Business Making Progress

Failing to seize the opportunity - what bankers have in common with railroad tycoons

Following last week’s CEB TowerGroup, my main observation was that bankers are facing a ‘perfect storm’ that will necessitate a change in approach across the whole industry. Unfortunately it seems that bankers are still denying the circumstances they face, believing that they will survive.

Why do I say this? In a mobile, connected world, customers are becoming used to service levels that take into account their previous buying preferences, interests, background with the service provider and even their location. They are used to accessing services wherever and whenever they need to, via any channel, and are increasingly savvy to offers and promotions. Despite media stories of ‘Groupon fatigue’, the popularity of daily deal and voucher sites speaks of a new generation of bargain-hunters that often won’t make a purchase without some kind of added incentive.

Banks are not yet interested in this consumer trend, but they should be. Instead of seeing payments as a cost centre to their business, the data it gives them about customer spending habits, when combined with today’s mobile technology, provides a massive business opportunity.

At the moment, it seems like the banks are unable to see the bigger picture. Much like the railroad tycoons in early twentieth century America, they have the cash to invest but are not seeing the opportunity. Airlines were just setting up internal flights, which eventually became the competition that turned the railroads into a second-choice service that could only compete by discounting prices. The railroad owners could have got into the airline business, but instead of seeing themselves as transport providers, they only concerned themselves with the smaller world of railways. Bankers today, similarly, see themselves as providing a customer service that goes beyond today’s boundaries of banking. Traditionally, they’ve been the consumer’s trusted advisor. Now that trust is eroding, they will lose out if they don’t capture new ground. Otherwise, banking becomes a commodity and the only way to survive will be to drive further efficiencies and reduce costs.

In the very near future, customers will realise they don’t need banks, they need banking – and will shop around for the best offer if their loyalty has not been secured.

Solving the problem will require looking to new areas. At the CEB TowerGroup event, the key note speaker made this comparison: after 100 years of failed expeditions, Mount Everest was eventually conquered when new explorers brought in nylon ropes from the world of sailing (to avoid the problem of frozen ropes snapping) and oxygen masks that had been developed for fire fighters. Innovation is ‘out there’ – you don’t need to find it in your own discipline or reinvent the wheel, just observe how other sectors are embracing change and see what might help solve business problems in your area. When it comes to innovation, bankers would be wise to remember that to get to the top, they need to look to other areas for inspiration.

So where should banks look for innovation that will help them adapt their business for the next 20 years? Much of the technology they need to become more responsive to customers’ needs and open up new revenue streams already exists. Bringing together the engines from algorithmic trading, BPM technology from the telecoms industry and location-based services from the mobile world, they could make full use of the information they already have about what consumers like to buy (and where and when) to develop new, more targeted, offerings.

We have a vision for Responsive Customer Engagement, a technology approach that means a bank can respond to a customer’s actions and turn it into an opportunity to secure more revenue – and, perhaps more importantly – customer loyalty. One business model for this could be in providing a customer buying one item on their credit card access to offers and promotions from other merchants in their locality. The merchants – also the bank’s customers – would also become more bought-in, as their payments provider becomes their access to a mass of new custom.

I will be talking more about how these technologies could help banks tap into consumer trends and bring the change they need to survive in future blog posts. For now, I’d like to leave you with a thought from the mountain: if you haven’t yet reached the pinnacle, perhaps you are using the wrong tools. Don’t get left behind!

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.

 

 

 

 

Defining the “Responsive Supply Chain Executive”

Earthquakes, political uprisings and unforeseen every-day disruptions are just some of the stressful events that supply chain executives face daily. For any supply chain exec – especially those managing networks that span diverse geographies and markets – having visibility into the extended supply chain is a key component to staying on top of issues, improving responsiveness and meeting SLAs. All told, a lot goes into being a responsive supply chain executive in today’s environment. Here are two main must haves:

 

Real-time Visibility

Many businesses suffer from supply chain blind spots, impeding their ability to quickly recover from unexpected events and efficiently re-sequence their extended supply chain. A responsive supply chain executive must have real-time visibility throughout the entire network. This visibility allows managers to effectively “light up” those blind spots and proactively monitor the entire chain (no matter how dispersed it may be) to ensure that all processes are running smoothly through every touch point along the way. It also empowers executives to spot disruptions early, at any point in the system, and respond to them before they snowball and affect end deliverables and SLAs. Which brings us to our next must have…

 

Actionable Insight 

Being able to see the disruption is all well and good, but if you can’t react to it and address it, all benefit is lost. Responsive supply chain executives must have actionable insight, meaning they must be equipped with the ability to correct disturbances rather than simply acknowledge their existence. The ability to quickly respond to out-of-plan events allows execs to rapidly re-sequence their extended supply chain, meeting every SLA.

Until the day when we can correctly predict the future, supply chains will always be hindered by unexpected, uncontrollable events. When confronted with such an event – whether it be a natural disaster, geo-political issue or simple human error – the ability to quickly identify and respond is critical. In the absence of a crystal ball, advanced technology arms us with the ability to sense trouble and respond so we can keep supply chains active and flowing, despite what the world may throw at them.

 

 

Making 'Cents' of the Shifting Business Landscape

Last fall we collaborated with the Economist Intelligence Unit to look at how companies around the world are responding to the rapidly increasing pace of change in business. While I touched on some of the early quantitative results in a post for The Business Insider in September, the Economist researchers recently released some compelling qualitative data that shines a light on the ways organizations are tackling operational responsiveness.

 

A few key points caught my attention:

• Leaders need to be willing to conceive multiple futures and embrace uncertainty

“Companies need leaders who are tolerant of ambiguity and who can make others feel comfortable about that. They have to instill confidence in their teams that they are making the right decisions, even though it’s not clear how the future will evolve.” – Lowell Bryan, McKinsey

• Executives should listen to messages from the frontline 

“One of the most powerful sources of information about emerging adaptive opportunities and pressures lies at the frontline. Employees who interact with customers are always the first to get the clues and early warning signs about new sources of opportunity or competition.”

–      Ronald Heifetz, co-founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government

• Cultures will need to adapt 

“Most people have a bias towards the status quo, so when they are faced with a disruptive opportunity or threat, they see it as a virus they want to kill.”

-       Hal Gregersen of INSEAD

• Setting up a new division can be an effective way of managing disruptive change

“Setting up a separate unit with its own P&L and management allows that unit to focus on the breakthrough disruptive change, while the old unit can be shrunk down and moved to a space in which it can survive.”

-       Clark Gilbert, president and CEO of Deseret News and Deseret Digital, and a former professor at Harvard Business School

 

I encourage you to take a look at the Economist Intelligence Unit’s full report, Game Changer to hear more from these leaders and explore how you can affect change, stay ahead of competition and drive your bottom line.

And for those of you interested in more on the quantitative data, check out this infographic: 

Tweet and Be Damned

The following is an excerpt from Dr. John Bates’ recent commentary on Huffington Post, which discusses Twitter’s ability to predict financial market sentiment. 

Another firm has jumped on the Twitter sentiment bandwagon; Topsy Labs is planning to release a Twitter trading tool to investors later this year. Topsy follows U.K. hedge fund Derwent Capital, which launched a fund last year using a Twitter algo that claims to predict market direction three or four days in advance with nearly 88% accuracy. And U.S. firm Wall Street Birds, which offers a free service for investors to use to make investment decisions based on the analysis of social media data. (It has become so popular that to sign up you must get invited by an existing user.)

But are emotionally laden Twitter messages able to provide reliable bellwethers for market sentiment? As I said in an interview with Advanced Trading in April, I think you can use a Twitter algo to get a sentiment reading on particular topics, but by the time you've got the information it is more of a trailing indicator rather than a leading indicator.

Read the full post from Dr. Bates here. 

 

Improving the Banking Customer Experience - An Internal Perspective

Banking organizations are fraught with silos. Operating this way must feel like looking at the world through a straw, I imagine. With a limited view, your ability to affect change is thwarted by the distortion of the full magnitude of any given situation. With this narrow perspective, you’re vulnerable to errors or worse, fraud and revenue leakage.

Compounding this issue is the increase in customer demands. As expectations rise, tolerance for dissatisfying banking customer experience is at an all time low, and grumbling customers take to social networks to complain.

The good news is: there’s an answer. Banks can reevaluate their operations and gain the critical business level visibility needed to achieve premier levels of customer support. To do this, business leaders should assess four key areas:

• Volume – the number of customer requests coming in through all channels such as call center, online, mobile etc.

• Velocity – the pace of customer expectations (same session service expectations) and the ability to meet big data and customer requirements in real time at the moment they are requested

• Variety – the variety of data and channels we see such as web, mobile, call center, outsourcing services etc. The more channels there are, the harder it is to track, control and resolve issues before they reach the customer. Many institutions now outsource IT needs, etc. making it even harder to control each channel 

• Complexity – having end-to-end visibility into internal transactions despite multiple channels

You simply cannot offer new products and services and maintain consistent customer experience if you have not taken a hard look at your internal operations. The lack of visibility makes the complex dependencies between data sources and channels too hard to see and thus too hard to control.

