Over the years financial institutions typically have been consumers of cloud-based solutions across generic and non-core services like virtualization, datacenter consolidation, storage and disaster recovery. Many financial institutions are either planning or have implemented in-house private clouds for sensitive consumer data and are utilizing the public cloud for generic services. As cloud computing capabilities mature and become more reliable, multi-tenancy and hybrid cloud models will drive increased adoption of cloud-based solutions that are focused on core services and achieve cost efficiencies and scalability.

Below are a few ways in which cloud-based solutions are transforming the way financial institutions engage with their customers:

• On-Demand BI

BI solutions around data scrubbing, predictive modeling and analytics are gaining importance for banks as they fine-tune strategies to improve profitability while increasing revenues in a highly competitive market. The insights provided by analytical reports augment banks’ capability to invest in channels that offer greater potential of ROI and are flexible to market demands and customer behavior. The ability to have access to flexible computing capacity can obviate the need to plan, procure, configure and deploy IT systems with associated costs, lead-times and financial risks. As a result, financial institutions will recognize significant benefits through lower operational costs, increased flexibility and deployment capabilities, thereby realizing improved time-to-market.

• Core Banking – SaaS

Core banking solution (CBS) typically provided banks with lower cost of operations while yielding significant efficiencies. Microfinance institutions usually have a customer base with large volumes of transactions that are of low value. Implementing CBS for these institutions, on one hand will help in reduced cost of operations and make it an economically viable operating model and on the other ability to reach out to larger rural population. Temenos’ T24 Core banking system, now available on Windows Azure development platform (Software-as-a-Service), has enabled microfinance institutions in Mexico to reduce costs by adopting a pay-as-you-go pricing model. This allows them to do away with the deployment and maintenance of hardware and software associated with traditional solutions.

• Accelerating Financial Inclusion

Smaller banks, typically with limited budget and resources, have been unable to serve their customers in a cost effective manner due to prohibitive costs of operations. Shamrao Vithal Co-operative Bank (SVC) has helped to remedy this by  building a Federated Cloud which is helping  these smaller banks to consume shared resources including hardware, software and banking software., The infrastructure for each bank is kept in a separate work area with appropriate security controls to maintain confidentiality and integrity of each bank. The resulting lower TCO for the banks will help them extend financial services like no-frills savings account and insurance products to under-banked population and other sectors, particularly in the emerging markets.

• Enabling Enterprise Mobility

To remain competitive, financial institutions have to deploy innovative technologies and support multiple channels of distribution to engage their customers. Ability to access data and information anywhere and anytime will empower employees of financial institutions to respond faster to the customers’ needs.  By moving the internal apps to a public cloud managed by Google apps, BBVA, one of Spain’s largest banks, responded to the growing mobility needs of the bank’s workforce while reaping the benefits of cost savings. This was possible because of lower upfront IT CAPEX investments, increased efficiencies linked to scalability of cloud deployments and reduced risks linked to IT deployments by transferring (in part) to cloud service providers.

Cloud computing, a disruptive innovation, can play a transformational role in enabling financial institution to serve and engage with their customers at   lower costs and higher operational efficiencies. Additionally, cloud computing technologies can allow companies to respond faster than the competition with quicker time-to-market.

ECM governance helps organizations ensure smooth ECM implementations which not only meet business and technical requirements, but also equip organizations with valid and reliable documents, records and content which help them make the right decisions quickly. Additionally, ECM governance ensures the integrity of an organization’s information. It’s also important to keep in mind that ECM Governance is perpetual and lives until the ECM system lives.

Proper and well-defined ECM governance eliminates decisions at the departmental level and helps organizations to make decisions at the organizational level, which shifts the focus in the right direction. This helps to infuse cross departmental ideas, which improves business processes. Common information and content between departments, if tagged with the same metadata, will result in faster and seamless retrieval of the right information. Our consulting engagements have taught us that failures result predominantly because of ECM program set up rather than product or technology related challenges.

Requirements

ECM Governance must have a vision and mission. The vision must be clearly defined without any ambiguity and all relevant stakeholders (executives, IT leaders, information architects / taxonomists, compliance officers, development teams, information workers, trainers etc.,) should unanimously agree and adhere to it. Governance should also define guiding principles along with policy and standards.

ECM Governance can be divided into 3 sub governance areas:

1) Information Governance enables organizations to define the structure of information and the processes governing the information and content. It has three key activities including defining information architecture design, defining information management life cycle and defining policy management framework.

2) Program Governance enables organizations to create an ECM Center-of-Excellence team who is responsible for identifying, managing and supporting all ECM initiatives. It has three key activities including identifying people, defining processes and technology, defining KPIs and set up and organizing trainings.

3) Technology Governance enables organizations to define a set of technical standards that creates a scalable, reusable and secure development model while implementing ECM programs. It has three key activities including developing coding standards and best practices, defining development models and identifying and creating reusable assets and frameworks.

Once ECM governance is defined and rolled out, the organization must embrace, adhere and follow it until the ECM system truly lives in the organization. I think the primary reason for any ECM implementation failure  is lack of ECM governance set up and adherence to it. Therefore, the key to any successful ECM implementation lies with a carefully thought out ECM governance setup.

A social business is one that cultivates the spirit of collaboration and community at the heart of its thinking and operation. Management structures lean towards more collaborative decision making and focus less on the traditional command and control approach. On the other hand, technology enables peer-to-peer collaboration, whereas people are driven more by achievement and peer recognition. A social business is one that is engaged and deeply connects with people. It is also transparent, with fewer limits to information, expertise and resources. This type of company is nimble and able to address and anticipate evolving opportunities.

