A collection of notes about the Forrester BPM Forum, and the Forrester Content and Collaboration Forum in Boston Sept 22 & 23.

Nathaniel Palmer, Keith Swenson – Taming The Unpredictable: Real-World Adaptive Case Management

We had the pleasure of kicking off the forum at 7:30 Thursday morning.  This presentation was the official kick-off for the book “Taming the Unpredictable.”  I told Connie that I come from California, and getting that early is against my religion, especially on the east coast, but no to avail, we had to present then anyway. I like to think that being first, they couldn’t have started the forum without us 🙂

Please see the slides:  Taming The Unpredictable: Real-World Adaptive Case Management

Rob Koplowitz – Planning For The Future Of Work Begins Now

What we are really talking about is transforming the workplace.   49% of information workers have smartphones, 25% for work. 62% have enterprise mobile applications.  18% use video conferencing for work.   Tablets create a fundamentally different way to interact with information, and look at the amazing rise in popularity in two years.

Work is becoming increasingly social: IBM connections, Jive, NewsGater, Telligent. These were the leaders in the first wave on the topic, and there are many more vendors.  56% of corporations are investing in enterprise social. 53% consider use of collaboration tech high or critical priority. The job of IT is no longer just keeping the email server running. Now you have to take part in the fundamental change in organizations.

He presented a case study on TaylorMade, golf club manufacturer. The sales person has a vast amount of sales material, some accurate some not so accurate. The business is very competitive. The salesperson has to have all the information ready because he has only about 5 minutes to sell a sporting goods store on the product line. Decided to give everyone iPads and to use “Box Mobile” solution.  They put all the collateral in one place on Box.net. Key advantage is that there is only one version of the truth.  Sales person does not have to carry any hardcopies, but at the same time has everything available anytime, anywhere. Box runs in the cloud, and has players and viewers so that any format or source works. Video is no problem. No boot up time, no table, just hold the iPad up and run it.

Don’t make this hard on workers. Don’t just throw technology at people. Example: worker using email, but adding IM. Then add Social Network for contacting people they don’t know . Then add a portal for corporate official information. Then add a “workspace” for collaborative developing documents. (SharePoint, Box) Eliminate the chasing of email. Then add web conferencing. SSO not really there. Getting frustrating. Add a blogging tool for quick publishing and comments. So then add Twitter (microblog). Too much to ask. So … worker tends to go back to email.

The time has come that all enterprise solutions have to have a mobile platform support.

Knowledge management was kind of a failure: good for organization, not for individual. Incentives weren’t there, no stick. Need was not critical. But today this is becoming critical to manage information at the right place at the right time.

Three things are needed to be successful:

• Executive support: Not just funding, but that executives are part of the change. This is very disruptive. Want to transform the business.. Will your executives say: “we have always done it this way … and always will” Executives have to expect it to be uncomfortable, and if they are not ready to start on the journey, come back next year to it.
• Business Value: this is really tough. Taylor made felt that they would be able to close more business.
• Groundswell of Adoption – use case: a huge organization was adopting social. Started with a JAM session. Timeboxed and at the end make decisions. Asked the question of “what is the value of social technologies”. Executives participated. Ideas that came out was actionable because it came from the company. Bsiness leaders asked for IT to come help their business.

CISCO has a compelling story.  John Chambers said “we are going to work differently, we are going to change our culture.” CISCO had been a command and control environment, but he said culture needs to change.  Don’t be left behind.

How do you get security organization to agree to let people use smart phones? – There are security mechanisms. There is some consideration that people will bring their own devices and be able to use them. There are problems, but it is happening anyway. Organization must be proactive to find ways to make this safe.

There are lots of cloud based options, like Lotus Live, Huddle, Office 365 which cost less than $10/month.  However, the cloud is not so good for connecting back to on premises systems.

Many organizations now have multiple social platforms in place, what do we do? This is an inflection point. A few years ago we said just let consumers drive the trend, let them install and use whatever words for them. But this is changing. (1) IT needs to be involved in this because of security, compliance, authentication, etc (2) a lot of walled garders are now causing problems, they need to be bridged or eliminated.

Rob Koplowitz, Ted Schadler – Mobile Collaboration is Like Peanut Butter And Jelly

41% of workforce is highly mobile, some of these are hyper mobile.   50% of smartphones, 70% of iPads used for work, are purchased by employees.   From a poll of 5000 workers, 1751 of them use a smartphone. The breakout: 25% android. 41% blackberry, 21% apple.  Later he said that Android is more difficult, and not showing up in enterprise. Android seems much more consumer than business.

When creating mobile applications, the main requirement is that it has to be a great experience on the device. Who is going to log into SAP to approve an expense report on a mobile device? Not going to happen. however, if capabilities are extracted out to something that can be used on a phone, it works.

Architected to deliver low latency securely anywhere. For example, a weather application takes 5 seconds to get the weather will push people to other applications. Users are trained for instant response.

Social layer will become the mobile glue. Activity streams work really well on mobile devices, but need to address security and administration requirements. Training employees is important. Consumer social networking is OK for some things.  For example, Lloyds uses Facebook for customer communications is OK, but NEVER for quotes or business data. This is a real challenge for collaboration meets mobility world. Application has to integrate with everything else.

