Business Making Progress

Your (not so) Typical Customer

Right now, your customer has 500 emails in his inbox, 20 voicemails on his phone, 85 percent of his DVR box is full. She has 25 apps uploaded on her iPhone (of which she only uses five on a daily basis). More often than not, he’s texting, emailing, watching CNN and eating all at the same time. She’s on the road 30 weeks a year and is constantly searching for a Wi-Fi connection. Yes, these customers may be typical high-powered executives, but they certainly don't want their CSP to treat them as anything like “typical.” They want a personalized experience, they want to be understood, and they want to know that someone is out there, listening and supporting them.

As competition continues to increase, treating customers as individuals (as opposed to a generic group, or worse, just another up-sell opportunity) will become a key differentiator for providers. Service providers will need to focus on understanding and anticipating customers’ needs. To do this, they must leverage technology that helps them understand and cater to the needs of customers' situation or location, their likes and dislikes. In other words, providers need to see the whole picture when it comes to their customers, and the only way they can achieve this is by marrying a customer's individual profile with their real-time usage call patterns to obtain a clear end-to-end visibility into customers' unique situations. 

With competition steadily increasing, the ability to offer real-time personalized services, which are more useful than simple location-based promotions, will become a key differentiator for service providers. Only by gaining the complete view of the customer can CPSs hope to present tailored services that will appeal to, and make a difference for, their customers.

It’s this type of personalized service that will keep customers loyal and help providers maintain and grow market share in the future.  

 

 

Customer Service is a Matter of Visibility

Given the proliferation of service options and add-ons available to today’s mobile user, keeping the customer happy is a task that has become more and more challenging in recent years. As the number of customer services options increase and diversify, the number of disparate business and operational systems involved in that customer’s experience has also  increased. As we all know, the backend is not one network and one system, as dozens of legacy and new systems need to integrate to provide one unified view of the customer.   

It is possible to manage the end-to-end customer experience, but visibility is key. The best way to achieve this holistic view is to bring all customer-impacting activities together. Only with a comprehensive view of all systems can SPs begin to solve customer problems on one call.  

This complete service view will become the single biggest point of competitive differentiation for mobile providers in the coming year. To prevent churn, providers need to respond to business events as they happen, allowing them to proactively address and fix network issues before the customer suffers from poor service and is left with no one to call but the competition.

 

 

 

 

Banks Need Transaction-Level Insight Into Mainframe Systems to Meet New Transparency Demands

Recently I participated in the first installment of a webinar series  hosted by Bank Systems and Technology. I was joined by Greg MacSweeney of Bank Systems & Technology and analyst Gareth Lodge of Celent, and we discussed the need for banks to have transaction-level insight into mainframe systems to meet customer, partner and internal demands.

We are living in an increasingly complex world, especially in the financial services space where regulations continue to tighten. Banks must increase analysis to meet this heightened demand for reporting and compliance, and to do this we need real-time access and visibility into all transactional data. As Gareth said during our discussion, “Mark Twain said we can count on two things in life, death and taxes, and now we have a third: regulation.”

In addition to meeting these new requirements, customers are increasingly expecting immediate and detailed response and communication from their bank. However, this type of service requires access to transactional-level data in real-time. This is a multi step process and is not automated, so how do we get it done in a timely matter for the customer especially when this data is hard to find and difficult to interpret?

Many banks still maintain complex system architectures comprised of old and new mainframes- many of which are very difficult to access and navigate. It’s like operating in the dark, where there is very little transparency, creating frustration for IT departments.

In the future, we hope to see banks address some of these challenges with new technology. In order to meet new regulatory demands, banks need access to transactional level data, which will improve responsiveness and ultimately customer service. However, finding transactional level data on the mainframe and being able to act upon it poses quite a challenge from a business and operational perspective.

So how do we do that? Stay tuned for my next post, highlighting second installment of our webinar series. I welcome your comments here, as well.

More extended supply chain variables means greater need for visibility

Companies do not compete, supply chains compete…have you heard that one before? If you have, you probably are well aware of all the factors that go into running your business rely upon a host of partners and service providers that do not have your logo on their business cards. Globalization and competiveness has created a business world where no company can truly “own” all that goes into make their business…their business. We can only succeed in our business if our partner, our supply chain, is successful. In the pursuit of efficiencies, economies of scale and maximizing competitive advantages we have also created the unintended consequences of dilution of control. Even when companies controlled their supply chain they did not enjoy the visibility or ability to react to consumer demands to the level they would like. Remember Henry Ford? He was happy to sell you a Model T in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Already Ford knew that his assembly line, and by extension his supply chain, could not cope well with diversity, choice and any color other than black. 

Fast-forward to today’s globalized economy. Companies whether they are B2B or B2C, must offer choices to their end customer. Whether those choices are in terms of the color, size, taste, speed or texture of the good or whether it relates to the service level a customer can expect after the sale or the rapidity at which the service is delivered. These all factor into the global extended supply chain and all call for a level of orchestration and visibility not easily attained but constantly demanded by customers. The reality is our extended supply chains and businesses need greater visibility and enhanced real time decision-making functions in order to compete and ensure they meet the constantly evolving demands of the consumer.