A social business approach can deliver tangible results in accelerating business outcomes across several key areas:

• Maximizing your talent. It’s no secret that people are the biggest assets of a company. Having understood the role played by employees in yielding business results, companies are increasingly focusing on leveraging people as assets to achieve business outcomes. A social approach to business will help optimize people skills by encouraging employees to step out of their typical ‘confined to job description’ roles to actively participate in business interactions and business decision making. Such an approach will help unleash the creative potential of people as assets and enable the enterprise to address customer needs better.
• Maximizing your knowledge. Many organizations possess a tremendous amount of knowledge. However, a few are able to take the full potential of their collective wisdom. Knowledge processes are by nature, social. A paradigm based on ‘social’ will make learning and sharing more participative, encouraging people to contribute in front of a larger audience.
• Drive innovation. Innovation happens at the periphery where the customers meet your business. A ‘social business’ approach enables the organization to pull ideas from the people at the periphery – your front line staff and customers.

While a ‘social’ approach could deliver tangible results, these results cannot be achieved simply by rolling out a micro-blogging site, a wiki or an intranet with a few collaborative features.  It requires a carefully thought out change in management approach and a technology platform that suits your organization’s culture and practices. A careful reengineering of your business processes is required for ‘social’ to be enabled. I will discuss some of these considerations in detail in my upcoming blog posts, so stay tuned.

Does this mean that a company that has 25,000 likes on its Facebook page and 10,000 followers on its Twitter account is successful? Not necessarily. The above figures just indicate customers’ interest to be a part of the community. This interest however, is a huge opportunity!

True success is when you adopt a strategic approach to tap digital marketing opportunities, create avenues to engage with customers, make them like your product/service and indulge in word-of-mouth promotion. However, it is not as simple as just setting up a Facebook page or a LinkedIn group. There needs to be considerable effort invested into building your community for it to display self-sustenance and start bringing in revenue.

Here are six steps you can take to create a vibrant and engaging social community:

1. Assess and identify the social media channels that suit your needs. The key point to understand is that it is perfectly fine not to be on all the channels. Pick the channels which will allow you to express your company/brand’s proposition to the customers most effectively.
2. Define a strategy for each social media channel. Each social media channel targets different sets of audiences making it very critical to align your communication strategy to match the target. There is no one single strategy which fits all. Define the audience you’re trying to reach, realizing that they aren’t all the same. LinkedIn and Twitter are better suited to B2B communications whereas Facebook works great for B2C and C2B communications. These channels however, should not be treated as a place to dump or broadcast only outbound messages to a massive audience.
3. Assign community manager(s) to manage conversations and social content. Aim to manage the communications both ways and make customer engagement fun and easy. Otherwise, customers may move away to competitors.  Have digital-savvy community managers organize and monitor communications, PR, events and content creation.
4. Engage and listen to customers. It is imperative to spend time and effort and keep close watch on the comments shared about your company in order to track the pulse of your customers’ experiences. Merely creating great content may not drive customers to your pages. Continuous customer engagement must be aimed for, while being mindful of their very low attention span.  The content must be optimized to meet their needs.
5. Identify key influencers in your community to drive future customer engagement. As the community grows it will be tough for community managers to manage everything on their own. There should be continuous analysis to find out the key influencers in your community. They are not the ones who make the most noise but those who contribute original content on your community. These are the people who spend quality time on your pages. Create a tiered membership model to allow such influencers to rise in hierarchy and manage parts of your community on your behalf. This will ensure more page stickiness and will help your community assume self-sustenance.
6. Finally, analyze and adapt your product/service offerings to meet the customer expectations. Ensure continuous monitoring and regular assessment of your business objectives and goals based on the feedback from your community. Separate the customer rants and spam in order to assess the real needs and improve your offerings.

Social media technology gives companies the ability to interact with a large number of potential customers, and, this type of technology continues to grow. Because of this, it is wise to invest considerable time and effort to create a sustainable strategy in order to reap huge returns on your ‘social’ investments.

As of right now, no one knows what the time frame for the extension would be or who would be exempt from the exception. In addition, ICD-11 is fast approaching and expected to be implemented around 2015, just a year away if the industry were granted a one-year extension for ICD-10. This begs the question, if companies delay ICD-10 implementations now, how will they be ready for ICD-11? There are multiple options to weigh, which I will discuss in this blog post.

Let’s look at some key areas that will benefit from implementing ICD-10 right now:

1. Existing Capability with 5010: Because the 5010 implementation has been completed already and the transactions are now ready to accept ICD-10 codes, it would be easier to implement ICD-10 data collection capabilities within the front end claims processing to enable submission of ICD-9 or ICD-10 data. Payers can also test with new edits for ICD-10 codes to identify claims that could be rejected later in the process thereby costing more to adjudicate.
2. Phased Migration to ICD-10: Moving from ICD-9 to ICD-10 is less complex than going from ICD-9 to ICD-11. Migrating to ICD-10 is a natural progression and would enable Payers to capture required historical information that might not be available if we went to ICD-11 directly. Also, the time extension allows Payers to implement a phased approach thereby allowing ample time in between migrations from partial to full remediation.
3. Reimbursement Based on ICD-10: ICD-10 is intended to help Payers save millions of dollars every year that would otherwise have been wasted due to improper coding and payment due to lack of sufficient data and better utilization of resources for the right procedures.
4. ICD-10 Training: ICD-10 implementation will enable Payers with ample time to train their employees before the actual mandate. Without this training, the ICD-11 transition will be more complex and confusing.
5. Data Collection & Analytics: Implementing ICD-10 prior to ICD-11 will allow for the much-needed revamp of the in-house data structures. Most of these are already undergoing changes due to various other mandates. This will provide Payers with insight into the various benefits of having ICD-10 data.

Apart from the above benefits, ICD-10 implementation will help improve customer confidence and thereby enhance the business due to lowered cost in premiums. At the same time, Providers will also benefit from more accurate payments and less rejections and delays.

This post was originally published on GovernmentHealthIT on March 12, 2012, and is re-posted here by permission.

RWD increases the adaptability of applications enabling them to run on various platforms (smartphone, a tablet or a laptop/desktop). It maintains code base and automatically re-engineers the layouts to suit the device used. This helps reduce duplication of efforts and maximizes productivity and operational efficiency.

