tool that leveraged a repository that had the links between architecture and execution.

Process, Case & Decision Modeling:

There were several sessions describing how to model and integrate standard modeling notations (BPMN, CMM & DMN). For organizations starting their BPM/Case journey, modeling is a common entry point and generally leads to a linking to business architecture over time.

Emerging Digital Technologies:

One of my favorite sessions was given by Dr Chuck Webster on the linkage of medical processes with the IoT by leveraging wearable technologies. Chuck went on to explain how devices could be attached to patients for real time status and how wearables + RFID could be used to manage hand cleaning and other disease prevention. Chuck the pulled out his pocket robot, Mr RIMP, to show how robots could be used in a pediatric setting to settle kids. He showed a video of interactions with Mr RIMP that was hilarious. https://youtu.be/ull1cojGouA

I really enjoyed the process mining session by Dr Anne Rozinart of Fluxicon on using visual and animated cases that run through a discovered process model by measuring actual paths of cases/ process instances. This way the real deviations from the planned model and actual execution can be tracked and choke points can be identified.

An enticing session was presented by Quantiply and one of their clients (to remain anonymous) where big data was leveraged to identify real time events and event patterns to react to problems and even predict where issues my occur. Interesting.

Personal Touches: 

I really enjoyed hanging with my son David, Tim Price and Chuck Webster who put together a mini synthesizer leveraging a little bits kit (a Lego approach to creating composite electronic devices). Tim tried to play "Stairway to Heaven" with some success :) See below for a pic of Dave and Chuck

I was also given the 2015 Marvin L. Manheim Award For Significant Contributions in the Field of Workflow. It was a very nice recognition of my passion to drive BPM & Case into the new digital organizations.

Blog Activity for 2Q 2015

I thought you might find it interesting what folks are interested in reading about process related topics on my blog. It is interesting to me to see what gets hit the hardest, so I can plan future postings for you. The top posts were the Internet of things and decision management, but the hot themes were around digital transformation, a better customer experience and swarming processes. The up and coming subjects were around dark events and digital platforms. 

Where in the world are the hits coming from?  The US is always number one by a wide margin and is not shown here. There is no surprise that France, Russia & Germany are at the top, but I am surprised that Japan is off the chart. 

Dark Patterns: Recognizing Them in Real Time

We all know that events are firing off in many directions at once and the amount of events to sort through is mind boggling. In fact for every event you see; there are, at least, an order of magnitude number of events occurring for every one you see and this does not take into consideration the events you don't see (aka Dark Events).  It's a bit of an iceberg phenomena. What can help sort out the importance is to look for patterns of multiple events occurring over time and leveraging those patterns for next best action based on opportunity or threat analysis? Until big data, in memory, this was a difficult, if not impossible approach to take. Ahhh, the advantage of emerging digital technologies for business.

Seeking Patterns of Interest:

There are many noise events and patterns occurring at the same time there are emerging patterns that may mean something to an organization. Just like scanning headlines in the news, you ignore many individual articles. However when certain trends start to emerge, new events and patterns of connected events now mean something. This is true of organizations as well. Identifying emerging patterns of interest or targeting the size and shape of patterns that will require an organizations attention will be a growing field over time as we get into a predictive mode of business instead of our reactive habits.  Mining patterns will be a new set of skills organizations will need to have over time.


Connecting Patterns to Context:

Collecting interesting patterns can be fun, but organizations need to have a purpose that directly or indirectly affect them. This means that patterns of events need to matched against known opportunities and threats at a maximum or analyzed for next best actions. Matching against known patterns is the easy job, which may require multiple patterns to present or emerging. The real challenge is to recognize the value or non-value of an emerging set of events or patterns fast enough to make a difference. Of course there will be the normal analysis after the fact, but the premium is on near real time. Matching patterns to opportunities and threats will also be a new set of skills organizations will have to cultivate over time. There will be noise patterns just like noise events.