To hear more about gaining end-to-end visibility in the banking world, check out Bank Systems & Technology’s recent webcast, “Customer Transaction Management - Gaining Visibility, Control and Reliability.” 

 

The Internet of Things Expands

A friend of mine recently told me he was surprised by an experience he had with some of his Apple products. He had downloaded a couple of games for his iPhone from the App Store.

The next time he opened his iPad, the games were already there, even though he hadn’t taken any action to sync them up. His two devices and the app-store cloud had gone off and talked amongst themselves and done whatever needed to be done.

Most of us simply accept the wonders of the Apple ecosystem without trying to figure out what’s behind it.  But my friend's experience is just one example of the growing value in empowering the “Internet of things” to drive business processes.

An increasing variety of non-electronic systems are starting to be transformed by inter-machine communications. Those communications control business processes that are becoming faster and more automatic. 

W. Brian Arthur, a visiting researcher with the Intelligent System Lab at the Palo Alto Research Center, recently wrote an article in McKinsey Quarterly, pointing out that underpinning the real world is a second, digital world that is growing exponentially. It is, in fact, controlling more and more of the real world.

Arthur uses the example of a package of machine parts being shipped into Rotterdam. Its arrival on a pallet is registered by RFID; typically the information is then forwarded to the freight terminal that will receive it next and the trucker who needs to carry it and the factory that is awaiting it.  All that information drives human activity, but the commands didn’t come from humans, they came from automated communications between machines. 

The communications among the machines make the whole process highly responsive.  People get involved only when they’re needed for tasks like driving the truck, or opening the loading dock door.

In the real world of airline delays, responsive process management is playing a growing role. New regulations fine airlines up to $27,000 per passenger for keeping passengers trapped in planes on the tarmac for more than three hours, even in cases of unavoidable storm delays. That has forced airlines to develop automated processes that recognize when a plane is within 30 minutes of that limit and start taking needed steps. If all gates are occupied, the airline must find a gate that is about to board, and delay that flight so the first one can return to the gate. It has to try to assemble a new crew to make sure flight-time limits aren’t exceeded. It has to start rebooking passengers with connections and identifying preferred fliers for special treatment. This kind of responsiveness demands electronic processes that tell humans what to do. 

Cisco estimates that by 2020, there will be 50 billion devices connected to the Internet. While many people will have more than one device they use to reach the Internet, most Internet-connected devices won’t be human-interface tools. They will be machines that will communicate with other machines in processes that only occasionally reach out for human intervention.

These tools promise to make our world work a lot better. In some cases they will improve efficiency, reduce pollution, cut costs and boost profits. In others they will amuse us, entertain us or monitor us.

The reality is that the tools themselves will mostly be useful by communicating with each other. Those communications will initiate processes. Businesses can’t rely on humans being able to absorb the growing amount of information and quickly respond to changing events. They need to use modern software technology to design responsive processes that will take the right actions. 

 

Consulting our crystal ball: IT Predictions for 2012

With the New Year just around the corner, many are busy thinking up unattainable diet and fitness resolutions, but we here at Progress have instead spent our time collaborating on more realistic forecasts for the coming year.

The team here at Progress put our heads together to produce our top predictions on how the role of IT within the business will change in 2012. An increased emphasis on cloud development, data security and social integration are all issues we expect organizations to prioritize over the next twelve months, but the list doesn’t stop there. Here’s a quick look at where we see business IT going in the coming year:

1. Cloud on the move. Organizations will increase deployment of the public cloud, escalating demand for cloud-enabled systems and applications.
2. Cost control evolves to efficiency. While cost was the main driver of cloud adoption in the past, the focus will now expand to include system efficiencies and time to market.
3. Data security starts with secure access. Who will have access to the data? How will it be encrypted? Who is the core owner? A strong driver that runs on a stable and tested data interface like ODBC is the best line of defense as application stacks continue to grow.
4. RIP: Non web-based applications. Approximately 80% of business apps will be web-based, and they need to be business process enabled, web-based and cloud-deployed.
5. IT border control. More than half of all content and functionality will be out of your organization’s control … in the hands of outsourcers, supply chain partners and external community databases. How will it be protected is the question du jour.
6. What’s in the fire hose? While we may see companies promoting fancy strategies for managing “fire hose data,” only those focused on responsive analytics will make meaning from the massive deluge.  
7. Limitations of freeware. This year, we will see greater support for ODBC and investment in data connectivity as companies look for dependable, robust ODBC drivers to handle financial transactions securely and quickly.
8. All hail the social enterprise. Social collaboration apps will dominate as employees look for ways to more effectively share and innovate across regions and lines of business; in fact, users will begin to expect these capabilities to be offered as standard, embedded features in business applications. 

And there they are: Progress’ IT predictions for 2012… how do they stack up to what you have in mind? We welcome comments below or on Twitter at @DrJohnBates or @ProgressSW

In the words of Mark Allen, founder of Corticon

Corticon founder Dr. Mark Allen shares the full story behind rules management innovation:  

The idea for Corticon started back in 1995, during my medical training at UCLA.  As a part of government-funded research projects, I built rule-based systems to automate clinical decisions, such as what diagnostic tests to order, or treatments to render.  My research proved that physicians using these systems practiced a much higher quality of care at a lower cost (they ordered more of the appropriate tests and treatments, but far fewer of the inappropriate ones).  And, they were twice as fast in the encounter.  I was sold.  This was the future of medicine.

The problem was that the systems were prohibitively difficult to build and maintain.  Using the best available software development technologies, and a great team of programmers, the systems took years to develop.  Worse still, as soon as we finished development, the guidelines would change.  Even simple changes would take weeks to code, and would often break our systems.  I became very interested in this problem, and how to solve it.

I discovered ways to more easily visualize the logic as sets of interrelated business rules.  This provided a common language between subject matter experts, who defined the business rules, and programmers, who implemented the rules.  Ultimately, this helped accelerate application development and change cycles, and ensure the accuracy of the logic.

I saw the opportunity to transform not just healthcare delivery, but also decision-making within other industries.  In early 2000, I joined forces with Pedram Abrari, an expert in Enterprise Java, XML and AI technologies. He brought deep expertise in developing rule-based systems in financial services and HR applications as well as innovative ideas to incorporate into our product. Our founding team of expert engineers began building the Corticon solution, and today, Corticon products are used to power billions of decisions every day in diverse industries and applications.

Now, as part of Progress’ extensive BPM, BI and CEP offerings, Corticon BRMS has the ability to expand into new areas of decision management and responsive actions. We are excited to begin the next chapter of business agility and responsiveness with Progress Software. 

If you have questions or comments, feel free to contact me at maallen@progress.com. If you’re an existing Corticon customer, you can continue to use your existing Corticon contacts for support, professional services and sales, and if you’d like more information about our solutions, please contact a Progress/Corticon sales person through www.corticon.com.

 

Exciting news: Progress Software Acquires Corticon

Today, Progress announced the acquisition of Corticon, an industry leader in the Business Rules Management System (BRMS) market. I’m incredibly excited about this acquisition. I want to take a moment to talk about why we made the decision to acquire Corticon and why I’m so thrilled.

As you know, Progress is the “responsive business specialist”. A responsive business is one that can see how effectively it is running right now and over time, that can proactively address opportunities and threats, and can continuously improve the performance of its business operations. One key part of the responsive business is decision management – making decisions in the moment. And that’s what Corticon specializes in. Corticon delivers a business rules engine that automates business decisions, enabling more efficient and responsive operations. So whether it is a complex set of rules to decide if someone qualifies for an insurance policy, or to decide whether fraud is going on, or to decide on whatever business decisions need to be made, Corticon enables that complex decision logic to be defined simply and executed efficiently. Pretty useful stuff!

The really cool thing about Corticon is that it is safe to put in the hands of a pure business user. Corticon offers graphical tools to compose rules that can automatically detect conflicts and loss of integrity in rule sets at design time. This contrasts with having to do comprehensive run-time testing using other rule approaches. With Corticon, you can detect problems before you go live. You have the necessary guard rails to de-risk the system and to improve time-to-value. That fits perfectly into Progress’ vision of empowering the business user alongside the business analyst and IT user.

Corticon will be integrated into Progress’ RPM Suite. This will combine Corticon’s BRMS with Progress’ Business Process Management (BPM), Business Event Processing (BEP), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA) and Business Analytics. Through the Progress Control Tower, the vision is that a single command and control interface can provide visibility and control across your business. As IDC’s Maureen Fleming said, "high quality and comprehensive rules and decision services capabilities are required for a best-of-breed platform." And we believe Corticon is the best rules engine out there. Also the Corticon team are fantastic and we welcome them whole heartedly into the Progress family.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to take a minute to view this video from Dr. Mark Allen, founder of Corticon. You’ll agree, he had remarkable vision in 2000 when he started the company. And by integrating it with our RPM suite, we are now offering customers a comprehensive single vendor solution.

We’re excited to add Mark Allen and the rest of his team at Corticon to the Progress family and are looking forward to offering our customers a better way to manage their businesses in real-time.