Responsive Web Design Implementation – Best Practices

Fulfilling the user expectations is a big challenge given the diverse mobile devices which have come up in recent times. During implementation of one of our apps, we found the challenge affected not only the development team but also the QA team in terms of certification of the application.

Based on our experience, we came up with 6 best practices for RWD implementation:

1.    Create multiple versions per image
Consider creating multiple versions of images for all graphic assets. This will help enhance the app display to fit smaller screens. In iOS world, we call them low res and high res; also called as Retina display.

2.    Assign images to HTML elements
Since many small screen devices have higher screen resolutions, assigning images to HTML elements would help since the extra compression is then unnoticeable and file size is significantly smaller.

3.    Reposition the global navigation on hand held devices
When viewing web pages on larger screens, the expected location of the navigation is at the top or left side of the screen. On hand-held devices, the navigation can take up all the screen real estate if it appears at the top. This can lead the user to believe they must make another navigation choice instead of realizing the content is further below on the page.

For hand-held devices, global navigation typically appears after the content. So a user can swipe upward through the content, and then be presented with additional navigation options. The challenge here is to reposition the navigation with CSS without needing to alter the HTML.

4.    Restyle anchor tags
In addition to changing the position of the navigation, we can also change the style as well. Standard anchor tags are restyled on small screens to reflect the look of mobile buttons commonly used on hand-held devices.

5.    Use large screen CSS as default for browsers
In order to keep backwards compatibility with older browsers, keep the large screen rules outside of any media queries. This will ensure earlier versions of browsers, that lack support for media queries, can still ‘see’ a set of CSS rules.

6.    Use hybrid apps for hand held devices
Increase the approach of using hybrid apps for hand held devices, in which case you would use majority of UI functionality in HTML5, CSS3 related components and only use the native code when needed.

On the other hand, RWD approach also has some loopholes that have to be addressed to harness its true potential. A major challenge to the trend has been the fluid base layout of the devices. Fluids at times fail to get filled appropriately in the pixels to suit the display screen size. This takes a toll on user expectation. Also, the huge CPU and memory usage that results from resizing of images to best fit device screens has been another persistent cause of concern with RWD applications.

Despite the odds, there remain bright chances of the technology getting adopted largely by the web design fraternity, since the technology holds the potential of saving the effort of developing different forms of a single app for different display devices. To start out, organizations can implement RWD for simple websites. Meanwhile, there are many issues around RWD that needs to be addressed before the market accepts it with open arms.

The first wave of mobile applications could be viewed as simple extensions of existing online capabilities to a new channel (e.g. view your checking account balance on your phone as opposed to desktop).  However, the next wave of innovation is driving capabilities unique to the mobile market, leveraging the technology capabilities of mobile (always on, handheld, portability) as well targeting a specific set of users (lifestyle, social, collaborative).

Financial institutions are investing considerable time and resources to take advantage of these trends as they see opportunities for enhancing customer experience and setting up potential new fee revenue, while at the same time minimizing operational costs and streamlining operations.

Some interesting mobile applications that are changing the marketplace include:

1.    Mobile Check Deposit
These applications allow you deposit checks from anywhere at any time without making a trip to the branch. While remote deposit capture has been a mature offering, it is largely targeted at business and other high volume check depositors. Mobile check deposit targets the everyday retail banking customers, providing them with a capability that did not exist. While it offers consumers new accessibility, mobile check deposit also reduces costs for banks due to less trips to the branch. JP Morgan Chase’s Chase Mobile app supports Mobile Check Deposit on iPhone/iPad or Android.

2.    Peer to Peer Payments/Mobile Money Transfer
We have finally reached the time when consumers can execute a person-to-person payment without having to write a check and without needing to know the recipient’s bank account information for a wire transfer.  New mobile capabilities have arrived that allow you to send or receive money merely by using the recipient’s mobile number or email address. PayPal offers ‘Send Money’ functionality through its mobile application that allows you to pay through your credit card or your PayPal account. What’s more, the application also provides capabilities for bill splitting when you are out with friends for dinner or other social events, allowing you to settle your tab immediately.

3.    Photo Bill Pay
Danske Bank has deployed a mobile application that allows you to take a snapshot of a bill (utility, phone, credit card etc.) and submit payment from your mobile device. The Photo Bill Pay application quickly corrects image distortion of photo, extracts appropriate details (such as account number and payment amount) from it and then allows the user to process it. This eliminates the need to enter details manually.

4.    Advanced Trading and Research
Fidelity’s App for iPad allows customers to track their holdings online, perform market research, execute trades, manage account information and initiate customer service requests. The app is specifically built to leverage the iPad’s touch and visual capabilities allowing you to select up to 10 technical indicators across a variety of fully interactive charts that you can pinch, zoom, tap, and customize to your needs. It provides integrated audio/video plus GPS navigation to find the nearest Fidelity Center.

5.    Mobile Wallet/Payments
In the latest turn in a rapidly evolving market place, PayPal has announced a pilot program with Home Depot to allow shoppers who have a PayPal account to make purchases in store simply by entering their cellphone number and a PIN. Future features will allow customers who scan an item in store with their phone to receive discounts to be used if they purchase the item. In time the program will also link gift cards into your PayPal account. PayPal is piloting the program with Home Depot but intends to offer the program at 20 major retailers by end of 2012.

These examples above represent several innovative trends happening in the mobility space for financial institutions. Adoption rate for mobile applications is rapidly increasing and we are beginning to see entirely new capabilities based on the device characteristics and convergence of social and consumer preferences. Financial institutions are investing in mobile, making it a high priority, as they see opportunities for new revenue streams and new customer segments while reducing costs.

Most of the content authors do not use CMS solutions on a regular basis. They may need it once a month or sometimes even less than that. It is very likely that they will forget their CMS user id/passwords. The inability to use the CMS solution will cause more barriers in terms of the acceptance of the CMS solution.

7)    CMS WYSIWIG Editor: “WYSIWIG” means “What you see is what you get”.  However, most of the time, it does not meet business expectations.