At Progress Software we are addressing these needs and this next step in the evolution of supply chain solutions. Come to Revolution to learn from our team and clients how we are able to tackle this issue and join us to take the next steps in the next wave of supply chain solution innovation.

How Software Can Help Airlines to Keep All Their Plates Spinning

By Joshua Norrid, Industry VP, Travel and Leisure, Progress Software

I often think that managing an airline in today’s climate can be a bit like trying to keep several plates spinning at once – one mistake, and all your hard work can result in a costly, embarrassing mess. Over the last 12 months, we’ve heard a great deal from airlines which are finding themselves having to make some difficult decisions about how they approach the road ahead. Increased costs across the board have seen airlines of all shapes and sizes slashing their budgets as they look for the best way to cut costs without reducing overall efficiency.

The situation has now become so drastic that traditional industry growth has been put on hold by the majority of airlines, which are instead looking for ways to keep their heads above water by releasing funds from areas such as maintenance and distribution. So what are the causes of these increased costs? As we begin to emerge from the shadow of the global economic downturn, why are so many airlines finding it necessary to tighten their belts?

Clearly, there are a number of conflicting economic and political factors driving this need. Perhaps the most significant of these is that the cost of fuel has rocketed to as much as $100 a barrel, and as much as 31 per cent year-on-year in some territories. This price increase has had an obvious knock-on effect for the airlines industry, many of which have been faced with a straight choice between passing this increase onto their customers or trimming overheads.

Other factors, including an increase in political hotspots around the globe, are reducing the number of flights leaving each day - adding to the pressure. Either way, it’s becoming increasingly clear that airlines are facing an uphill struggle, as they fight tooth and nail to hold on to market share, while trying to ensure that customer satisfaction is not affected by their drive to reduce overall operational costs.

Perhaps this is where software developers can play a part? By allowing airlines to view business-critical information in real time, complex event processing software can help to establish which areas require greater resources, and which can be trimmed as and when circumstances dictate. This will allow them to view the performance of their entire operation in real time, and make better, more informed decisions. This software could be one way for them to avoid making potentially costly mistakes – and keep all of their plates spinning!

Can CSP really turn to CEM to help reduce churn?

With the market for cellular customers now saturated across most of the developed world, retaining existing customers has become a major priority for mobile operators. This is because it is demonstrably more cost-effective to retain existing customers than to attempt to win new ones from their competitors.

This is good news for subscribers too, as it means that operators are working hard to provide them with the best possible user experience in order to retain their user base. Various analyst research and media announcements at this week's TM World Management forum in Dublin  has shown that the rapidly growing number of smartphone users are the most demanding in their expectations, and also generate the highest ARPU, so operators are focusing their efforts firstly on keeping this sector happy. According to a keynote from Facebook EMEA director of operations Colm Long, over 80 per cent of telecoms operators are claiming that having Facebook on their platform is imperative.

For this reason, it is my view that this is why tools that provide a holistic customer experience management (CEM) view are now being widely sought. These solutions can enable communication service providers to continuously monitor and manage their customers proactively, and in real time, through one interactive interface. The objective of CEM is to firstly reduce order fall out, then establish and validate the overall quality of service and billing experience of mobile customers. This is in addition to providing an insight into the types of users and devices that are being used to access data services. If specific customers appear to be having a less-than-ideal user experience, the service provider can not only improve the level of service experience for them but also target special offers that may encourage loyalty. If Dublin has taught us one thing this week, it is that there is growing pressure mounting on service providers to manage and grow the revenue from their customer base. For this reason alone, using some form of CEM solution for a more granular insight into customer activity is becoming increasingly important moving forward.

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.

 

Responsiveness and the Future Supply Chain

I’ve been a McKinsey follower for 20 years and often used their insight as fodder for some of my presentations. I always try to blend a bit of business sense into what I say and a big part of what I have to do is bridge the business and technical value of what we have to offer. Emerging technology, where I’m often found, always has a sense of a solution looking for a problem and any time there’s a catalyst from an industry and market force such as McKinsey, I’ll take it.

I was intrigued by the title of the latest (January 2011) McKinsey Quarterly issue where “Building the supply chain of the future” was tackled. Now this piece, crafted by Yogesh Malik, Alex Niemeyer, and Brian Ruwadi, brings up some interesting points about meeting the challenges of the next generation supply chain. In particular, their points on splitting monolithic chains into smaller, more nimble segments and viewing the supply chain as a dynamic entity in an effort to hedge uncertainty. Both will require new thinking on the part of the business and both will require more from the technology in place. The focus then becomes not just visibility but one that emphasizes operational responsiveness.