Connecting Patterns to Smart Actions:

So a pattern not only looks interesting, but it will require action, specifically associating the right actions that correspond to patterns. In the case of expected patterns, actions can be inventoried and put into action quickly. Many savvy organizations do this today. It takes some scenario planners that can identify patterns that represent conditional action(s). While this is not easy, it has been done. It's the emerging patterns and their ability to affect the getting to the goals set by applications, processes and work forces.  Goals driven approaches with next best action features will lead to the kind of organizational learning necessary to make smart actions a reliable habit.


Net; Net: 

Dark events alone have significant impact on organizations. However,  when events are considered in concert with processes and data, the impact magnifies. The same can be said of patterns of events and the coordinated actions that can and should be made in a timely manner. This is where complexity science can contribute, but that is a topic for another day. Stay tuned for our last blog about dark events on the ROI of Illuminating Darkness.

Additional Reading on Dark Events:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/05/announcing-new-series-on-dark-events.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/05/dark-events-introduction-to-unexplored.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/06/dark-event-discovery-and-analysis.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-trifecta-of-digital-darkness.html

Art Projects for the Second Quarter 2015

It turns out that I gave my paint brushes a break this quarter after creating three paintings last quarter.
See last Quarter: http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/03/art-projects-for-first-quarter-2015.html

I just puttered around with some digital art this quarter. Let me know what you think of the following pieces. Thanks to those who purchased pieces last quarter.

Apple of My Eye:

Infinite Love:

Wheel in the Sky:

Sleeping Dragon:

For more of my art see my website:
http://www.james-sinur.com/paintings/  for traditional paintings
http://www.james-sinur.com/digital-art/  for digital art

BPM at the Cross Roads: Digital Vs Rapid Development

There seems to be two major streams of activity in business process management today. One is aimed at delivering the new digital organization and the other is aimed at rapid development. It seems that the BPM vendors are aimed at one or the other these days. I had a CEO of a leading BPM vendor say that he was just aiming at super charging the developer and all his organization was oriented in that direction. I had another CEO say that he was aiming at transforming organizations to the new digital world while delivering incremental benefit. There are benefits of both approaches that I'd like to discuss here.

 Benefits Rapid Development BPM:

With the popularity of model driven approaches to creating processes and applications, BPM technologies have stepped forward to assist wagile approaches that are leveraging SCRUM cycles in a big way. Since most BPM technologies are built for change incremental they are idea for SCRUM cycles. Since the level of code in BPM platforms at a much higher level of coding metaphors, portions of processes and applications can be delivered for review cycles quickly. This allows both IT professionals and business professionals to work hand in hand in creating case management, processes snippets, code services, integration services, mobile APIs and cognitive services (COGs). This approach is usually operating in the cloud and development seats are rented at a low price point to get started without deep architectural study. This is a rich vein for BPM vendors to mine for revenue and there are a new batch of BPM players emerging with this approach.

See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/03/successful-digital-organizations-slay.html 

Benefits of Digital Transformation BPM:

Organizations are looking to transform to a digital organization. They are likely to start at the user experience and most likely a "mobile first" effort. Mobile, social and cloud is a baby step in this longer journey in getting to digital which may lead to changes in the overall business model over time. Studying the customer journey for competitive implementations is probably the first big step for for the digital journey. Then all constituents of your organizations end to end value and supply chains will need to benefit from process particularly shared processes and business policies. This is an evolving set of efforts that will require new and creative thinking considering likely opportunity and threat scenarios.

See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/06/digital-business-platform-what.html


Net; Net: 

Both of these approaches can justify and sustain a BPM effort, they sometimes end up looking like a "zero sum" decision. I would propose that they are literally better together and the most savvy organizations are seeing the opportunities to deliver speedy development and rich incremental benefits while driving to a digital organization. As the definition of digital will most likely evolve for most organizations, an agile BPM platform can be more than helpful. Maybe an essential?