Users generally receive content in word documents, ppt or pdf files which they need to paste in WYSIWIG editor. While doing the copy/paste, content formatting usually goes wrong and users need to tweak around with the HTML code to resolve these issues. It is always good to apply your website CSS (expand) to WYSIWIG editor which limits the number of styles and helps novice content authors to do the editing.

8)    Content Approval Process: The content approvers are generally senior people in the organization such as product managers, marketing managers or corporate communications team. It is important to evaluate and consider content approver’s CMS experience as well. The ability to preview and approve the content using approval emails is generally appreciated by the business community.

9)    Release only the Finished Product: There is usually a strong push to do the bare minimum and release to users. However, this can have effects on CMS acceptance as it does not meet the necessary usability requirements for users. This does not mean that you should not engage with your business users till the very late stage of the project. You must engage with the business proxy on a continual basis and show him or her the on-going improvements and solicit feedback on business scenarios.

10)    Shield Users from Technical Complexities: Your CMS product can be powerful, complex and equipped with many cool functions. However, many times, users don’t care about these functions and instead want a simple content editing tool. Because of this, avoid using complex technical terms and help business users to adopt the new solution.

CMS tools are chosen to improve content authoring experience and lack of CMS usability will make it hard for business users to accept it. I am sure you may have interesting experiences and perspectives to share on this subject and we would love to hear them.

• “My business users are not able to understand this new technical tool. What they need is a very simple way to add/edit some text, add images, videos, submit for approvals and publish new stories. We do not need all the technical bells and whistles!”
• “What is the use of this button on this screen? I do not need this. Please remove it!”
• “Why do I need to perform extra 3 clicks to do this task? Why can it not it happen in a single click?”
• “Have you configured this right? I would like to validate it with a product vendor or some external CMS experts to ensure it is correctly configured.”

CMS Usability: 10 Tips to Consider

CMS usability is one of the primary concerns among business users. While rolling out a new CMS platform, it is important to consider CMS usability from the project initiation phase. It should be well integrated into the CMS design process. Below are a few tips and techniques from a CMS usability standpoint to consider while planning and preparing for a CMS rollout.

1) CMS Dashboard view: The CMS dashboard should act as a one stop shop for users to perform their Business-As-Usual (BAU) content operations. Dashboard provides a handy toolkit packaged in a structured manner which helps users to launch content operations in an easy and intuitive manner. Some  tools which users generally like  to have on their dashboard include:

• Recently edited content items
• Favourite content items
• Favourite folders
• Content waiting for approval
• Ability to launch site in preview or edit mode
• Expired content notifications
• Training videos for easy reference
• Content Analytics

Many CMS tools offer dashboard functionalities and we strongly advise companies to make use of it to create a better content authoring experience.

2) Site Wide Preview: Users want to have complete site visualization in the CMS itself as it would appear on the site. The inability to visualize the complete site in an easy and intuitive manner can be a real pain for business users. While selecting your CMS tool, you must confirm the site wide preview capabilities for various different scenarios.

3) Surf and Edit: Users are usually well aware of the website, however, it is hard for them to comprehend content structures inside the CMS, which is managed using different folders. Business users usually appreciate the concept of surfing and editing the website. Although this approach sometimes leads to more number of clicks, the usage experience is somewhat like an Apple product where you don’t mind the extra clicks because your experience is pleasant.

4) Search: Search in the CMS is very important in terms of finding content. A search widget on the user dashboard can help users to locate hidden content which is not easily accessible by surfing the site.

5) Content Authoring Forms: After locating content, content authors require content authoring forms to make changes to the content. The forms should be well designed, with logical structure, meaningful labels, proper validations and a clear call to action. It is important to bear in mind that business users need to understand the use of different fields in the forms and if there are too many fields in the form then it will be difficult for them to comprehend.

This is the first of the two part blog series on usability issues to consider while rolling out a Content Management System. Check out the second part of the blog, where we delve on other usability issues.

Empowered Consumer – Redefining the Role of IT
The empowered consumer which could be a customer, employee or a partner, has more options to choose from, more information at his/ her disposal, and most importantly, access to collective intelligence on which they base their decision to buy a product or service. The journey from an “also a” buyer to an “empowered” consumer has been the direct result of technology innovation in the last few years. iPhones, iPads and other smart gadgets are driving the empowered consumer movement. Moreover, a number of factors including tech savvy generations, the mobile workforce, social collaboration, and technology convergence are helping consumers to be at the center of a business activity. Some interesting insights can be gleaned from  a recent study on Millenial workers. The study shows that Millennials expect immediate responses, prefer a wider variety of communication channels and try to solve technology problems themselves. In the survey, 61% of the Millenials (respondents) indicated that they don’t turn to company support first to solve problems and 40% use a mobile device for work.  These and other facts provide some interesting insights, challenges and opportunities for businesses. The question is: how should businesses/IT adapt to the evolving empowered consumer paradigm? Going from a business enabler role to that of leading the business transformation initiative, in the future, how should IT look at its role?

The Goal – Consumer-Centric IT
Unlike in the not-so-distant past, businesses today are being exposed to the vagaries of technology advancements; it is either adopt or perish for businesses. The future is slowly unfolding, and the key patron driving these cataclysmic changes is the empowered consumer. For businesses the need of the hour is Consumer-centric IT, an approach that revolves around the empowered consumer. The ability to foresee how the future will evolve is every business’ dream. Below are our thoughts on what CIOs need to keep in mind while building their future consumer-centric IT strategy:

• Digital Avatar, Creating a Positive Experience: With customers finding dependence and reliability in online conversations revolving around a product or service, businesses must create a virtual persona who is able to listen and engage with customers in the online world.  A recent study shows that a sizeable percentage of the GEN Y use social media to engage with brands and 50% of them indicated that Facebook, blogs and brand videos affect their opinions about products. It is important that businesses leverage social media to effectively meet the “reach of internet,” and ensure positive experiences are created around its brand.
• Merging of Personal Technology & Work: It’s the age of “anytime, anywhere” work. The arrival of smart phones and gadgets has been crucial for the growth of this culture. In the future, more and more employees will demand use of their smart gadgets in the workplace. Businesses must have a plan, approach, policies and systems in place to address this situation.
• Leveraging the Power of “Big Data”: Every customer interaction, business transaction, employee feedback or a product failure has a story to tell. Hidden within the depths of  organizational history, is its “Big Data” – which can be the source of innovation, a new product launch, strengthening employee engagement or increasing revenue. Unfortunately, apart from a few organizations, the majority have yet to leverage “Big data” to transform their businesses. CIOs will have to invest in advanced analytics to tap the vast amount of actionable information that they have in their vestiges.