Computerized Compliance: Savior or Intruder?

Several top executives of UBS, one of the world’s biggest banks, resigned in disgrace this fall following the announcement that a very junior rogue trader in the London office had managed to lose the astounding sum of $2 billion.

Government regulators had already been pushing banks to make sure they knew their risks and commitments at all times. Clearly, UBS didn’t have the automated systems in place that would have alerted higher-ups to the exposure. Some critics asked how an individual ETF trader could have authorization to take such a huge risk. Presumably UBS had set limits for each level of trader, but a flaw in the system let the man keep increasing his exposure.

Automating compliance in the world banking systems should be a no brainer. With the velocity and volume of transactions, only computers can make the trades, and only computers can monitor them. Some regulators buy real-time market surveillance monitoring from Progress Software, the same company that provides real-time trading software to investors (and the sponsor of this blog).

But computerized compliance can be a two-edged sword. It can be so restrictive that traders can’t do their jobs of creatively managing risk. 

And when corporate managers start pushing their CIOs to monitor compliance in other areas they can get into difficult areas of employee privacy. MIT research fellow Michael Shrage, recently wrote in Harvard Business Review that, “very few CIOs want to become the ‘Chief Interrogation Officer’ or ‘Chief Invasiveness Officer.’ But those are roughly the roles they're being asked to assume as the enterprise dependence on their technologies expands.”  He points to requirements to monitor e-mails and text messages for disclosure of secrets or terms of harassment.

Most companies make it clear to employees that they should have no expectation of privacy for anything they do on a corporate computer or corporate network. And workers are coming to understand that anything bad that they say about their companies on their private Facebook pages or Twitter feeds could get them fired.

The issues of compliance and privacy are becoming more difficult as companies increasingly allow employees to use their own technology, such as iPads and iPhones, on the corporate network. It’s very easy to accidentally write an intemperate e-mail or forward an inappropriate picture with your corporate account rather than your private HotMail.

The ability to monitor all kinds of electronic activity by employees makes it tempting for companies to do so. But they need to carefully consider exactly what they want to monitor. And they should let employees know the boundaries.

Some companies have adopted loose guidelines. Microsoft’s unofficial policy on employee blogging is “don’t be stupid.” But with Millennials entering the workforce, understanding of what is “stupid” may be lacking. Someone has to warn them that lines that were clever on their semester-abroad blog might be offensive in a work Wiki.

Computerized compliance is a necessity in many functions. But companies need to consider carefully what they monitor and what they do with the information they gather.

What is RPM?

This week Progress Software end users and partners worldwide gathered in Boston to get some actionable insights that will help them lower costs, raise efficiency, improve customer experiences, and drive revenue. Our attendees have the ability to chose from over 100 sessions designed specifically for business and IT professionals. One of our breakouts is dedicated to Responsive Process Management (RPM) which is a topic we’ve been talking about a lot over the past year. The introduction of RPM has stimulated discussions around our hallways and within the industry on what RPM exactly is…

• Is RPM the Next-generation BPM?
• Is RPM a totally new and different concept?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Below are two articles written by Daniel Schlosky. Dan is a technology writer with more than two decades of experience writing for companies like Sun Microsystems, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Western Digital. He’s also written for publications such as Datamation, Silicon Strategies, and in-house publications for Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments.

Take a minute to look at both perspectives and TELL US WHAT YOU THINK!

To share your thoughts, click the Comments link below.

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BPM Is Still Evolving

In the early 1990s, the first Business Process Management (BPM) systems could track processes with only limited scaling and relatively few users. Adequate for tracking accounting or claims processes, they were not yet up to handling an entire company’s purchasing system that services tens of thousands of people. Since then, BPM has evolved into much more powerful and mature systems. They all now include process engines, process modeling, asset repositories, etc. Current large, robust enterprise BPM systems have great complexity and functionality, while web-based departmental BPM systems are usually simpler but still highly proficient.

Today’s BPM systems are extremely powerful and capable. They focus mainly on cutting costs by making companies more efficient through iterative, continuously improving processes. While BPM systems have come quite far, they are still advancing. Several new trends are making them even more powerful and useful.  

One new trend that goes beyond cost cutting is finding new revenue sources. For example, Progress BPM enabled an airline to expand its revenue stream by building an application to connect to alliance partner airlines. The customer, after paying a small insurance fee, is assured that if a flight cancellation occurs, the airline will automatically rebook him/her on the next alliance partner’s flight. It would also automatically change hotel reservations, cancel and rebook rental cars, etc. Happy customers are now saved from the hassle of rescheduling everything themselves – and the airline adds to its bottom line.

A second important trend is including complex event processing in BPM systems. With this capability, managers can monitor streams of activities such as stock market transactions, airline scheduling, and communications ordering systems. One basically searches for patterns and anomalies within those patterns. Although some other BPM systems may also deal with events, Progress BPM, when combined with the company’s Apama business event processing (BEP) platform, sets it apart in both power and performance.

A third new trend is the mobility enablement of BPM systems. These systems can now interconnect with intelligent handheld devices to speed up handling tasks with greater user convenience. For a BPMS process tracking purchase requests and approvals, managers can now actually respond to them on their iPods or blackberries without having to fully log onto financial applications on their laptops. This new mobile capability both simplifies the approval process and saves time.

Yet another significant new trend is enabling greater collaboration, especially in process modeling. Coupled with the new mobility, this is an even stronger improvement. The objective is to have managers in different locations review and provide input for the process model and simulation. Having this collaborative capability in the process planning stages is a major benefit.

These four innovations of the latest BPM systems – finding new revenue sources, events processing, enabling mobility and facilitating collaboration – are the leading new trends in the ongoing evolution of BPM. 

 

The Progress® RPM Suite – Is It Really About BPM?

What exactly is Responsive Process Management (RPM)? Is it a natural extension of BPM, or a totally new and different concept? Analysts and customers generally agree that RPM is an evolution of high-end BPM Gartner talks about Intelligent Business Operations as a development from BPM for responsive operations. Forrester refers to Business Transformation and IDC to Decision Management as expansions of BPM. Others, mainly business rather than technology professionals, see RPM as a completely new domain, one with greater ROI and faster time to value.

A recent Vanson Bourne independent research study found that most businesses are unable to respond to market or customer changes quickly enough to be competitive. RPM triumphs over this challenge with a very high level of operational responsiveness – the ability to sense and respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur. If not totally new, RPM raises its responses to a whole new level of power and possibility. Savvion BPM is an integral part of Progress’ RPM Suite, but so are the company’s Apama business event processing (BEP) platform and Actional business transaction management (BTM) solution. To cap these three systems, the Suite adds its new groundbreaking Progress Control Tower, a first-of-its kind interactive business control panel that ties the three systems together for unprecedented responsiveness capabilities.

The Control Tower is the central RPM control point for

• Modeling and simulating processes
• Automatic documenting of processes
• Drilling down and analyzing information
• Cross-collaborating with team members
• Taking corrective steps as needed
• Continuously improving processes
• Reducing risk

So with all this said, which is it – a natural evolution of BPM or a totally new concept? Convincing arguments can be made for each view. If it’s an extension of BPM, it goes much further by adding real-time, end-to-end visibility into events and applications; enabling immediate response to situations when they arise; allowing users to capitalize on opportunities; and empowering business users with greater control for continuous business improvement.

What do you think? To share your thoughts, click the Comments link below.

 

End to end visibility - coming to a supply chain near you

I have been fortunate to particpate in the 2011 Gartner Supply Chain Executive Conference in London, an assembly of leading supply chain practictioners where we spend 3 days listening to latest thinking for Gartner/AMR Research analysts (I will always think of many the AMR analysts in that light!). The underlying theme for supply chains is that we are moving to a new generation of innovation, a manner for enterprises to build the systems and capabilities to elevate their extended supply chains.

What is one of the building blocks at the heart of this transformation? End to end supply chain visbility of course! Gartner highlights a theme which revolves around the VUCA concept -

• Volatility
• Uncertainty
• Complexity
• Ambiguity

Supply chains need to integrate end to end visibility, supply chain sensing and responsiveness to be able to survive in a world where VUCA lurks at every corner. This ability to successfully weave together these abilities through your technology is paramount to your supply chain achieving a high level. One aspect that we must also consider is that no matter how good the visibility and functions technology brings to the extended supply chain, at some point there must be a human intervention when it comes to make decisions. Companies cannot ignore the need to have the appropriate supply chain leadership within their organizations who can leverage these new tools to their full potential.

Which is another element that Gartner hightlighted - supply chain talent management.

Vendors can provide enterprises with some world class capabilities, but enterprises need to put the right level of talent at the controls.

Want to discuss VUCA, visibility, control towers and other supply chain issues of today? Please send me your comments and if you are at the Gartner conference come by the Progress booth! Or please come to Progress Revolution in Boston next week and we can discuss over a bowl of clam chowder.

Is Revolution the Path to Transparency?