Responsiveness in the supply chain requires heightened awareness of all segments in the chain. “Nimbleness” is achieved by being able to sense and respond to changing conditions and allow for immediate, in-flight, changes to the processes that run the chain. Siloed systems and management won’t work. Strictly relying on information gathered after the fact may be too late.

You’ll need to move from reactive to responsive. The good news is that it’s possible now – and with much of what you already have in place. We can do that with Progress RPM right now. If you’re re-thinking your supply chain, you might want to check it out: Progress Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite.

Red Flags in Morning, Firms Take Warning

A pattern is emerging within new financial services regulations where regulators and financial services firms deploy monitoring technology to "red flag" potential issues such as risk, position limits, errors and manipulation. The "red flags" raised would then alert the relevant personnel or authorities.

In the case of the Volcker Rule, prohibiting banks from proprietary trading and investing in or sponsoring hedge funds or private equity funds, the authorities would use a three tiered approach (http://tinyurl.com/2bh9ot3).  First "tripwires", such as the length of time a trader holds a position, its size or riskiness, would alert banks’ compliance departments  who would (#2) quiz the trader on the nature of the position. And (#3)regulators that keep inspectors on banks’ premises would see the tripwires and monitor both traders and compliance departments.

Over at the CFTC, regulators are looking at a similar approach to monitoring and controlling position limits on products such as oil and metals with a "points" system that would give the CFTC monthly reports that it could use to red-flag traders with large positions (http://tinyurl.com/2ugbdh6).

The tracking and red flag approach is the latest step in increased monitoring of trading operations with the ability to take response before it’s too late. At Progress, we have been advocating using monitoring and surveillance technology to help catch inside trading and avoid fat fingered trading errors for years. With new regulations, monitoring becomes not only mandated but more complicated. Red flags are likely to be flying all over the place within as little as months, both inside and outside financial services firms, presenting a fine opportunity for our Responsive Process Management software solution.

As the financial services world becomes more compliant, the ability to manage red flags becomes more critical. Every process within a financial services firm must be scrutinized, from trade entry to risk management, to analyse and understand internal and external events. This take sophisticated technology. This is where Progress Software's RPM software fits in. According to technology research firm Ovum: "Unless an organization has already made a significant investment in creating an operational responsiveness solution around best of breed products, it will be worth seriously considering the competitive advantage and improved effectiveness that could be achieved by deploying RPM."

Ovum noted in a Technology Audit note that multiple technologies are required to gain a comprehensive insight and respond more rapidly to changes to the environment. These include: business process management (BPM) to model, implement, and execute the processes; business analytics to determine how effectively the processes are working; complex event processing (CEP) to understand the implications of many streams of internal and external events; business rules management to determine the appropriate actions for a given set of conditions and variables; and visibility into end-to-end transactions to track and audit their progress.

The interrelationships between all of these components and the vast amount of information that has become available must be understood before its impact on processes can be ascertained and appropriate tuning performed. In other words, RPM is the answer.

RPM can monitor an increasing number of information feeds, both within or external to the organization, then apply business policy and governance rules, then automatically tune the  established process or alert a human decision-maker (if necessary) and present him/her with current, relevant information on which to base the most appropriate response.

According to Ovum: "All of these individual capabilities already exist (at different levels of maturity), but the cost and complexity of integrating these into an effective business solution is beyond the means of most organizations. Hence Ovum believes that the requirement identified by Progress represents a genuine market opportunity." Well said. 

 

Take Control of Your Business with RPM

Achieving the ability to gain real-time visibility, immediately sense and respond, and continuously improve business processes are the core benefits of responsive process management, but what makes the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite so powerful is the Progress Control Tower™ - a unified, interactive business control panel that gives users the tools they need to view what is happening within their business and the ability to improve it.

Dr. John Bates, Chief Technology Officer at Progress Software

In Part 7 of our 7 part video series, Take Control of Your Business, John talks briefly about the how the Progress Control Tower not only gives our customers visibility into their complex events but it also allows them to set up business rules and alerts so that they can continually change and evolve how their business processes operate. Click here to learn more about Progress Control Tower.

Interested in hearing what industry analysts are saying about operational responsiveness? Watch the 3-minute teaser, Gain Efficiency. Avoid Risk. Seize Opportunity, by Gartner analyst Roy Schulte, and then download the entire video. You may also be interested in the paper Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time written by industry analyst James Taylor.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

What Is Operational Responsiveness?
Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?
Delivering Operational Responsiveness
Four Types of Business Process Visibility
Immediate Sense and Respond
Continuous Process Improvement

How to lose customers in 6 easy steps

Last night, I took a flight from Miami to Boston and we had to make an unscheduled stop in JFK.  I travel enough to know that mechanical failures happen, and that's just a part of life in the air.  But, the story I want to share is not about the fact the plane had a failure - it's about how the airline's inability to be a responsive business - their inability to respond to this unexpected situation effectively - likely turned more than 100 passengers into people that will never again fly their airline.

Let's look at what happened, and how - by being a responsive business - the airline could have turned the situation around.