The empowered consumer is rapidly changing and redefining the traditional role of IT. Those enterprises that understand this trend and realize the impact the empowered consumer is having on their business will achieve success. In fact, these enterprises are the ones that are driving the movement towards consumer-centric IT and adopting the above strategies. A consumer-centric approach offers immense possibilities and opportunities for businesses to innovate, enhance their consumer experience, increase consumer satisfaction and drive future growth.

The question is: Is IT ready to adopt this type of approach and make it part of their future mandate? Does IT have the courage to take initiative and provide the vision for the business? As with everything, there are risks, but we believe IT must take this plunge and embrace the empowered consumer movement in order to ensure continued growth for the business.

Based on our experience in using agile methodologies for implementing technology solutions for large, global, multi-geography clients, we have been able to crystallize a few best practices that can go a long way towards avoiding disaster:

• Importance of Size-based Estimation. Size-based estimation has been a tried and tested best practice in traditional software development environments. It allows the “amount of functionality” to be quantified separately from the effort.  Agile on the other hand uses a more nimble and social form of effort estimation that is evolved over multiple sprints. Fixed price contracts require the predictability of size-based estimation techniques, whether (Quick) Function Points or other custom form, based on the user stories. Initial cost can be based on a high level definition of the expected functionality/scope and the contract predicated on the size of functionality to be delivered and the price per unit of size. In line with the spirit of agile, the actual functionality delivered however, may be different.
• Effective Specifications. The first principle in agile is that it is a futile exercise to try and lock down all the requirements upfront. This is often used as an excuse to have zero  ineffective documentation. Although ALL the requirements cannot be documented upfront, effective Agile requires a lightweight but effective functional and design specification at a story level within each sprint for achieving scale.
• Requirements and Change Management. Agile requires diligent requirements and change management to succeed in a complex environment. I’ve seen the discipline of freezing the requirements for each sprint often getting compromised. As stories are frozen for each sprint, changing the functionality in a subsequent sprint is not considered a change – it is but a new user story.  If a story is invalidated within a sprint for whatever reason, credit can be provided based on a pre-agreed percentage tied to the stage in which it got invalidated.
• The Agile Design Factory. Agile requires close collaboration and availability of the customer stakeholders for requirements discussions. Any delay in clarifying requirements causes a huge strain on the development team due to the short timeframe of sprints. In an offshore model, the issue is more severe as customer interaction may be limited by time zone and proximity challenges. A best practice that I’ve seen work very well is to have a dedicated design team that takes on user stories from the product backlog using some initial priority order and fleshes them out in a factory model, facilitating a more predictable implementation schedule.
• Right Architecture. One of the key challenges in agile development is architecture. A common mistake is to ignore architecture in order to satisfy the push for “customer visible” functionality.  Lack of a viable architecture makes every subsequent sprint increasingly problematic and fragile, affecting project feasibility. The trick is to identify which user stories have an impact on the architecture and to introduce the “right amount” of architecture. Rather than define everything upfront, you should define what is needed and leave enough room for evolution. Every sprint requires the analysis of “architecturally significant” user stories so that the architecture can be evolved in a controlled manner. Architecture is very much an ongoing exercise in agile projects.
• Leveraging a Balanced Team. All developers in a large agile team may not be highly experienced. A combination of mechanisms, including focus on architecture, the agile design factory and the right development practices and tools can be used to leverage larger and more balanced teams in agile engagements. Development practices such as test driven development, static analysis and continuous integration can go a long way towards providing a stable foundation of code. Ignoring the maintainability of the code can be equally disastrous as ignoring the architecture.
• The Right QA Strategy. It is often difficult to build an effective QA strategy in agile projects given various challenges: lack of documentation, dynamic planning process and tight sprint timelines. Agile QA should take an end-to-end or user journey centric view during the sprint planning process, and prioritize and sequence related user stories in a logical order. Placing the test designers within the agile design factory and the test execution team close to the implementation team can facilitate an efficient and collaborative QA process.

I hope these seven best practices will help you overcome the array of challenges presented by a typical large scale, fixed price, offshore-based agile program. By leveraging these best practices, Agile can promote a strong foundation of effective partnership and collaboration between customers and their outsourcing vendors.

Looking into the crystal ball, what might we see? Technology advancements will continue and that is obvious, but where will that lead us? Through the haze in the crystal ball, I believe we will see BPM solutions getting much closer to the right context of work. Early technology forced us to dumb down work into transactions, thus work has been forced to conform to rigid data entry and robotic steps. The context of work in technology did not equate to real world behavior.  The paradigm forced us to change and conform to the technology. What I see today is BPM platforms that provide the ability to develop solutions with more flexibility, acting like partners in solving business problems. This is somewhat similar to the experience one has while using a mobile app in a smart phone or a tablet. Because of its in-built functionality and performance standards, the app ensures that the user gets the desired results through more intuitive interaction and immediate gratification, unlike in the earlier era of having to conform to the technology by dumbing down your needs into a series of activities. The remote deposit capture (RDC) mobile app that is being used by banks is one such example of smart technology getting closer to the right context of work. Today BPM is at the cusp of evolving into an agile and intelligent platform that will cut out many of the transactional steps to deliver the same results more quickly and more efficiently.