Revolutions are proliferating.  When you watch a revolution happening elsewhere, political or otherwise, it’s a good time to contemplate the revolution in your own history, or in your future.  There are few among us that can’t point to one or the other.  One of the common drivers is the fear that something is happening where we can’t see it happen, and we want transparency – of process, of government – of whatever seems to be wrong.

The capital markets globally are experiencing a similar revolution now with regulatory change, and the current climate threatens to create a revolt as well.  Market participants may push back on reforms to the point of creating a new state of stress.  Either way, the future presents very real threats to companies that aren’t prepared.  We’re observing a vast expansion of global rulemaking, and a coming deluge of data - especially in the derivatives markets. It’s very expensive and distracting to fix problems after the fact, so we need to act now.  “Hope is not a strategy” – as is often said to have been uttered by famed (American) football coach Vince Lombardi.

In an open letter to Barack Obama published on January 23, 2009, Benjamin Ola Akande advised, "Yet, the fact remains that hope will not reduce housing foreclosures. Hope does not stop a recession. Hope cannot create jobs. Hope will not prevent catastrophic failures of banks. Hope is not a strategy."

Now we have the Dodd-Frank Act in the U.S., MiFID II and EMIR in Europe, all preceded by the de Larosiere Report (EC, 2009), Turner Report (FSA, 2009), Volcker Report (G30, 2009), G20 – Feb 2009 Declarations, Financial Stability Forum Report (FSF, 2009), INF Report (IMF, 2009), Walker Review (UK, 2009), Basel / IOSCO Reviews… the list goes on.  And the rest of the world is watching, waiting, for another revolution.  The intended scope of the most recent reforms seems to almost be panacea, and transparency is the first step.

The next Revolution is happening in Boston, fittingly.  Progress Revolution 2011, from September 19^ththrough the 22^nd, offers the chance to learn from industry innovators on how they have successfully tackled these challenges within the capital markets.  Customers including PLUS Markets and Morgan Stanley will be there to share success stories.  And Kevin McPartland, Principal at the TABB Group, will be there too.  I’ve included a sneak peek into Kevin’s “Path to Transparency” below.

According to the New York Times, at the Republican Convention in 2008, Rudy Giuliani once said while contemplating Barack Obama’s candidacy, “… ‘change’ is not a destination ... just as ‘hope’ is not a strategy.”  Rudy will be speaking at our Revolution too.  Will you be there?  It will be a lively conference – I hope that you can join us!

-Dan

The Path to Transparency

By Kevin McPartland, Principal, TABB Group

Managing the vast quantities of data born into existence by the Dodd Frank Act and related regulation will present a challenge in the post-DFA environment; but collecting and producing the required data is just the tip of the iceberg. The ability to analyze and act on that data is what will separate the survivors from the winners. This is already true in many other parts of the global financial markets, but the complexities inherent in swaps trading coupled with the speed at which these changes will take place creates unique challenges. Spread this across all five major asset classes and three major geographies, and the complexities become more pronounced.

Margin calculations are proving to be one of the biggest concerns for those revamping their OTC derivatives infrastructure. In a non-cleared world, dealers determine collateral requirements for each client and collect variation margin on a periodic schedule—in some cases once a month, and in other cases once a year. When those swaps are moved to a cleared environment, margin calculations will need to occur at least daily. The result is an upgrade of the current batch process with dozens of inputs to a near-real time process, with hundreds of inputs. Whereas before major dealers could perform margin analysis, client reporting and risk management in a single system, those systems now need to operate independently within an infrastructure that provides the necessary capacity and speed.

The trading desk will require a similar seismic shift, as flow businesses will provide liquidity across multiple trading venues to an expanding client base. Most major dealers are at some stage of developing liquidity aggregation technology intended to provide a single view of liquidity across multiple swap execution venues. Creating this type of virtual order book requires receiving multiple real-time data feeds and aggregating the bids and offers in real time.

Furthermore, rather than comparing model-derived prices to the last trade price to produce quotes, inputs from SEFs, CCPs, SDRs, internal models, third-party models and market data providers will be required inputs to real-time trading algorithms once reserved for exchange-traded derivatives.

Providing clients with execution services presents other challenges. Executing on multiple platforms also means tracking and applying commission rates per client per venue in real time. Trade allocations also complicate the execution process.  In the bilateral world a big asset manager can do a $100 million interest rate swap and spread that exposure across multiple funds as it sees fit. Under the DFA, the executing broker must know which funds are getting how much exposure. Account allocation in and of itself is not new, but cost averaging multiple swap trades and allocating the right exposure at the right price to the proper account presents complex challenges, especially in a near-real time environment.

Risk management, compliance and back-testing data will also require huge increases in processing power, often at lower latencies. Risk models and stress tests, for example, are much more robust than they were before the financial crisis, requiring a considerably higher amount of historical data.

Compliance departments now must store the requisite seven years of data so they can reconstruct any trade at any moment in the past. This is complicated enough in listed markets, when every market data tick must be stored, but for fixed-income securities and other swaps, storing the needed curves means that billions of records must not only be filed away but retrievable on demand. Similar concerns exist for quants back-testing their latest trading strategies: It is not only the new data being generated that must be dealt with. Existing data, too, is about to see a huge uptick in requirements.

In the end these changes should achieve some of the goals set forth by Congress as they enacted Dodd Frank – increased transparency and reduced systemic risk.  The road there will be bumpy and expensive, but the opportunities created by both the journey and the destination will outweigh any short term pain.

This perspective was taken from the recent TABB Group study Technology and Financial Reform: Data, Derivatives and Decision Making.

 

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.

Banking Industry Session Sneak Peek - Richard Bentley on Responsive Customer Engagement

 

Maintaining customer loyalty and identifying new revenue opportunities is are recurring themes within today’s banking industry. As mobility and social computing proliferate, the ‘instant-on’ customer need more and more touch points. Although a challenge from the perspective of data security, storage and compliance, there are significant cross and up-sell opportunities that are ripe for the taking.

Today, in a special drill down post, Progress Industry Vice President for Banking, Richard Bentley, shares his take on Responsive Customer Engagement as well as other topics he’ll be exploring during his talk at Revolution.

To read Richard’s full post, click here.

 

Why and How Responsive Process Management Differs and Augments Business Process Management

Next month I’ll be speaking at the Progress Revolution Conference in Boston.  As I prepare for my talk and review presentations by our customers I’m struck and pleased by just how much companies have improved their bottom line through Business Process Management (BPM).  It’s incredible to see the growth from a mere technology solution to an established best practice.

Obviously, it’s not surprising that a solution that reduces costs, improves quality and boosts efficiency delivers better business results. However, cost management and streamlining processes are only half the picture.

Many companies are challenged by the increased velocity of business operation, reporting lags, fragmented functional areas and an inability to quickly and effectively analyze a complex chain of business events and respond appropriately.  When you don’t have visibility into business events and access to all the information you need at your fingertips precisely when you need it, opportunities are lost.

The key to Responsive Process Management (RPM) is actionable insight. Without it you’re analyzing what HAS happened instead of what’s about to happen. Hence, you’re powerless to affect the outcome. Consider how many companies first learn about a problem from their customers – after the damage is already done. 

Imagine that you work for a transportation company and that one of your trucks carrying a critical shipment on behalf of a key customer breaks down on the highway.  With RPM in place, all stakeholders have immediate visibility to the situation and can act quickly to implement a solution. They do not need to wait until they are told about it. Your logistics team will know to send another truck to complete the shipment, your scheduler will be able to update the delivery window and shift resources as needed, and your account management team can keep your client appropriately updated.

Without RPM it’s highly likely that your team will learn about the incident only when the customer calls to report that the shipment never arrived. The damage is done – your people are scrambling, your customer is dissatisfied, and your relationship is compromised.

The cost of cleaning up business messes extends beyond time and resources.  Your reputation and brand equity suffers.  You’re distracted and likely missing out on revenue producing opportunities.  Your position in the marketplace erodes as your competitors pass you by.

It is critical to be able to dynamically control the outcomes and handle exceptions that impact your business.  By responding to opportunities and threats within the actionable window, you eliminate disruption and distraction while increasing revenue.

RPM provides actionable insight. It presents a company comprehensive visibility into any combination of processes and events.  All users of the RPM solution have access to the whole picture.  Information flows seamlessly from all relevant sources within the organization and outside of it.

This puts everyone on the same page at the same time.  Your staff can anticipate and solve problems, reset priorities, keep customers happy, and leverage dynamic revenue producing opportunities.

Because everyone’s operating from the same vantage point, you can proactively collaborate on day-to-day operations to improve efficiency, increase revenue and provide a better customer experience.  

Businesses are facing increasingly complex operational challenges – more stringent regulations and higher transaction volume increase compliance requirements and risk.  RPM helps you anticipate threats around non-compliance and fraud by providing the insight necessary to head off these events before they become full-blown problems.

It’s not enough to focus on cost reduction and streamlined processes.  To achieve meaningful business performance improvement, you can’t ignore RPM and the power of agility and ability to sense and respond through real-time visibility.  It’s good for the organization and it’s good for the customer.