First, the only successes of the situation:  There was a spare plane waiting for us in the gate next door, and they were able to get a replacement crew (the crew we had had "timed out" - they had been flying too long that day to go the rest of the way with us) to our new plane very quickly - within 30 minutes of landing.  So, kudo's to the crew scheduling team.  Whether it was luck or not, this part worked out.

Now, let's take a look at where it all began to unravel:  It took roughly 2 hours to move the baggage from our original plane (at gate 35) to our new plane (at gate 36).  Yes, my grandmother could have moved the baggage faster.  But, that's neither here nor there because my grandmother has no interest in coming out of retirement to work for this airline.

I can only assume the ground crew wasn't staffed to handle this unexpected plane.  Anyone who travels a lot knows that airlines only have skeleton ground crews on late in the evening (we were scheduled to depart on the new plane at 10:45pm but ended up departing at 1am) - and you can't blame them given their tight margins.  But, had they been more operationally responsive, here's a few things they could have done by having the right tools to respond to the developing situation in real-time:

• They could have been alerted to the fact they didn't have the capacity and responded by calling in extra ground crew (just as they do with plane crew).  Surely the help could have arrived in time to make a difference.
• With broad, real-time visibility into all the ground crew operations, they could have rebalanced the ground crew they did have (so that multiple planes arriving would each have a short delay in baggage handling - instead of one plane, the one with the most sensitive customer service situation, having a massive delay).
• With a clear set of impact analysis capabilities, they could have rescheduled the parts of their cargo load (not the passenger's bags or time critical cargo) the next morning to reduce the load on the overworked ground crew. 

What's more... all of this could be done within just one functional group within the airline.  They wouldn't even have needed to collaborate across teams - but they would need much better visibility.  End-to-end visibility into the developing delay, visibility into the allocation and status of ground crew, and visibility into cargo time sensitivity.

Now, let's look at where another hallmark of responsive businesses -  the ability to gain cross-functional coordination, especially in unexpected situations - could have really saved the day...

Because we were scheduled to have a short time between landing and taking off in the new plane, they didn't have any catering for the new plane (no snacks, no drinks, not even water).  Now, here's where being a responsive business would have changed the situation:

• Had the catering group been able to be alerted that the plane was being delayed significantly because of baggage issues, they would have had plenty of time to cater the plane.  And nothing soothes an angry passenger better than something to tide them over.
• Now, imagine they could have notified a customer service manager (perhaps on their mobile phone if they were already home for the evening) authorized to make a decision to give the snacks away for free.  Had a manager had the opportunity to make this decision in real-time it would be an easy call—$200 in free snacks or more than 100 passengers that will do their best to never again fly your airline (and who will likely tell all their friends to do the same).  But, more than likely, no manager was ever notified.

Of course, what happens in ground operations stays in ground operations (inability to share situational information across organizational silos is a common theme for businesses that aren't responsive).

Given the long delay, with the right coordination around the developing situation, a customer service manager on the ground in Boston could have been notified that there were likely a lot of irate passengers on the flight.  They would then have had plenty of time to get to the plane when it landed in Boston to personally apologize for the issues (you'd be amazed by how much weight a personal apology from someone in power goes with customers).  But, no.  No one came to the plane to apologize to the passengers (and the pilot stayed hidden in the cockpit - I suspect he was afraid of getting an earful from the passengers as they left the plane.  But, again, I don't blame him: he's not trained in handling irate customers as a customer service manager would have been).

Or, perhaps, the airline could have emailed or texted their elite passengers a personal letter of apology the next day.  Again, this would be a low-cost no-brainer.  All it takes is good situational awareness and coordination.

That said, one thing I've learned is that the strongest bonds of loyalty are created in the midst of adversity.  Handle a bad situation well, and your customers will stick to you like glue.  So, had the airline been responsive they could have created more than 100 loyal customers (and the network effect would draw in many more potential customers because of the referrals).

But, this is not a story of success.  It's a story of failure.  It's a story of what happens when you're not responsive.  This one failure created a net change in their potential customer base of 100s, if not 1000s, of passengers via friends-of-friends.  Now, realize that for a big airline this type of failure likely occurs at least once a day somewhere in their network.  The only reason this business can afford to lose 100s of potential customers a day is that all the other airlines are just as bad.

Of course, all it takes is for a first mover to change the rules of the game.  If one airline, by becoming operationally responsive, gains the reputation of "if the sh*t hits the turbofan, and I know it will eventually, I really want to be flying on X" the opportunity would be huge.  I'm not going to mention names but I will say this, "To the airline I flew on last night, you [should] know who you are", your competitors are already working to become responsive businesses (I know this for a fact) - so you better get your act together because the status quo won't cut it for much longer.

When it comes to Integration, Contracts Make all the Difference.

It may seem odd to talk about contracts and SOA in the same sentence, but without them experienced enterprise architects and integration developers understand the negative consequences that will ripple through the business.