In 2012, we’ll see greater functionality deployed because of better tools and better alignment of technology and business needs. This will reshape our BPM strategies and allow us to optimize business processes by bringing the BPM technology to the ‘right’ work context:

• Dynamic Case Management (DCM): Case management significantly improves business efficiency by integrating people and processes in real time. Dynamic case management provides a better construct for organizing work by providing accessibility and visibility as well as improving the flow of information between concerned parties, thereby helping businesses reduce cycle times, enhance process efficiency and improve knowledge management. We foresee an increasing role of DCM in BPM.
• Predictive & Decision Analytics: Optimization of statistical analysis tools will take forecasting and predictability to new levels, solving more business problems and identifying diverse business opportunities, both in real time. Predictive and decision analytics will further improve the decision making process and drive processes in real time towards achieving business objectives, keeping opportunity costs in check. Tangible facts will drive the right resolution.
• Adaptive Case Management (ACM): More and more businesses will bank on adaptive case management techniques to react to business events and changing processes more quickly. ACM will help automate burdensome manual activities and prepare firms to deal with unpredictable situations in time. Businesses will increasingly look at reflecting needs in ‘production’ flight rather than undergo long development cycles only to cast processes into cement.
• Mobility & Social Media: Mobile BPM and Social BPM will be the two giant trump cards that businesses will leverage in 2012, smartly taking process development and implementation outside the confines of the physical enterprise to include consumers and employees from across the world. With real time collaboration and participation of diverse key stakeholders in place through mobility and social media, BPM is all set for yet another makeover!

2012 will be a promising year for BPM to make work ‘simpler’ and ‘smarter’ for the new age business. BPM will be expected to deliver ‘better, faster, cheaper’ outcomes leveraging real time collaboration across platforms, integrating people and processes, permeating through physical boundaries to connect and contribute to process improvements – paving the way for technology to revolutionize business operations. Perhaps BPM will be perceived as the ‘real’ change agent for technology.

Despite this, IT spend in banking and financial services grew in 2011 and looks poised for modest growth in 2012. Why is this happening? Banks and securities firms feel pressure both to reduce costs and to innovate. There are multiple ways to cut costs but the only way to simultaneously reduce unit costs and innovate is through technology. Hence, IT investment continues even in the most difficult times and even while operational portions of the IT budget are themselves under attack, as we foresee next year.

For 2012, there will be a sweet spot of IT investment, specifically, unit cost reduction combined with either improved customer experience or with compliance. Banks and their captives or IT partners who can do this through a global delivery model will be at an advantage. Our best bets:

• Online customer-facing technology will continue to attract investment. Unit costs for online transactions are pennies or less while costs for human mediated transactions are dollars or more. Customers prefer banking online and firms that deliver it will gain market share. Examples range across the financial spectrum, e.g.,: 1) allowing consumers to make online payments to other consumers worldwide, 2) giving business customers the ability to scan batches of checks and deposit images online, or 3) exposing a bond dealer’s inventory, buying interests, and pricing to institutional trading partners.
• Mobile, tablet, and social computing, arguably a subset of online banking, has become the fastest growing tech investment area and deserves unique comment. The race is on to lock in the younger generation of banking customers who do not own a land line, who use Facebook instead of email, who buy a Starbucks Latte with their smart phones, and who think voice calling is their phone’s least important capability.
• Integrating online channels with customer service is the key to lowering cost and improving quality when the customer does have to pick up the phone or come into an office. Business process management (BPM) is the key technology to ensure that the bank’s service rep understands what the customer is trying to do, has any information the customer provided online, and can manage the customer’s problem through to resolution.
• Cloud computing, slow to take off with banks because of security concerns is gaining traction, with lightweight cloud for non-critical development environments, multi-party deal collaboration, and client relationship management.
• Smart implementation of regulatory and compliance systems can turn a cost of doing business into cost reductions and risk management capabilities the bank wants and needs. Advanced Business intelligence and analytics are the keys to better information at lower cost. BPM can enforce compliance, improve performance, and ensure that a process is auditable.

Even in times of slow growth and tight budgets, banks making these investments will be successful in 2012.

Semantic Web and Enterprises

To remain competitive in the marketplace, enterprises need to effectively use information to make better decisions. Enterprises in general collect and analyze large amounts of ever changing information from multiple sources, available in multiple formats. However, for the enterprises, the need is for actionable information which can help them build competitive advantage. This is where Semantic Web technology comes into play for an organization. At its core, Semantic Web places importance on wise and proficient utilization of information. Semantic Web can not only help enterprises to quickly analyze and identify the right data, but also extract the meaning of the data. For example, Semantic Web technology can help a bank analyze its customer’s data (who uses the bank’s services across banking, credit card, stock trading, etc.), identify different meanings of the customer’s use of its services and get insights for its campaign management activities including cross-selling its services.

In the pre-social media days, enterprises could control the information flow as the sources of “incoming information” were few and manageable. However, with the proliferation of social media (known as the “Facebook” effect), the amount of information has multiplied manifold and enterprises do not have absolute control over the information. Also, enterprises subscribe to databases or data sources that gather information from different outlets such as newspapers, magazines, conferences, etc. All these sources of information cater to a global audience and appear in multiple languages, each with its own rules, idioms and context.

Semantic technology enables enterprises to make sense of this enormous amount of data by understanding the meaning of the content (words) in their proper context. The emerging HTML5 technologies, structured CSS and pages help in analyzing a page and provide a richer set of “tagging” that can be used by machines to analyze the page and its contents. This makes it easier and efficient in mining the information.

Thus, where the Semantic Web really shines for enterprises is not in just providing the meaning or context of the content but  really providing some actionable intelligence that an organization can use as a key differentiator vis-à-vis its competitors. It can help enterprises to remain competitive in a global market by harnessing the power of all forms of content generated by them via their users and using this collective information as competitive intelligence.