I hope you can attend my breakout session, “RPM Enables Enterprises to Improve their Top and Bottom Lines” at the Progress Revolution Conference in Boston this year. I’m speaking on Tuesday, September 20, 2:30 – 3:30pm. Click here to learn more.

The Travel Technology Revolution and What It Means For You

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

It was a pleasure to attend the SITA Air Transport IT Summit in Brussels and to see more than 300 delegates taking part in a lively, energetic discussion on a wide range of issues affecting the Travel and Leisure industry. Interestingly, of all the topics of conversation we saw during the two-day summit, the one that delegates kept coming back to was the extent to which technology was helping to bring them closer to their customers. But how prevalent is the travel technology revolution in the airline industry – and can it really add value?

It’s clear that the industry today finds itself is in a period of significant transition. With more congestion on the ground, and more complicated systems and processes in place, there’s an increased likelihood of things going wrong, meaning that for many, irregular operations are increasingly becoming the new standard. As a result, more organizations are turning to technology to help them predict these irregularities, manage contingencies and add value to their customers.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that today’s customers are very different to those we saw five or ten years ago. Advances in consumer technology in recent years mean that we’ve seen sweeping changes in customer behaviour during the same period, which brings its own set of challenges. Today’s passengers are a new breed of technology-savvy consumer who are ready, willing and able to tell people what is happening at all stages of their journey, using their smartphone or other mobile devices – particularly if they feel something is going wrong.

This, in turn, means that airlines must work even harder to connect the dots for their customers, with many turning to complex event processing (CEP) software which allows them to keep track of everything from reservations to the status of baggage as they strive to be truly responsive to the needs of their passengers.

Another key theme at the summit was the willingness to embrace cloud computing as a solution. In the past, concerns over the feasibility of cloud solutions have dominated, but this year was different. Indeed, most of the people I spoke to seemed to agree that by owning 100% of their assets, they had been missing a significant number of opportunities. As a result of coming to this conclusion, many had been entering into serious discussions around investing in cloud solutions, with some building the infrastructure required to deliver reservation and departure information as well as enhanced customer service across this platform.

Of course, while concerns remain about speed and security of cloud services, it’s perhaps too much of a stretch to argue that widespread adoption of this technology is imminent.  But what is clear is the extent to which the industry is waking up to the fact that cloud and other technologies can benefit and enable their customers.

In the twenty-first century, the technology-enabled customer is king, and those in the industry are having to work harder than ever to give them the information they need, and to provide solutions which will increase the overall quality of service.  The role that technology can play in bridging this gap should not be overestimated – isn’t it time you asked how prepared your organization is for the technological revolution?

Comment to this post and tell us what you think!

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!

Why Streamlined IT Processes are the Key to Growth

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

According to recent figures released by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), industry profit forecasts so far for 2011 will drop 54% from $8.6 billion to $4 billion, with the recent spike in jet-fuel prices being cited as the key reason.

If the IATA’s recent profitability forecast has shown us anything, considerable changes need to be made if the current slide in profitability is to be reversed. The international trade body also suggested that we could see a drop in year-on-year profitability of as much as 78% in 2011, underlining the fact that the need to cut operational expenses across the industry has never been more pressing.  Of course, there are several ways to achieve this, and we’re already seeing the airlines industry looking to slash maintenance budgets and reduce distribution coasts.

The problem is that a variety of global pressures are driving this need to cut costs, which, in turn, means that growth can be difficult to achieve.  Certainly, low-cost airlines seem to have an advantage in this respect, as their comparative size makes it easier to undercut their larger rivals in terms of price; but it’s also true that they find it easier to drive growth by forming strategic alliances, which allow them to broaden their offering.

Alliances in the industry are not a new concept, and it’s become commonplace to see an extended travel itinerary containing two or three different carriers. However, what’s less well known is that in order for these alliances to work, IT systems owned by the operators must be integrated to allow them to share all relevant information, such as reservation details or baggage retrieval. The trouble is that many of the larger airlines have large, complicated legacy IT infrastructures, which can take years to integrate into other processes.

Low-cost airlines, on the other hand, tend to have more streamlined processes, which makes it easier for them to manage data and integrate systems which means growth is much more achievable.

It seems clear to me that, in the coming years, we’ll see more established players turning to more responsive software which can work alongside existing processes to drive down the time it takes to integrate processes. Clearly, the lesson for major airlines is that simplified, uncomplicated IT processes can open the doorway to growth – and help them to remain competitive.

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.

From location based to situation based services: What are the key differentiators for the mobile operator?

Location-based services (LBS) have found their way to the heart of the mobile value proposition. According to the analyst firm Forrester, 30 per cent of European online consumers with mobile phones are interested in using mobile GPS/navigation services, while 52 per cent of Smartphone owners with unlimited mobile Internet packages already do so. While the prominence of LBS is clear,  I'm concerned that the traditional LBS model doesn't have enough local efficiency built into the system to scale geographically. 

This means that as networks sell to advertisers and attempt to match them to a publisher network, very few of those ads carry any LBS at all. Those that offer "local" targeting have meant city and, in some cases, area code – which is fine for tests but doesn't warrant a premium for location. In light of this, how are the new locations- and context-based technology now available different from traditional LBS, and how does it provide the operator with more fine-grained visibility into user activity? 

New situation-aware technology translates specific contexts into logical situations, like ‘being in a car that is almost out of fuel’. If a system knows such a situation, it is able to deliver the user more specific information. As a result, operators are now able to continuously monitor millions of users who are generating events depending on their situations. This is in contrast to the traditional LBS model, which sent users information purely on their location, not based on what they were doing when at the location. As a result of having this enhanced visibility into user behaviour, operators will now be able to target more accurate location-based advertising and promotions based on the users' usage patterns when they are at a specific location.

So in light of the continued interest in LBS, it’s worth asking: would you rather have a location-based service, or will situation-aware based technologies soon be top of mind?

Dr. Ketabchi Reveals Secret Sauce of BPM

Are you a business or IT person who wants to... Reduce costs? Improve quality? Manage exceptions? Increase revenue? Most likely, it's all of the above.

Dr. M.A. Ketabchi, Chief Strategist at Progress Software, presented at the Gartner BPM Summit in March on how you can increase your business operations IQ.  He explains how you can run your operations more intelligently, and he reveals:

• The “secret sauce” of business process management
• Well-known companies that have benefitted from BPM, and how they did so
• How business event processing (often referred to as Complex Event Processing (CEP)) enhances BPM
• Typical business challenges that require a combination of BPM and BEP
• How Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) brings it all together

If you are interested in the replay, click here. It will be available FREE FROM REGISTRATION for the next five business days only. What a deal! ;-)

Hope you enjoy it. And, as always, make sure to share your feedback and comments here.

Changing an airplane engine while in flight

There were some words we heard over and over again throughout yesterday’s 11th annual financial and industry analyst event in New York City. Those words were: “easy”, “fast time to market”, “visibility” and “leverage” and they were spoken by all of our attending customers (and even some who weren’t there via video).

The Progress Analyst Day, attended by some 80 analysts from many of the most respected firms in the US and EMEA, focused on responsiveness and how we at Progress Software can assist our customers achieve the goals they describe using these words.

First: “easy”. The world has changed; few business executives today want to spend time and money developing software that will need to be supported and changed continually in order to keep up with an evolving competitive landscape.

There is a widespread aversion to inflexible packaged applications. As Liam Hudson, M.D, Global Head of FX Ecommerce at Bank of America Merrill Lynch put it: “We are not an IT shop. Spending time on IT is a distraction for us. Alpha generation is the only bit we want to write ourselves.”

Second: “fast time to market”. Ozlem Demirboga, Head of Customer iInformation Management at mobile communication services, Turkcell, said: “Fast time to market is important. It has to be quick and easy for us to create new location-based campaigns.”

Jim Winburn, CTO at clinical research organization, PRA International, agreed and noted that speed to development would help his firm to drive new drugs to market faster. As did Julian Self, CIO at commercial real estate analysis firm, IPD. According to Julian his clients’ performance (and bonuses) depends on IPD gathering, analyzing and reporting back - as it happens.

Third: “visibility”. Seeing business processes from a high level, in a single view is a common goal. Eric Gooley, Head of Business Process Engineering, Operational Reporting and Metrics at communications firm, Level(3), said: “With the increased visibility we now have we can drill down to director and manager level and hold them accountable for bottlenecks and processing issues.”

Demirboga simply wants to be able to see if Turkcell’s location-based sales campaigns are getting results, and: “to make sure the system is working.”

And finally: “leverage”. Rip and replace, the act of starting over completely, is no longer an option. The complexity of IT infrastructure differs from industry to industry and firm to firm. What they have in common is that they need to keep the technology they have built or bought already; it is part of the business, often critical, and expensive.

Progress customers want to keep most of what they have, to continue to use the technology and leverage that investment, while adding technology that can sit on top of it and bring in quantifiable results.

As Progress President and CEO, Rick Reidy said in answer to a question posed: “You can justify the investment by extracting greater value from legacy systems for exponential return.”