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) requires establishing contracts between its participants. The first or most basic SOA contract provision concerns what formats and protocols are used. When two service participants, a provider and a consumer, establish a contract, it must start out with some protocol and format artifact (or transport and data-level semantic), such as an XSD and the associated WSDL describing the interface between that consumer and producer. These decisions establish the beginnings of interoperability, specifically how the first-level pin-outs get wired together.

Beyond this basic level, IT professionals tend to think about contracts in two broad areas: the service-level agreement (SLA) and security. For IT, an SLA usually specifies scale, response time, and availability: for example, handling 10,000 requests per second with a response time of less than 500 milliseconds, and availability to four 9s, or 99.99 percent uptime. From a security standpoint, a contract covers four or five areas.

In installment #7 of the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series, Hub Vandervoort delves into the sixth point of mediation - Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Privacy/Protection. But rather than providing a comprehensive account of the idea of QoS and QoP, the video podcast and technical paper offer a high-level overview of some capabilities within Sonic ESB by itself and in association with Actional, which is largely built into the ESB infrastructure, and how those come together to create the foundation of QoS\QoP—trust and commitment —required for effective contracts.

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Check out all of the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series white papers and videos here!

Sense and Respond to Event Streams in Real Time

Last week we introduced one of the key benefits of  responsive process management (RPM) - real time visibility. We've heard what it means to be operationally responsiveness, why it's so hard to achieve and how we deliver it through the Progress RPM® suite. Today we'll look at another key benefit of RPM – the ability to immediately sense and respond to business events so that you can quickly reveal opportunities, threats or inefficiencies, and take action.

Dr. John Bates, Chief Technology Officer at Progress Software

In Part 5 of our 7 part video series, Immediate Sense and Respond, John talks about the how one of today’s smart technologies, complex event processing (CEP), allows businesses to process event feeds and have the ability to sense and respond to the opportunities, or threats, that occur in real time. A good example of how CEP benefits companies is in fraud prevention.

The best part? You drive. A business control panel will give you the ability to gain real-time visibility into business events, immediately sense and respond to changing conditions, and achieve continuous process improvement. Learn how Agent O applies RPM to tackle credit card fraud in real time.

Interested in hearing what industry analysts are saying about operational responsiveness? Watch the 3-minute teaser, Gain Efficiency. Avoid Risk. Seize Opportunity, by Gartner analyst Roy Schulte, and then download the entire video. You may also be interested in the paper Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time written by industry analyst James Taylor.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

What Is Operational Responsiveness?
Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?
Delivering Operational Responsiveness
Four Types of Business Process Visibility

 

Four Types of Business Process Visibility

So far we’ve learned that operational responsiveness is more than agility and business process optimization, it’s about plugging decision makers into business events and giving them the tools and information they need to respond to the unexpected, thereby allowing them to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. We've also learned why it's so hard to achieve and how we deliver it through the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. Now let’s look at one of the key benefits of RPM – the ability to gain real-time visibility across your business.

Dr. John Bates, Chief Technology Officer at Progress Software

In Part 4 of our 7 part video series, Four Types of Business Process Visibility, John talks about the four different types of visibility that many companies may (or may not) have. These include visibility into: 1) modeled processes (business process management), 2)  un-modeled processes (usually legacy processes), 3) outside processes, and 4) the interaction between processes.

What’s great is that the Progress Control Tower™ gives business and operations managers the ability to see how all these different types of processes are performing – thereby giving you real-time visibility into ALL your business events.

Interested in hearing what industry analysts are saying about operational responsiveness? Watch the 3-minute teaser, Gain Efficiency. Avoid Risk. Seize Opportunity, by Gartner analyst Roy Schulte, and then download the entire video. You may also be interested in the paper Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time written by industry analyst James Taylor.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

What Is Operational Responsiveness?
Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?
Delivering Operational Responsiveness

 

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…

 

Stamford Bridge, here we come

Tomorrow sees Progress Software taking over Stamford Bridge, home ground to the world-famous Chelsea Football Club. We’re not just there to check out the players’ dressing rooms – we are being joined by James Caan, of Dragons' Den fame, as well as the great and the good of the UK business community, to discuss how businesses can start to make decisions based on foresight, not hindsight, in their operations.

Gordon Penfold, Chief Technology Officer at British Airways, will be sharing his insight on ‘operational foresight’, revealing how the organization has set itself up to better deal with the irregular operations that have become a fact of life in the last year. And Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research, will be sharing his views on where the next wave of truly responsive business management is coming from, and which trends to watch for. And Progress' own Chief Executive Officer, Rick Reidy, will be giving a keynote too.

I'll be there, speaking in one session but also blogging and tweeting from the event. So watch this space for the latest updates.

For those of you attending, I look forward to seeing you there.

www.progresssoftwaresummit.com

 

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!

