Business Making Progress

Business Process Improvement vs People

Do you think we can actually improve business processes if people are involved? I think the answer is yes… at least I hope so. Back in May 2010 I completed the introduction of a single sign-on (SSO) project that I had been working on for over a year. I admit it, it was painful. During the planning and execution phase, I experienced, firsthand, the difference between the goals of the business and the needs of IT.  It wasn’t the first time but it made me realize what I wasn’t missing… CONFLICT.

Well, two months following the implementation we saw a huge drop in leads. Why? Because people didn’t want to “join our group”. They just wanted a simple white paper or archived webinar. This is what I would call “people process intelligence”. In this case, the process intelligence that we instituted for our visitors wasn’t really wrong or broken, it was wrong because we based the new process on how we “thought” our people would interact or respond to SSO. I have no doubt that SSO still makes our customers, partners and employees happy because with a single UID and password they can access public website assets, Community assets, updates & downloads, and even technical support apps, but from a prospecting point of view, it doesn’t make sense.

For most businesses, their processes (or business events) are much more complex, but I would wager a bet that anyone owning a critical process still needs to bring together business goals and the technology requirements imposed by IT.   As I embark on Phase II, I find myself being a bit of a bully about certain things, like whether we include a Progress ID image or not (NOT). I also find myself annoyed because what I hoped would be a “short form” for guests is now 8 fields.  However, as annoyed as I am, those “extra” fields are critical to our being able to properly route and nurture a lead. It’s justified so I’ll zip my lip on that. What else am I doing? I’m getting to know my Omniture tracking powerhouse a little better. Once we go live, I want to clearly understand how my people are interacting with my form(s). I want to know when they are abandoning it (perhaps that 8^th question bummed them out), and what happens after they click Submit. Do they register for additional assets via the pre-filled form?  Do they come back at a later date and take advantage of the pre-filled form? Do they decide to “join our group”? Is anyone really sad we got rid of the big green Progress ID image? Basically, I want metrics to lead the process, not our opinions.

The fact of the matter is that people will always be involved in business process improvement. They’ll be part of planning and deployment, optimization and reporting, and ultimately “a people” could very well determine if your process is a successful one. Now, Progress Software can’t do much about "a people", but we can help improve process intelligence by giving you some of the tools you’ll need to be successful. We provide solutions for business process management (BPM), complex event processing (CEP), and application performance management (APM), just to  name a few.

Give us a call. We welcome the opportunity of telling you how we’re helping our customers bridge the gap between the business and IT, and improve operational  performance.

Belgacom and the Case for Business-oriented integration in Communications Providers

It is no secret that the telecommunications industry has been exploring various ways to tackle issues such as declining ARPU (average revenue per user) and increasing customer churn over the last five years. The keys to proactively addressing these issues are agility and responsiveness. For example, responsiveness around customer service – to make customers feel they have a personalized valuable service – which reduces churn; and agility -- around launching new and compelling services rapidly – to increase ARPU.

Despite this quest for the Holy Grail, many communications providers have failed to lay sufficient foundations. While there may be some useful technologies deployed in an attempt to provide an agile and responsive integration platform – these technologies have often failed to deliver what is needed by the business. SOA is a prime case in point. While SOA technology has been successful in many ways, it has also led to a lot of disappointments. Often the business was sold on the promise that SOA would make operations more agile and responsive.  However, what resulted was technology for technologists that looked like plumbing and was daunting and too generic to the business.

Business people want solutions that can deliver visibility to problems and opportunities – such as key business events (e.g., an opportunity to sell a new service, based on context or location) or process failures (e.g. persistent dropped calls for an important customer) – so that problems can be responded to quickly and opportunities taken. The business also wants solutions that can enforce business-level policies and service-level agreements, as well as solutions that can interconnect services at a “semantic level” – not just plumb data together. In other words – the business wants to deal in business-level concepts, and be assured that the underlying complexity will be managed by the system.

Today’s announcement that Belgium operator Belgacom is transforming its business and IT integration programme (more information here) represents a huge step forward for the telecommunications industry. Belgacom is clearly focused around being more responsive to the needs of their customers in order to tackle issues such as churn through improved integration. By selecting the right business integration foundation to support their IT strategy, Belgacom has taken a critical step forward in a long-term strategy to become more operationally responsive to their customers.

Due to the nature of the economic times we live in, it is vital that the telecommunications industry as a whole ensures that they have the best possible integration technology in place. Only then will operators be able to enhance their customer experience management offerings to attract and retain their business customers, differentiate their offerings, and lower their service costs.

 

Actional 8.2 Released

It’s a great time to be in New England. Bright fall colors frame every road as the trees that provide refreshing shade during the blistering summer days now provide a canvas of brilliant color. Nestled among the trees that line Route 3 north you’ll see corporate headquarters for Progress Software, a leader in Business Transaction Management software with Progress Actional.

Actional 8.2 was just released and continues to show significant advancements in supporting enterprises that need to ensure the success of every single important business transaction. As the heterogeneity of IT infrastructures increases, Actional can help organizations achieve this level of assurance by extending visibility into transactions that traverse environments that include Apache CXF and JBoss ESB. And if improving the customer experience and the performance of mission-critical applications is on your radar, be sure to visit the Actional website for details on expanded alerting—and other enhancements. This release is targeted for organizations that are looking to work more intelligently and with a laser-focus on quality and efficiency.

So does the release of Actional 8.2 trump New England’s fall foliage? With a true Bostonian accent I’ll just say, “When driving one’s cahr through Hahrvahd yahrd, one can rest assured that transactions are running smoothly, application perfahrmance is optimized and the customah experience is at an all time high!”

Are you a sitting duck or one that will respond immediately to threats?