When you put our customers words together they go a long way in describing our vision for Responsive Process Management (RPM). It leverages existing software, avoiding costly rip and replace strategies; provides easy-to-use visibility into all of your business processes; and offers quick time to market for initial deployment and on-the-fly changes.

Julian Self likened RPM to an airline engineering team replacing an engine - not using RPM is like trying to switch out the engines while flying. We like that analogy.

Building Customer Loyalty in a Churning Market

All businesses suffer from churn – the moving of customers from one service provider to another. As new and innovative services become better understood and more widespread, more suppliers enter the market and so the opportunities for customers to change suppliers increases. Churn is expensive. Recruiting a new customer can cost 5-10 times that of retaining an existing one. So how can technology help in the constant battle to retain customers? 

I’m going to illustrate what can be done by talking about mobile telecommunications – an industry where innovation is rife but where churn is a significant problem.

Mobile communications continues to grow very quickly. According to a recent Cisco survey, mobile data volumes are nearly doubling each year. By 2015 it predicts there will be 7B personal mobile devices globally. Analyst firm Ovum recently reported that in 2010 revenues from mobile data for European mobile operators exceeded that for voice calls for the first time.

Smartphones are completely changing the way that people use the Internet. It’s worth reminding oneself that now, in a pocket device, one has a phone, a camera, email, PDA, mapping with GPS, in some countries a near field payment device and of course access to thousands of applications. Morgan Stanley has predicted that in 2012 shipments of smartphones will, for the first time, exceed those for personal computers. The whole landscape of computing itself is changing.

With all this growth mobile operators should be very happy. Subscriber bases and mobile data volumes are growing. And yet, mobile operators can’t rest easy. Yes, innovation is everywhere, but most of the innovation (at least that visible to end users) isn’t going on in the mobile operators – it’s going on in the phones and the applications. End users are becoming more and more divorced from the particular network they use and, certainly in developed markets, operators primarily compete on two things only – price and coverage. The growth of the mobile Internet is pushing operators to the bottom of the value pile and risks leaving them as faceless utilities. This, in turn, leads to churn, with rates for mobile operators range from 20-40%, meaning that between 20 and 40% of subscribers will, per year, leave a network for another.

Other industries are of course liable to churn too. Insurance is one example – I recently used an online insurance aggregator to find car insurance and, within a few minutes, obtained a rate 20% below that that my current provider was offering. Online retail is another – it’s very easy to move to another retailer that might be offering a lower price on the same product. In general, churn is present wherever a product is a commodity or near commodity and where customer relationships are weak.

Some wireless operators are fighting back by identifying more ways in which they can meaningfully interact with their customers. To take a concrete example, one European telco, a Progress customer, is now continuously monitoring calls from their 30M subscribers to identify patterns of usage that indicate a different tariff would be more suitable for that subscriber. This could be as simple as noticing that the number of bundled monthly minutes used had been exceeded. A text message is then sent to the subscriber suggesting that they move to another tariff that would reduce the cost of calls in future. Time is of the essence. If the subscriber receives an offer soon after placing one of these calls they are far more likely to accept it than if the offer came through many weeks later.

The way that marketing campaigns are run can become a lot more responsive. The mobile operator may decide to run a campaign to, for example, promote a particular tariff it thinks will be of interest to a subset of its subscriber base – those people, for example, who spend more than $100 per month and roam frequently. Sending out offers via text message requires great sensitivity, as no operator wants its customers to feel it’s receiving spam. As the campaign executes results can be monitored in real-time and the target demographic of the campaign can be tightened to achieve a better response rate. Not only does this make the campaign more successful but also those subscribers that, in the end, are not targeted can become the target of a future campaign.

To do this requires a number of things. Firstly, software needs to be in place to allow the millions of subscriber calls to be analysed in real-time – an ideal use case for event processing. Secondly, there need to be tools which allow a marketing team itself, working largely autonomously without IT support, to create, test and dynamically enhance the rules which dictate which subscribers will receive the offer. And finally, positive responses to the offer need to be processed systematically through an order management system.

There are many other examples where responding quickly to subscriber activity can enhance a user’s experience of using a particular mobile operator. As Internet use becomes dominated by mobile, it’s likely that variable costs for data access, particularly where large downloads are concerned, will be introduced. The cost of a download will be calculated dynamically, dependent upon the bandwidth available within a particular cell at a particular time. At initiation of a large download (let’s say greater than 1Mb) the user could be prompted to ask whether he would like to download it at twice the normal bandwidth for another 10c. This would be a dynamic rate, calculated in real-time in response to current activity in the wireless cell and the propensity of the user to accept the rate.

So, what’s the general lesson here? By becoming more responsive to subscribers, mobile networks are increasing their value to customers, improving customer service and so reducing the likelihood of churn. Existing information about customer behaviour is being used but by being able to act on that information immediately they are able to communicate in a much more contextually suitable way so improving response rates and strengthening the customer relationship. All businesses should be looking how to use their operational information to respond to and interact with customers better. Real-time responsiveness to customer behaviour is becoming vital.

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.

Real-time Visibility Will Help You Make Better Decisions

Decision management expert James Taylor believes it’s really very simple… to succeed, you need to sense and respond to what’s going on in your business, in your systems, and all around you. He’s right. In my job, I need to be alerted immediately when the website is down. Now, we aren’t saving lives here at Progress Software (although I’d like to think that applications using our software and technology are) but our website is core to our business. If our site goes down, it will result in poor customer or visitor experiences which translates to lost revenue. What I need, IT are you listening?, is a notification service that alerts me the SECOND the site fails. If I had that, I could respond quicker and make sure that IT was working to get it back up. If I had that, I could also plan and make decisions on how I would respond to my frantic boss, the irritated visitor, and the customer support rep who just lost his/her web app right in the middle of a troubleshooting session or order process.

Anyone else know my pain?

Now, we all know that my wish is doable because it’s relatively simple, but for many businesses, their business events and processes are much more complex and the consequences of process failure are much more severe. I think it’s pretty clear that in order for us to make fast decisions, we need to begin by gaining visibility into our business processes. The Progress Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite is all about giving you the operational tools and business control panels you need to be responsive to changing conditions.

So, what's the next logical step for you? Learn a bit more about the first component to building the responsive enterprise that lets you make smarter decisions - achieving real-time visibility. Listen to James Taylor’s 3-minute visibility podcast – the 1st in a series of 4 podcasts. Not only will you hear how you can achieve real-time visibility but you’ll learn how the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite can help.

If you are interested in reading more, register to download the companion white paper Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time.

Episode1: Visibility

Or listen via player:

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.

Sharing some winter sun with Progress' application partners

Earlier this week I participated in the 2011 Progress Global Partner Conference which was held in Florida.

This is only the second time the partner conference has been global – previously it was held regionally – and I’m delighted to say that hundreds of representatives from business partners attended from all over the world.

Most of the partners present were what Progress terms application partners – those that have used Progress products to build applications that are then sold to end-users. As always, the sheer diversity of the applications partners create and sell is mind-boggling – from healthcare apps specialising in kidney treatment to point-of-sale retail systems deployed in 25,000 outlets worldwide to location-based content delivery platforms. Progress recognises the many varied achievements of its partners with its very own awards ceremony. The winners can be found here. And, yes, it is a tiny bit like the Golden Globes, although without the acerbic wit of Ricky Gervais.

These partners continue to be incredibly important to Progress Software. Supporting them with product innovation as well as facilitating new ways for them to deploy their applications (for example by testing out their applications in the cloud with Progress Arcade) is a key pillar of Progress’ strategy. Another strategic pillar is Responsive Process Management (RPM), launched by Progress to the market in 2010, and several sessions in the conference were dedicated to explaining how RPM fitted into the partners’ world. Adoption of RPM in the partner community is happening. An example of this is Skyward, school management software supplier, recently announcing their use of Progress’ OpenEdge BPM platform. This puts them on the first step to full RPM adoption.

John Rymer from Forrester Research, the software analysts, also addressed the conference. Amongst other topics, he talked about four big “on-ramps” of new functionality – business process management, analytics, business events, and collaboration. These, he believed, were the most effective ways for software vendors (Progress’ partners in this case) to deliver new functionality fast and will be the key technologies behind many of the next generation software platforms. Forrester’s presence at a Progress partner conference was timely. Recently one of their analysts, Mike Gaultieri, blogged about Java, despite being more popular than ever, being a “dead end” for enterprise application development. He encouraged developers to consider alternatives, including Progress OpenEdge, that offer substantially higher productivity. It was a reminder that OpenEdge remains as relevant as ever and is a great aid in application modernization. Further output on this topic from Forrester is imminent.

All in all, it was a successful, high-energy conference. Many thanks to all the partners who came, and to those that didn’t, please try and make it in 2012!

 

 

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.

BPM is good. Continuous Process Improvement is even better.

As businesses strive to achieve operational responsiveness, they need to make sure that business stakeholders and IT have the ability to collectively define business processes and deploy those processes as applications accessible via the Internet. That’s where business process management (BPM) comes in. BPM is core to achieving operational efficiency but it doesn’t just stop at defining and deploying processes, it means continuously improving how those processes are operating. It’s about having the ability to continuously adjust to changes in your business operating environment and community, and to proactively act on changes in government regulations, performance requirements, and technology.