Responsiveness and the Customer Experience: Business Events

I recently did a webinar, Responding to Business Events as they Happen, where I discussed the relationship between business events and the customer experience. The catalyst came from a few of our customers where they’re definitely getting the benefit of bridging customer events with customer transactions. In most cases, they recognized that there are specific measures (or KPIs) that suddenly become more powerful if they can be transitioned into real-time instead of past-tense values. Finding out tomorrow how you did yesterday is too late for many customer experience “episodes.”

Today’s customer experience lifecycle can be pretty complicated. You’ve bred in multiple touch points to the lifecycle where a customer can enter and exit anywhere and at will. What’s lost is the common thread of control of a managed lifecycle. That makes sense for today’s business climate, but you’re left with business systems and infrastructure from an era that doesn’t fit the requirements of the new lifecycle. If you enable your customers to “serve themselves” then you need to develop your experience strategies to meet their expectations—oh, and you have to do it with what you’ve got since there’s no way you can replace your existing systems. No problem.

It’s all about events and your ability to sense and respond. The customer experience lifecycle is affected by customer events—throughout the lifecycle from prospect to on-going service and support. The customer can enter and exit anywhere, anyplace and at anytime. In this case, the customer experience cannot simply be managed from a single, siloed point such as customer service or a website. You need visibility into all potential entry/exit points where a customer may interact with your enterprise. How they interact with you is just as important as how they use your products. Much can be gained by correlating their interactions and usage.  And if you can manage all of this in real-time, you can be proactive in your response—before it’s too late. Business Event Processing (BEP) allows you to capture utilization and interaction events across the customer experience lifecycle. You can then turn those events into something that is meaningful and actionable. So not only can you get broad visibility, you can do something about it.

In a world where churn is costly, you can’t afford to let someone click somewhere else.

Next up: The Customer Experience: Use Cases and Examples

Live Webinar with IDC's Maureen Flemming Tomorrow

When all you can do is analyze what HAS happened instead of what IS ABOUT to happen, you are missing out on important opportunities. What you really need is to get actionable insight so you can gain total control of your business. Join us tomorrow for the webinar Your Business Moves Faster When You’re At The Controls and hear IDC analyst Maureen Fleming provide more insight into how to gain comprehensive insight and continuously improve business processes by managing change more effectively.

Join the Live Event:
Thursday, 22 April 2010
11:00am EST / 4:00pm GMT / 17:00 CET
 >  Register here

Archived event:
Friday, 23 April 2010
Time: 9:00am Sydney Time
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Real-time. Do you take it for granted?

I can’t help but notice all the references to “real-time” lately—real-time AWD, real-time ABS, real-time computing, real-time communication, real-time arts, Real Time with Bill Maher, etc.—I even clicked on realtime.com… I got the message “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” and the only thing I can say is that I was annoyed, in real-time! Seriously, if you search on “real-time”, Google estimates 1,850,000,000 results.

The use of real-time isn’t new to me. I’ve been listening to Progress talk about it since earlier than 2004. Progress had the bad (at least I think so) habit of organizing their development, marketing and sales efforts around how we are organized as a company. Sometime around 2004 the division that I worked in was actually called the Real-time Division (I have a hat to prove it). We went so far as to structure our website under www.progress.com/realtime/. This division developed, marketed and sold our ObjectStore and Apama product lines. Today we’re organizing ourselves more closely to solutions and products so when people tell me about a “page not found” when they visit someplace under ~/realtime, a shiver runs up my back and gives me a headache. For anyone who’s worked on the web side of the business, change is not always good.

Anyway, I digress... In some cases, I do take “real-time” for granted. When I press the brake of my car, I expect my car to stop in real-time—even if I really get thrown into a tailspin because of all the rain around here. I bought an AWD car a few years ago and I’m apparently naïve because I don’t know of a button I need to push to have real-time AWD. Real-time computing, now that’s a different story. I bet many technologists might not take “real-time” for granted. Do you? Wikipedia notes that early references to real-time computing were in reference to high performance. When the Real Time Division first started talking about “real-time”, it was related to event processing—complex event processing—the ability to monitor, analyze and act on business events as they occur. Behind most transactions is a database and as most of us know, updating a field/row of the supported database isn’t always real-time. It may only take a second but we all know what a second can feel like when we’re trying to win the Gold, selling or buying stock at the best price, or reacting to the brake lights blasting in front of us. Apama’s technology doesn’t wait for the database to update, it “automagically” processes the event WHEN IT HAPPENS—learn more about Apama.

Last week we announced the launch of the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. This solution suite presents “real-time visibility” as a core feature/benefit of the Progress RPM suite. When I first started reading the content for the launch, I associated Real-time Visibility to our Apama technology but it’s actually associated with multiple Progress technologies—Apama (for visibility into events), Actional (end-to-end visibility into transactions) and Savvion (visibility into processes). It made sense, at least to me, because it’s about “seeing” how transactions are operating as they occur—from design time through runtime. In this case, I do not have to take real-time for granted, and it’s not automagic, because I’m looking at a dashboard that’s showing me exactly how an event is being processed. With Real-time Visibility, I can see (visualize) how the transaction is flowing and if there is a problem I can immediately respond and work to find a resolution.