Key vendors in the space:

• Document-based Collaboration: Box, Dropbox, OpenText, SugarSync
• Activity streams: IBM, Chatter, Yammer, Tibbr
• Social collaboration: IBM, Jive, NewsGator, Socialtext
• Enterprise Social Platforms: Leaders: Jive, IBM, Telligent, NewsGator, Strong: MS, Socialtext, Atlassian, Cisco, OpenText.
• Others: Chatter, Socialcast, Tibbr, Yammer, Moxie, Igloo, Oracle, SAP (bought Sybase), Saba.

Strategies:

Tibbr looks to bridge line of business and the knowledge worker. TIBCO is an interesting player in this space. Carry system generated notifications to mobile, and then carry user generated responses back to take action. Starting to see this as an emerging killer workflow.

Yammer has a significant investment in interacting through mobile devices. Supporting all the platforms. Sneaking into the organization.

Google+ interesting go to market strategy. IF it works in the consumer world, I will harden it and sell it to you in the enterprise world. There will be a Google+ for business. (Who is mad about facebook changing their interface again?)

NewsGator: built as optional component on iOS (pad and phone). HTML5 strategy.

Derek Miers – Designing Your BPM Engagement Program Around The Customer Experience

Business as a whole is moving from a command and control to a customer focused service delivery.  There was a lot of discussion of “customer experience” at this year’s forum.

Four phases: (1)siloed, (2)functions supported by processes, (3)processes supported by functions, and finally (4) service process organization. This is the 4 steps of moving from traditional line management to processes and services management. He points out that there are political challenges to deploying this. Leaders have to lead these things, and that is one of the challenges.

He draws a correlation between process maturity and focus on customer experience. Maturity level 1-2 cost reduction is the top category (74%). Level 2-3 customer experience is the biggest. levels 3-4 and 4-5 customer experience remains high but value innovation becomes most important. Waste elimination remains that the same levels at all levels. The “ah-ha” moment was that if at level 2-3 you don’t focus on customer experience improvement, you will never get to level 3-5. (Survey is mostly business people, not IT – Forrester/QPC business process maturity survey)

How to get everyone engaged: start with brand, thinkg about services you will deliver, and align your processes and system to support that experience.

Brand experience statement: example of “easy jet” is published on the web. Not lots of manuals for doing things. Everyone at EasyJet knows what their customer experience goals are.

Capability often means aggregated IT. Another way of thinking about this is to tease apart what value change you are involved in with the customer. Avoid org chart names like the plague. Dodge the politics. Avoid turf battles. Package capabilities through processes to provide services to customers. Most people work on what they have got, and not what they need.

Should NOT be documenting the baseline, and then the “to-be” process. Instead, we should be establishing a customer experience vision. Use that to drive the operational process architecture, and then to the to-be process. The issues that is we assume that the processes we have today as the ones we need, but is that justified?

Engage the executive to think about the business problems and capabilities that are needed, and to priorities of those. Then they own the results.

It is the people on the front line who really know what problems the customers are having. It is not the process expert who has the right insight. Provide guardrails to design a holistic service vision.

• what do we know about the customer and market? What are competitors doing
• governance
• what resources do we need to make service sustainable?
• how to use measurement and learning
• how is this service going to implement the sort of relationships that we need for external participants?
• Communicating marketing and sales.

Recommendations

• give program a personality
• segment customers and imagineer offerings
• hassle maps – what Steve Jobs does, as he worked out everything that is a hassle about a phone,and then fixed it.
• provide guidelines and structure, but let team design the offering
• work backward, identify behaviors that are needed
• derive operational processes from business

Clay Richardson – The Impact Of Social Computing On Customer Experience Design

1) Empowered customers demand social experiences

Corporate processes remain disconnected from the social world. First impression of exec: I am not connecting ANYTHING to a social system. No security. Most still view social like the riots in London which was a free-for-all.   Still, business usage of social is increasing.

2) Extend processes to social for better experiences

Social is really just a channel. You need to understand how customers view this. If you are using social as only broadcast, then you are missing a lot of benefit.

Traditionally processes are defined in a top down way.  Management identifies process, technologies design and implement, deployed and used

Persona: “Michael” wants to be given the tools to stay in touch and be productive no matter where he am.

Social is forcing a bottom up approach: employees and customers identify the most valuable improvement opportunities, then shared development, collaboration and communication, and finally management prvides governance and best practices.

3) design considerations and emerging models

• social process discovery (Lombardi Blueprint)
• social process guidance: predictive modeling, rules, agile bpm
• social process development (total agility workspace integrated with facebook) track task status Singularity.

4) Eliminating social process design gaps

sometimes the value of the plan  … is the plan

Try using “journey maps” to provide an outside-in approach. Maps out phases of the journey, and emotional measurements.

Conclusions

• embrace social as a key driver for customer experience
• extend core business
• enable customers to design their own

Craig Le Clair & Steven J Spear – Untamed Business Processes: The Barrier To 21st-Century High-Velocity Companies

See my post from last friday: Untamed Processes at BPM Forum 2011

Frank Gillett – The Personal Cloud Is Coming: Understand How This Important Market Will Affect Your Employees

See my post from Saturday: Bring Your Own Cloud to Work