Dr. John Bates, Chief Technology Officer at Progress Software

In Part 6 of our 7 part video series, Continuous Process Improvement, John talks about the how business process management allows businesses to easily replace and/or automate existing – possibly manual – processes. With responsive process management (RPM), however, you can dynamically improve processes and apply event-driven rules that will allow you to respond to potential problems before they occur.

Interested in hearing what industry analysts are saying about operational responsiveness? Read a recent blog post by industry analyst Mike Gualtieri entitled "Java Is A Dead-End For Enterprise App Development". In it he writes, "Progress Software’s responsive process management (RPM) combines the best of BPM and business events to help businesses respond to real-time events and change business processes. This is just a small sampling of the next generation of business application development tools." You may also be interested in the on-demand webinar Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time presented by industry analyst James Taylor.

Enjoy past videos in 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

 

If a Customer Tweets into the Ether, Do They Make a Sound?

As you may have read in yesterday's post, we hosted our final Progress Software Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday. We again heard from the venerable, John Rymer of Forrester Research. In his speech, “Design Solutions for Faster Change and Greater Business Impact” he touched more strongly this time on the concept of customer service as it relates to real-time business event processing.

We have previously cited his example of Maytag responding to mommy blogger Dooce’s issues with the company’s product and subsequent public ribbing of the company via social media channels. This was a great example of reacting to a customer, one empowered by their own online reputation and influence, to the best outcome for all parties involved. Yesterday, however, John gave some examples of companies who are not only reactive but also proactive in how they approach customer service issues via social media, the ultimate in real-time dialogue with consumers.

In keeping with our summit series’ central topic, how businesses can become more operationally responsive, John discussed how empowering employees to solve problems sans red tape is important. He brought up the example of Best Buy’s Twitter team that is able to answer product queries, solve problems, and rectify direct criticisms / customer aggression in real-time mitigating the risk of a decline in brand sentiment and loyalty with every happy or at least satiated customer with whom they interact.

With more and more channels through which customers can complain and a decreasing reliance on traditional customer service lines and email aliases that long go unresponded to, the masses are taking to channels like Twitter forcing organizations to respond in new ways as well as make decisions about issues faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Overall, attendees left thinking about how they see and respond to business issues in new ways from every speaker. From John though they also left with new places to take long hard looks at in planning their customer service efforts.

Talking about Twitter... take a minute to follow me, John R. Rymer, and Progress Software.

The Economy, Business Environments... It’s all Responsiveness to Us

Yesterday’s Progress Software Summit in San Francisco was capped off with a presentation that was a true highlight from our responsive process management Summit tour of the past few weeks – a visit from Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard.

Rich wasted no time in getting right down to business, and delved right into current economic issues and how the relationship between the GDP and aggregate demand show that the country appears to have another two or three years left of this “flat growth.” He took this opportunity to discuss the economic headwinds and tailwinds of this recession. For starters, the headwinds such as residential and commercial real estate numbers dwindling and small business expansion decreasing were signs of trouble that we are facing. However, on the positive, tailwind side of the coin, the global economy outside of the US and Western Europe is strong, the stock market is steadily increasing, interest rates are at all time lows and there are many global companies that have a lot of cash on their balance sheets.

Karlgaard expressed that the economy faces an incredible amount of different variables every day, and, whether positive or negative, they will occur and are therefore accepted as certainties. Businesses, much like the economy in Rich’s explanation, face a similar environment of new and fluctuating variables with customers voicing their concerns on social media channels, regulations constantly changing and employees communicating on powerful mobile devices.

Businesses should accept that these new events are here to stay, and the ability to sense and respond to them as they occur will be crucial in their crusade to succeed. The world, whether in business, economics or other arenas, is getting smaller and faster, and in the coming years, becoming increasingly operationally responsive will be what separates success and failure.

Busy week in India (Product Conclave and SOA Summit)

Over the past few years there has been a significant rise in new tech start-ups in India.This is most evident at the National Software Products Conclave organised by Nasscom (national industry body). Till a few years back this was essentially for, by and of global multi-national product majors and few leading Indian product companies. In past two years, however, this has transformed to now an event completely targeting tech start-ups. A very demand driven shift! This years edition is due next week and theme is Lean Startups in the Cloud.

I am happy to be part of this event. I am part of the core organizing team, and am moderating a panel discussion on the opportunity being opened by UID (a majorly funded federal program to issue citizen IDs - a la Social Security Number in many countries ).Topic being - Ride the New Mobile Solutions Wave Triggered by UID. The UID organization, headed by Infosys Co-founder, is looking at much beyond just the ID. Implicit in the envisioned architecture is the mechanism to authenticate ID verification with bio-metrics also in place. And this is being made available to all solution providers and SIs to build custom solutions in segments ranging from Supply Chain, Logistics and beyond to bottom of pyramid solutions. This is a serious opportunity for a completely new class of solutions. And lot of interest from the government to promote the platform and encourage new solutions. This is by and large a distributed solution with potentially large number of users/endpoints involved. Our Responsive Process Management may also have a play in this. I will be moderating the discussion to identify such solution possibilities. At an event with over 500 start-ups, and leaders from few hundred established product companies & SIs, present!

While on Responsive Process Management, one more interesting opening is that at a Business Technology Summit due also next week, have been invited to talk on  'Beyond BPM'. Here again, our vision for beyond BPM is Responsive Process Management, Where business process management in an organization is extended to the processes that are not yet automated thru SOA Orchestration or BPM. Without any re-engineeirng, to extend the visibility and control that BPM enables to other non automated processes in the enterprise. My talk will discuss extending BPM models to Responsive Process Management as a emerging solution space, and what it can mean for businesses. How the RPM as a solution approach helps with the sense and respond decision control based on modeling and tracking business flows without changing/modifying the code of any of the existing applications that participate in  the business flows.

Looking forward to the Nasscom Product Conclave, the discussion on UID and later the RPM talk at the Business Technology Summit at Bangalore next week.

Mr. Spock, a duck, and the Maytag Repairman…

You may be asking yourself what these three names have in common and we found out at the Progress Software Summit on responsive process management in New York City yesterday.

Following Larry Kudlow’s speech the audience heard from Progress Software CEO, Rick Reidy, yours truly, and Forrester analyst John R. Rymer. What we heard from Rymer repeatedly was that business event processing is the next big architecture movement. He argued that a company’s responsiveness was based on its ability to empower its people to be responsive through the elimination of restrictive policies and regulations. The use case of this was the interaction between influential mommy blogger Dooce and Maytag – with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, Dooce became an “empowered customer” whom Maytag could not and would not ignore when it came to responding to her gripes about her new washer. Being able to respond quickly and nimbly, without months of red tape allowed Maytag to weather what could have been a scathing PR debacle.

Rymer was also uniquely able to discuss Hans Solo and Captain Kirk as the intuitive business users in comparison to Mr. Spock and Obi Wan Kenobi who represented analytical business users. While a big hit with this tech-heavy crowd, this analogy also served to reinforce my discussion at the need to cater to pure business users, business analysts as well as IT. All organizations have Kirks and Spocks.

This all tied nicely back to the analogy that started our day that came from our CEO, Rick Reidy. If you and your competitors are ducks in a pond, who is the leader and who simply follows the flock? In order to be a leader one must be able to just nearly see the future or, at the very least, not drive in the rearview mirror. The idea that responsive process management, business event processing and, more basically, seeing and responding in a timely way can make you that leading duck was an easy to digest message that rang true for everyone who made it out to today’s Progress Software Summit.

Afterwards... it was off to Chicago!

Encouraging Eventful Entrepreneurs

Our Progress Software Summit kicked off this week at the Hudson Hotel in New York City with a keynote address from CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, “From Washington to Wall Street.” Kudlow dove right into the dominant headline-grabber of the day – the mid-term elections. Larry used the elections as a springboard to touch upon his thoughts on economic policy, politics and other current events.

He then hit on several hot button issues of today, including the emergence of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, his opinions on the oil and banking industries, as well as his thoughts on corporate tax policies and how they impact a key audience – entrepreneurs.

An overarching theme that we took from his speech is that entrepreneurs can learn from successes as well as failures, and this idea is not that different from business processes and event processing. When entrepreneurs launch a new company and it fails, it is not necessarily a disappointment, just as long as that business-person evaluates and applies what occurred. Then, when they take a risk with another launch, they will have learned from the events and processes that they faced the first time around, such as choosing that first employee, purchasing office space or accepting outside funding. These business risk takers can discover new paths and options from these previous situations, analyze them based upon their actions in the past and use this knowledge to catapult their latest business into a success. If such activity is encouraged, entrepreneurs will become responsive to the steps it takes to jumpstart a business, and ultimately turn those letdowns into triumphs.

A big thank you to Larry for taking the time to speak with our attendees and answer their questions after his speech! Follow Larry Kudlow on Twitter.