To be honest, nothing I do is really time or mission-critical. And while I take for granted that my CMS is publishing our newest press release to our home page the minute it gets published, our marcom VP is not. While he’s tapping his foot behind me, I’m wishing I could bring up my “real-time visibility” console and see what’s causing the delay—is it the CMS, the network, what? In industries like capital markets, energy, insurance, and telecommunications, real-time visibility is the difference between increased revenue vs lost revenue, and happy customers vs miserable customers. With Real-time Visibility, you don’t have to take anything for granted.

It's About Quality... End-to-End Process Quality

Hey everyone! I haven't written in a while because I'm still getting used to my new role and am freshly back from a nice two-week vacation. Why does all the juicy stuff get released while I'm away? Anyway, I'm sure it's not about me (this time). [Apparently I have a lot to say! Sorry for the length of this post in advance. The short version is: 1) It's all about improving "business quality", and 2) Make sure to read the Gartner blog referenced below.]

I wanted to weigh in on this RPM thing... Last week we announced the launch of our Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. What's it about? I'll leave the "brochure-ware" posts to the marketing folks. I have been talking to many of our customers and field, and while there's some confusion about what it means... RPM's benefits are quite obvious.

It's all about the "quality of the business".

Now marketing may not like how I leave out all sorts of important words/phrases... like real-time business visibility, immediate sense & respond, or continuous process improvement. Those concepts are all very important but they sound very familiar.

What differentiates the Progress solution is that we're enabling, quickly and layered over your existing infrastructure, the ability to react in real-time to your business conditions and exceptions to more tightly control the quality of your business as your customers experience your service/products.

Don't get caught up in the words. Progress' offering is new (and IMO innovative). I know, the jury's out and we have to prove that. But trust me on this one... at least long enough to let me explain.

Let me start by pointing out that all other vendors that "already do that"... well they don't. Don't believe me? Believe Mark McDonald at Gartner. In a blog from February 2010 he points out:

"... in 2010 more than half of CIO's do not feel confident in their ability to achieve results when improving business processes."

If all these other vendors have had a solution for this problem in the market for five years, but 50% of CIO's still don't trust it, something's wrong with the solution.

We can argue this point back and forth for hours, as vendors, because we love our solutions and it's a totally unproductive waste of time. Of course I (usually) believe my stuff is better than others. If not, I should just go get a job with the other guys. Right?

So, let me share some personal thoughts on process quality, what it really means (from a consumer's perspective, my own experience with a bank on a recent transaction), and it's importance will be obvious. I'll not attempt to prove that the Progress® RPM suite is better than the others here... but I hope you'll leave with an understanding of our intent and some of the less obvious challenges companies face when trying to solve problems with their business process quality.

I recently used a government program to refinance a home through Wells Fargo Bank. It's a very paper heavy process. I had the original mortgage with Wells Fargo and since it was a government program, there wasn't any variability to the process. It's a coastal property, so they need to verify up-to-date flood insurance. Of course, since they held the original note on the property -- they had up-to-date flood insurance proof on file.

A few things struck me right away:

1. Even my mortgage broker had no idea what the process was like because it was a government program. He told me that he'd submit the information, and eventually something would happen.
2. The person who eventually called (couple weeks later) and asked for my insurance certificate (which, remember, they had on file -- and, yes I could have canceled the insurance, but I sent them the same proof they had on file, so my point stands.) didn't leave a phone number. Or an application tracking number. Or an email address. Just a fax number and a first name. It took me a few days to get to a fax machine, on which I left my phone number and email asking for a confirmation of receipt because I wanted to make sure we completed this step.
3. I got another call (from another person) to discuss the process and confirm the final information. The inbound caller ID didn't show my bank's name, so it went to voicemail. It took me a couple of days to return the call during which she called again. When we finally spoke, she handed me off to yet another number/person who I'd have to call if I had any questions when I received the closing package.
4. The closing package asked for the insurance certificate again. And, the loan amount was higher than my current balance. The HUD-1 I got had the same numbers, but they weren't explained anywhere. Having all the dysfunctional experiences above, I had very little confidence in the process and almost decided to scrap it. I had to call the call-center again. When I did they quickly and clearly answered my question and confirmed that they had the insurance info so didn't need it again.

Why did these things stick on my mind? In large part because they're unnecessary and affected my experience with the bank. Do I really want a company this sloppy and disorganized in charge of my money?

The process worked. But, the quality of the process left a lot to be desired. In left me feeling uncertain (as I mentioned, I almost didn't proceed) and it was inefficient for them. Multiple calls to the data center, answering questions that everyone would have and where the answers were readily available. And, before you think it's sloppy human process (the part about not leaving a return phone number with questions, etc.)... there are tells that can be used to recognize poor human process too (like tracking how many calls to the call-center occur per mortgage, and how long the average response time is to each time they ask me for information... and whether there is a correlation, etc.).