Challenges to achieving a “Semantic Web”:
Despite the promising future that Semantic Web technology holds, there are few challenges that this new found technology poses to its users:

1. Deciphering the intended content and tone may be difficult when it comes to written words
2. The technology is still nascent and thus does not hold enough supporting modules for it to survive the industry highs and lows
3. ROI calculation is difficult and may not be available immediately
4. Instead of using only technology as the “silver bullet’ solution, enterprises need to invest in both technology and process as Semantic Web is a combination of both

Enterprises will thus have to resort to investment in technology, processes, native-language speakers and refine technology and processes in order to identify relationships that would ultimately lead to higher revenue and competitive advantage. With increased benefits to enterprises in providing a single, unified view across applications, Semantic Web can ease development, maintenance and upgrades across the enterprises.

How else do you foresee Semantic Web technology influencing the businesses of tomorrow? What are the key drivers for the adoption of Semantic Web technology?

BPM has taken cue from this world-wide phenomenon and has been quick to embrace ‘social’ and embed it into its very design. With the increase of bi-directional communication taking place between customers and business enterprises, more and more applications are being built collaboratively by both parties. A social interface will help enhance the efficiency of business processes by combining expert knowledge and user experience and needs information, giving more clarity to the conceptualization and subsequent improvisation of the complete BPM design phase. Many companies have recognized that their social BPM initiative should revolve around the organization’s processes as well as the tools and technologies being used and that it should be a collaborative effort between process designers and social media participants including customers, to improvise the entire process.

With social BPM integrating the views and opinions of diverse stakeholders using web 2.0 and social tools, we can see the evolution of specific trends in this area:

• Collaborative Process Improvisation and Implementation: Social BPM integrates social tools and social networks in BPM based interfaces, collecting feedback and using it to tweak process designs created by process engineers. In BPM implementations, social interactions facilitate implementations and provide the ability to integrate the unstructured nature of social communications and spontaneous events into the BPM equation.
• Process Discovery and Analysis: Another interesting social BPM pattern is the transformation of the process discovery and analysis stages. Traditional BPM confined these activities to process engineers and technical resources but with social BPM, key stakeholders such as frontline workers and customers have been drawn into the communication loop.
• Real-time Monitoring: Enterprises have embedded social systems to monitor their business processes in real time thereby replacing the ‘snail mail’ system. Social media feeds bring together the key parties for any event or project and helps track key people and events in real time enabling quick decision making and immediate corrective actions.
• Spontaneous Status Updates and Feedback: Social BPM also captures spontaneous status updates for the various business processes at the design stage or implementation stage so that the critical priorities are aligned to the development process at any point of time. Process users can also provide real time feedback, ensuring timely and effective process improvisations and enhancements.

With such emerging trends all set to revolutionize business processes, I feel the greatest impact on how we ‘do’ our BPM is yet to be unleashed.  With customer interactions transcending business boundaries and realigning the way businesses think and act, social BPM is BPM’s opportunity to brace itself for today’s increasingly ‘social’ world.

To get an answer to the above question lets’ try to list some of the most commonly heard pain points related to CMS applications and how cloud-based CMS applications can help alleviate them:

1. Usability: An easy user interface is certainly not the strongest feature of most enterprise CMS. It is a paradox given the fact that CMS is supposed to be the tool that reduces IT dependency and lets business make changes. In one of my earlier posts, I discussed in detail, this very issue. A cloud-based application with more of a web application-like interface for content authoring and publishing can certainly bring some relief to this problem. However, often a complex content entry process results due to how the product is modeled and shrink-wrapped into a process, rather than the product itself. A cloud-based solution might still be subjected to the same process rigor which can make it as complex as any traditional enterprise CMS. For example, in order to reuse an image across a site, the image might need to be defined as a content object as well. While using that image for a particular article, the author needs to first convert the image into a separate content object and then establish the relationship with a relator widget. This process invariably becomes cumbersome and technical in nature for a regular business user. Can a cloud-based solution offer anything more intuitive to this problem?
2. Time to Market and IT dependency: CMS packages for a long time have been sold as business user-friendly tools which can de-couple content authoring from technology dependency. As we see it, for enterprise applications that is still a far cry. For an online marketer who wants to create a quick microsite for an upcoming promotion, he or she might still need to submit a request to an IT group, who will then respond to that request by creating, testing and eventually deploying the site; thus, taking far more time than what the business demands. However, to be fair to the under-staffed IT groups, their workload is already quite heavy. This is one area where a cloud-based CMS can bring some much needed urgency. Since the majority of SaaS or cloud-based applications will be driven by SLAs, a quick turn-around time for any potential service requests is an important requirement, if not mandatory.
3. Multi-Channel Publishing: Customer touch-points have now expanded beyond just the web. From smart phones to tablets to kiosks, television and print; your content needs to reach new frontiers in a consistent fashion. This is easier said than done though. The biggest challenge in today’s content world is quick, seamless re-purposing of content for various channels to which it is destined. Most enterprises that have complex dynamic content publishing needs, like web-based news and publication or e-commerce, rely on home-built solutions or heavily-customized integrated commercial solutions to achieve this feat. There are hardly any CMS vendors who provide a full scale end-to-end multi-channel publishing solution. A cloud-based application is not going to be a game changer for this problem anytime soon. Fundamental challenges of content repurposing will still be the same.
4. Scalability: Many times the inherent architectural constrain of an application causes a limit on its scalability. This is an area which causes the majority of the enterprises to switch from one CMS vendor to another one. There are many aspects to the scalability problem like maximum number of concurrent user support, maximum document size upload, etc. The solution to scalability demand is often not just adding more servers and databases but rather the need is for a completely different approach to design and architecture. A cloud-based solution can offer you quick infrastructure scalability; however, application scalability will still be a problem.
5. Security and Control: This is an area of great importance to organizations like insurance, banks and healthcare providers that deal with sensitive consumer information. For the majority, having a complete control over the security of data is a critical success factor. Any major slip-ups in that can cause irreparable damage through lost customers, lawsuits and overall bad press. For any CxO, a cloud-based solution raises this particular issue of security at the forefront of his or her decision making process. Things will likely not change radically for cloud CMS in this regard for quite some time to come.