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

 

Fighting payment fraud with Complex Event Processing

Today Progress Software announced that SEB bank in Estonia has deployed the Apama Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform to look for payment fraud.

This is exciting news and the fact that such a production customer has gone public is a great validation of SEB's belief in the system they've built. A lot of banks are somewhat reticent to talk publically about fraud. Everyone knows it goes on of course, but banks usually prefer that this is a quiet fight, going on behind the scenes. SEB on the other hand see their use of CEP to detect fraud as a positive demonstration of their commitment to customers and card issuers to ensure that banking with SEB is as safe as possible.

A few weeks ago I visited SEB in Estonia and was hosted by Ain Rasva, the head of technology, together with the head of the fraud team. One of the key reasons they chose to invest in CEP was rising transaction rates and a realisation that conventional data management architectures were simply not suitable to look for fraudulent patterns in a timely fashion. Yes, transactions could be captured in, say, a database management system, but then queries to determine whether a pattern of fraud was emerging had to be run and re-run at arbitrary time intervals. An event processing approach is simply a better way of doing this job, both performance-wise and conceptually. With CEP, SEB can now detect a potentially fraudulent pattern of card use immediately and then start managing the case, using tools to conduct further analysis and to manage communication with the customer. This can be done now in minutes, rather than the hours it took previously. Patterns of fraud detection are constantly changing and SEB needs to be responsive to this - the fraud detection rules need to change frequently and quickly. With Apama, these fraud rules can be created, modified and tested rapidly, and this can be done largely by the fraud department itself rather than relying upon IT to effect each change.

Card payments continue to change and increase. There were 82B payments in Europe in 2009 and card payments are growing at a CAGR of 12% per year. Europe wide regulation such as the Single European Payment Area will significantly change the types of fraud that banks need to look for. SEB has placed itself in a good position to ensure that payments are conducted as safely as possible.

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

 

Gain Actionable Insight Into Your Operations at Summit 2010

The Progress Software Summit 2010 brings together the visionaries and experts who are applying today’s proven technologies that will help companies achieve operational responsiveness. Learn how applying business solutions such as Responsive Process Management (RPM) will help you gain agility, reduce risk and achieve 20/20 foresight. Transform the way you do business.

At the Progress Software Summit, you will:

• Learn how you can make better business decisions by achieving real-time visibility and actionable insight.
• Connect with your business peers and innovators, and share how you are - or are not - achieving operational responsiveness.
• See the latest innovations in business process management, complex event processing and more.

JOIN US IN A CITY NEAR YOU!

November 2, 2010 HUDSON NEW YORK 356 West 58th Street New York, NY	November 3, 2010 W HOTEL CHICAGO 172 West Adams Street Chicago, IL	November 10, 2010 BENTLY RESERVE 301 Battery Street San Francisco, CA
Our New York event begins at 11:00 am and ends at 5:30 pm, and is followed by a Cocktail Reception. Hear from Progress plus industry expert John Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. Our SPECIAL GUEST at the New York event will be Larry Kudlow: Mr. Kudlow is host of CNBC’s primetime “The Kudlow Report” and co-host of “The Call”. He is also the host of “The Larry Kudlow Show” which broadcasts each Saturday on WABC Radio. He is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of American Abundance: The New Economic and Moral Prosperity. Learn more >	Our Chicago event begins at 11:30 am and ends at 5:45 pm, and is followed by a Blackhawks game. Hear from Progress plus industry expert John Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. Our SPECIAL GUEST at the Chicago event will be Dan Hampton: A first-round draft pick of the Chicago Bears in 1979, where he continued to play 12 years as a defensive lineman, Dan Hampton is an engaging football Hall of Fame personality who is well-known and liked for his anecdotal and motivational speaking style. Learn more >	Our San Francisco event begins at 11:30 am and ends at 4:40 pm, and is followed by a Yacht Cruise. Hear from Progress plus industry expert John Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. Our SPECIAL GUEST at the New York event will be Richard Karlgaard: Rich Karlgaard has a unique vantage point on the trends driving the business and investment climates. He is the publisher of Forbes magazine, where he writes a bi-weekly column. Mr.Karlgaard is author of the Forbes book, Life 2.0: How People Across America Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding the Where of Their Happiness. Learn more >

Delivering Operational Responsiveness

We've already 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. Now, how do we help deliver it?

Dr. John Bates, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Corporate Development at Progress Software

Watch Part 3 of our 7 part video series. In this video, Delivering Operational Responsiveness, John explains how we've brought together three proven technologies that help companies achieve operational responsiveness – business transaction assurance, complex event processing (CEP) and business process management (BPM). All these powerful technologies are further enhanced with business rules and analytics.

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.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about Responsive Process Management (RPM) and learn how Agent O applies RPM to tackle credit card fraud in real time. You can also follow Dr. John Bates on Twitter.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

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

 

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

 

Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?

We've already 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. But why is it so hard to achieve?

Watch Part 2 of our 7 part video series featuring Dr. John Bates, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Corporate Development at Progress Software. In this 1 minute, 30 second video, Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?, John explains why many companies struggle to achieve operational responsiveness. He points out that the lack of real-time visibility is just one key reasons.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about Responsive Process Management (RPM) and learn how Agent O tackles credit card fraud in real time. Follow Dr. John Bates on Twitter.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

• What Is Operational Responsiveness?

What is Operational Responsiveness?

Wikipedia defines it as “a desirable quality of a business process or supporting IT solution, which indicates its ability to respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur. An operationally responsive business process or IT solution is one that reacts quickly and effectively to a wide range of business events as they occur, and is also one that is managed in such a way as to be rapidly and effectively evolved in response to changes in the business environment itself so as to drive both consistency and value of business outcomes.”

I like that definition but Progress Software expands on it by believing that it is the ability of business processes and systems to respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur - enabling business leaders to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. Operational responsiveness is more than agility and business process engineering optimization, it’s about plugging decision makers into business events and giving them the ability to respond to the unexpected, thereby effecting change directly.

Watch Part 1 of our 7 part video series featuring Dr. John Bates, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Corporate Development at Progress Software. In the 50 second video, What is Operational Responsiveness?, John explains what it really means to be truly operationally responsive.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about Responsive Process Management (RPM). You can also follow Dr. John Bates on Twitter.

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!

Credit Card Fraud Interrupted My Vacation...

And I learned first hand what responsive process management is all about - to a consumer like me.

I’m on vacation... Citi just called to check on a phone inquiry they just received. Someone was calling for information about my account. I mentioned that I didn’t make the call and then they asked if I’d made a $255 purchase in Burbank, CA at some toy store. Not only am I in NY, but I couldn't even remember the last time I used the card. I immediately looked in my wallet and there the card was. Someone must have gotten my number. Yikes! I’m a pretty big online purchaser so I am bummed. But I am really happy to have Citi on my side because the situation really could have gotten out of hand.

Citi effectively MANAGED the PROCESS and was truly RESPONSIVE. It made me feel great. Is your company operationally responsive? Are you making your customers feel great? Responsive Process Management (RPM) helps companies of all sizes and in varying industries achieve operational responsiveness so that they can retain customers and improve their customer experiences - just as Citi did.

Ironically, we recently posted a YouTube video that introduces Agent O (that's ooohhh). He’s on a mission to prevent bank fraud and is using the Progress RPM suite and Progress Control Tower as his mission control center. Watch the video! It’s fun.

Mission Operational Responsiveness: Progress RPM and Fraud Prevention

Imagine that you’re a Fortune 500 diversified bank. You have millions of customers worldwide using your credit cards to make purchases every day.

As a diversified bank, your customers expect great value and convenience every time they complete a transaction with you. To retain existing customers and obtain new ones, you are committed to delivering a convenient experience that meets your customers’ high expectations. Whether they have a credit card or savings account, you want their interactions to be seamless as they occur through your website, at ATMs, through merchants and in your branch locations.

Sometimes, things go wrong.

Diversified banks must balance delivering a convenient experience that meets customers’ expectations while continuously monitoring transactions in an effort to prevent bank fraud.

Meet Agent O and relive his fraud prevention adventure as he strives to monitor millions of transactions, when suddenly things go awry. Watch him combat the Syndrome crime family when they hack into ACME Trading Company’s network, stealing thousands of credit card numbers.

Will the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite help Agent O stop the crime in time? Watch the video to find out, as the RPM suite is put to the test.

And then tell Progress how you can use RPM to become a business hero and enter to win an Apple iPad.

Information Overload? Three Ways Real-time Information is Changing Decision Management

Upcoming webinar: 26-Aug-2010 at 11am ET
More Info and Registration: http://bit.ly/dyCu0c

JOIN US! In a recent survey by Vanson Bourne, 94% of respondents say that responding to information immediately is critical to their business, yet only 8% currently report information in real time. Why? Because many are unable to filter through the enormous deluge of information coming at them from every angle. This web seminar will discuss 3 ways that real-time information and business events affect your decision-making process. Through real-time visibility and immediate sense and respond, you get the right information at the right time. The result is decision management that is “in the moment” and operational responsiveness that meets the speed of your business.

Hope you can attend: http://bit.ly/dyCu0c