Process Visibility

Somewhere, someone in the bank knew the process. They had to. But that information wasn't shared-with or accessible-to my broker. He submitted the paperwork and told me I'd hear from someone.

If you worked with two banks... one said "we'll call you soon" and the other said "you'll hear from us by Tuesday, after that you'll get a package in the mail that you'll have to get notarized and return, the whole thing should take about 6 weeks, so by March, you'll be on the new rate" which would leave you with more confidence? Which is the better experience?

Companies need to be able to track the end-to-end business process. And, as Mark McDonald points out, they need to do that regardless of whether the process is embedded in their legacy systems, formally orchestrated in a BPM engine, or ad-hoc across distributed services (or all of the above!).

Frankly, it must be really hard to do, or more companies would do it. Was this process hard to track because it was part of a government program? Was it handled by different "systems" or teams for compliance reasons? Was there an external government processor that the bank integrated with and left the bank without a clear understanding of the SLA? Was the technology just not agile enough to meet the speed of the business? Said differently, the government was able to roll-out a refinance program faster than Wells Fargo's IT team could react, leaving Wells Fargo hanging with both the government and their frustrated customers. We all know the government is slow... is Wells Fargo's IT really slower?

Flood Insurance

This one baffles me. Aside from the fact that they already had the information they needed, it took me a few days because they wanted it via fax. I was uncertain because I thought maybe they needed something different than what they had, and was frustrated because I had no way to communicate with the person requesting the information.

I'm pretty organized. All my paperwork is scanned and searchable on my computer (and backed up!). Had I received an email request for information they would have had it in 5 minutes. Instead it took 5 days. That sounds like a compelling optimization. Someone has to care how quickly these things get processed (besides me and President Obama). Wasn't one of the early criticisms of these programs that they weren't being implemented quickly enough? After reading this story, do you wonder why?

Loan Amount

I was told it was a no-fee process, but the loan amount was way too high. I figured the bank didn't know what they were doing. A reasonable assumption based on my prior experience with the process. My call to the call center cost the bank money, and took more time. In truth, it was two calls. The first time I called they were too busy, and I waited then had to hang up. Why not just explain it clearly up front? Do they even know how many customers call with questions once receiving the paperwork? Do they know the length of the calls? Perhaps they can see the length, realize it's a quick question, and see if they can improve... again, it's not about the people or thought that goes into things. It's about sensing current business activities, and responding to patterns to improve the quality of the business.

Summary

Finally, I'm actually annoyed that I had to call the bank to see what the rates were. In fact, the bank should be scared of that as well. Imagine if I had called a competitor instead? Apparently the federal program I qualified for had been available for a while. Why wouldn't the bank have reached out to me? It would have impressed me, but also ensured I didn't call that competitor. In fact, this is a use case I worked on recently with an insurance company (different process, same idea).

Imagine being able to sense your customers' behavior and respond to their needs before they have a chance to look at a competitor?

Understanding the quality of the end-to-end business process and having the ability to take action based on events in real-time... that's Operational Responsiveness. It elevates the game and creates a barrier to entry against competitors. That's what the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite is meant to deliver for our customers.

Celebrating the shadow of Punxsutawney Phil

As the week of Punxsutawney Phil’s appearance commences, I must admit I’m one of the few that is happy to hear we have another 6 weeks of winter to look forward to! Why you ask, well that means more skiing and an extended window of time until I have to start worrying. Worrying about when to apply “Step 1” nutrients to my lawn, about how much the voles and moles have destroyed my plants, and about whether or not I warded off the dreaded Dutch Elm disease with the systemic treatment that was applied last fall. Bottom line is I have a 6 week reprieve.

But... what if I could apply technology to my yard, garden and even the infrastructure of my home. What if I could apply some fundamental concepts like automatic discovery, monitoring, management and control, across my household infrastructure? The possibilities are endless. I could set up points of visibility at strategic points in my yard such as the base of my newly planted Double Pink Weeping Cherry and at the perimeter of my bulbs. In the house I’d want visibility at the base of my water heater, sunk pump and egresses. With all this visibility I’d then establish a console where a complete infrastructure map would clearly reveal all activity that transacts in and around each point of visibility and if any issues were detected I could quickly and easily pin-point the root cause. And with points of control I could then dynamically control and avoid potential danger or damage such as voles eating the bark of my young cherry tree or avoid having my basement flood. Ohhhh wouldn’t this make life so much easier and a lot less costly.

Even though technology has not yet met my household needs, I still have hope. Maybe someday the principles and benefits of solutions like Actional for business transaction assurance will apply not only to the needs of enterprises with business critical transaction but to my needs as well. With Actional enterprises gain complete and automatic end-to-end visibility into their heterogeneous environment. Visibility that helps organizations understand the value of each transaction with the ability to dynamically control and optimize outcome. If enterprises can gain this level of business transaction management, I think it only makes sense that our next market should be the household management sector!