While many organisations are being ‘cautiously optimistic’ about what the future holds, the realities of today’s tough business environment could leave them as sitting ducks, according to Rick Reidy, CEO at Progress Software. They might take consolation that they’re in the same pond, but when interest rates in Japan hit near-zero, banks continue to fail and mistakes can lead to a ‘flash crash’, the pond is not a safe place to be. Businesses may have money, but fear and uncertainty is holding back decision-making – we await further regulation and want to know the consequences of recent government changes.

 
Listening to Rick’s keynote at our UK business summit (#progresswsummit, if you want to follow on twitter), in the impressive surrounding of Chelsea Football Club’s ground, London, it seems most of the audience agrees – it’s not good enough to sit around and wait to see if growth returns, and you cannot grow simply by cutting costs. You have to take control of your own ‘growth agenda’, as Rick put it. Businesses that want to survive the next five years need better visibility, through putting processes in place that enable them to react quickly to meet customer demands, adapt to market changes and take advantage of new opportunities. As Rick has advised, businesses need to act on up to the minute information so that leaders can make decisions based on foresight, not hindsight.
 
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll already know that we call this ‘operational responsiveness’: the ability to sense and respond to customer and market changes so that organisations can move quickly to meet challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. 
 
Rick has talked about what this means in the airline industry: the notion of irregular operations has become a weekly reality as companies face intense market pressure, striking staff and disruption from natural phenomenon. ‘Swivel chair’ communication between operational areas is no longer good enough. To react quickly enough, they need responsive processes in place that can help them maintain services and inform customers, almost as-it-happens. If they don’t, they will face massive fines, lost custom and damaged reputation – risks no company can afford at present.
 
We’ll be hearing more from Gordon Penfold, CTO at British Airways, about their approach to becoming operationally responsive to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Watch this space for my take on his talk…

 

How Being Complex Makes Transaction Assurance Simpler

I have been seeing an increasing amount on interest in the marriage between Business Transaction Management (BTM) and Complex Event Processing (CEP). On July 29^th Dr Dobbs Journal published an article called Complex Event Processing: IT Liberator or Over-Engineering Hell? This article was about the synergy of BTM and CEP (although I felt it was rather biased towards one company). Also, last week Jean Pierre Garbani at Forrester published this blog in which he discussed the evolution towards BTM and CEP working together.

Business Transaction Management is a rapidly growing area of Application Performance Management (APM). BTM enables users to look into the transaction flows within their business and ensure everything is running as expected. BTM enables problems in transaction flows to be discovered – such as a bottleneck in an important business process. The really appealing aspect of BTM is it can do this without the need to change the applications in the business; BTM can “discover the transaction flows” by tapping non-intrusively into the flows going through application servers, middleware buses, business process management systems and other systems within the environment. Over time, BTM can build up a picture of the environment’s business flows, look inside the transactions and flag up immediately problems that can really hurt the business.  Thus BTM works really well in legacy environments – not just modern SOA environments. And of course it appeals to business executives and operations users – not just IT users.

Complex Event Processing is the ability to correlate events flowing through a business  - to identify patterns in real-time. These patterns might indicate opportunities and/or threats to the business that have just happened, are in the process of happening or are likely to happen right now. Events are occurrences in the business, such as stock market quotes in trading, call data records being generated in communications or packages changing location in logistics. An example of a real-time opportunity is a trading “statistical arbitrage” opportunity – to sell one instrument and buy another at a micro profit; another is the ability to upsell something to a customer who has just purchased an item on their credit card – based on their spending and buying patterns, their location and context. Threats to be detected include risk exceeding a certain key level in a bank or gaming fraud occurring in a casino. This kind of business level visibility and immediate response also appeals to business users as well as IT.

Listening to the descriptions of BTM and CEP, does it sound like there is a little overlap? Well there is some. What BTM is really good at is non-intrusively discovering process endpoints and the events they exchange – and then tracking these events. What CEP is really good at is correlating complex real-time business events in real-time, including arbitrary user-defined patterns, which can evolve over time as the business evolves. So it makes perfect sense to put these capabilities of BTM and CEP together. For BTM this strengthens the real-time correlation and pattern detection capabilities. For CEP this enables discovery of services without the need to do expensive and time-consuming instrumentation of the environment.

At Progress we have two leading products in the BTM and CEP categories: Actional and Apama. We believe that BTM and CEP capabilities are converging for certain business use cases, so as part of our Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite we now provide seamless integration between these capabilities. Of course RPM does much more than that. More on that later!

Pushing the Envelope on Application Performance Monitoring

The verdict is in. Gartner released its first ever "Magic Quadrant for Application Performance” Monitoring (APM). With the release of this quadrant, they’ve now confirmed another “perfect storm” -- the convergence of application complexity, making management more difficult ,and business, driving IT operations to become more application-centric. The bottom-line: how does IT operations keep up with the ever-winding web of applications? How do they ensure the success of every single important business transaction as it traverses through databases, middleware, application servers, and external services?

The Magic Quadrant does a nice job of defining the 5 dimensions of APM. The most interesting were “end-user experience monitoring” and “user-defined transaction profiling” --f ocusing on the user experience. What a concept: a clear focus on how customers are being treated, how satisfied they are or aren’t, actually trying to understand if they’re having a good or bad experience! That said, Progress Actional business transaction assurance (BTA) has been a market leader focused on these key disciplines through patented technology that enables teams to automatically discover and model transaction flows and manage and control user outcome. And with the integration points into BPM of the latest release, Actional BTA pushes the envelope of APM by including both approaches to transaction profiling: automated transaction-centric event correlation for business processes that include automated and manual steps, and, as always, transaction-tagging.

Get the Gartner MQ 2010 APM Report >