In conclusion, it seems that cloud-based CMS do provide the advantage of quick turnaround and faster time-to-market for your content. However, as of now, it still inherits the few other fundamental issues of content management like security, application scalability and multi-channel publishing. The majority of early adopters of cloud CMS are targeting low hanging fruits like cookie cutter based micro-site design and hosting, event hosting, etc. The consensus is that there is a lot of potential for cloud-based CMS and the coming years will likely bring more insight into cloud CMS adoption for complex enterprise level challenges. Have you implemented a cloud-based CMS? What has been your experience?

Payers on track with the ICD-10 implementation process should have completed the Risk/Impact assessment of their IT and business areas and started their planning activities. Based on our experience with previous HIPAA implementations, we believe there are a few areas that healthcare organizations need to consider to ensure success of their ICD-10 migration program. Highlighted below are five mistakes Payers should avoid.

1. Receipt and Processing of ICD-10 codes – While Payers weigh in on the advantages and disadvantages for a partial remediation, more importance should be given to long term strategies. Going in for full remediation allows organizations to reap all the benefits of ICD-10 implementation. It is important to avoid falling into the trap of less risky partial remediation.
2. ICD-10 Benefits for Customers – Payers should avoid viewing ICD-10 implementation as another healthcare mandate created to increase the cost of healthcare. They should look from the perspective of a member and educate the members on the benefits of ICD-10. This ensures more member retention and satisfied customers.
3. Implementation Approach – Most CIOs focus on ICD-10 implementation as another IT project and miss out on the key areas of improvement. Considering BPM as an implementation tool will engage businesses more and make them feel part of the implementation success.
4. Tool Selection – Avoid selecting a tool with inadequate test data capabilities. The tool has to be flexible enough for the business team to use. Remember: the tool will primarily be used by the business and not by IT. This approach will also ensure quick adaption to the tool and avoid frustration associated with quality of the test data.
5. Test Strategy – More than any other HIPAA implementation, ICD-10 provides a huge challenge for testing. Our experience indicates that the testing aspect of the migration is not given due importance. Test data creation should be of highest priority to ensure coverage of test scenarios. Having a separate vendor specialized in healthcare testing will help the team focus more on the business, rather than technical, goals and objectives.

HIPAA implementations provide us with important insight into the various elements of a successful migration program in the healthcare industry. Above are a few of the traps which Payer organizations should avoid as they progress in their ICD-10 journey. We believe these mistakes, if prevented, can positively impact the timelines, efforts and costs of their migration program. We are curious to hear other challenges and issues you have come across which have critically influenced HIPAA / ICD-10 implementation programs. Please share your comments below.

1. Focus on performance – Performance should be integrated into the design from the very start of the new web application project rather than an afterthought. Performance testing should not be considered a one-time activity.
2. Identify key pages to test – It’s not always possible to test every page, so it’s important to select the pages that are expected to have the highest hit rates. The IT or marketing departments usually have the web analytics stats for the site and will be able to provide information on the sections of the site that receive the most traffic.
3. Know your target performance metrics – Well before embarking on any performance testing, you will need to identify realistic performance metrics. These may include page load times, number of concurrent users, etc. Typically you should aim to get these performance metrics before the solution is designed. This will ensure the architecture is able to cope with the expected loads and performance targets.
4. Measure base line performance – Plan to measure baseline performance figures for the old site (using the old CMS if it’s a migration) and the new CMS without any customisations. The reason for this is that you will typically want to prove that the ‘new’ site offers the same performance levels as the old one. While migrating to a new CMS platform, it’s important to establish performance levels of the new CMS, without any of your customisations, so as to ensure that the customisations have not degraded performance of the site.
5. Recreate the production environment – Plan to execute the tests on either the production hardware or a replica of production. If performance testing can’t be executed on production or hardware that replicates production, then the performance figures will need to be adjusted or extrapolated for production. It’s important to at least recreate any clustering and other configuration from the production environment to make the testing as realistic as possible. It’s important to ensure that the hardware used for testing doesn’t have any other applications running when the testing is due to be executed; this will ensure ‘clean’ performance figures.
6. Avoid network congestion through off-peak testing - Ensure testing is planned for a period when there is a minimal load on the network such as during the weekend or sometime in the night. This is to avoid loading the network with testing traffic when the rest of the business is using the network for normal ‘business as usual’ activities.
7. Team Management – Plan on having the right people available during the tests – e.g. DBA, Server Administrator, Technical Architect and, if possible, infrastructure architect to monitor network hardware such as load balancers.
8. Application Configuration – Configure the application and servers for production – i.e. switch on caching, set an appropriate logging level, etc. Don’t forget to disable DEBUG level logging unless you want the additional detail, as excessive logging may slow performance of the application. Normal production level logging is usually set to INFO, so it’s logical to use the same for the performance test.
9. Test the final production release – Ensure you’re running the production release software during the testing. It may be tempting to execute testing against an early release of the software, but unless this is the first of many performance tests, it is essential that the final production release is used. There is always a risk that the performance profile of the software will change from release to release.
10. Use monitoring utilities – Switch on application and monitoring utilities to record key information such as CPU and memory load, database query times, etc. It’s important to understand what’s going on at the web server, application server, database and other key integration servers. For database centric applications and sites (and most are) effective database monitoring is essential. For example, an application executing around 100 queries for every web request, can place a huge strain on the servers and reduce the number of concurrent requests that the application can handle. It’s an extreme example, and one that I have encountered in the past, but certainly proves that it is important to keep an eye on the number of queries being executed for a given web request.

Performance testing of web applications offers some interesting insights on why an application can fail. I am sure you may have a different experience or issues to talk about, which we would be very interested to hear about. Please leave your comments or other tips you may want to share in the below comments box.

Typical challenges that often cause concerns during a BPM initiative include:

• Focus on automation supersedes process excellence and continuous improvement
• Complex transformation programs end up in failures, as the business scope is not prioritised and the program roadmap not defined in advance
• Traditional Waterfall business requirements & process analysis phase takes  an average of 6 – 9 months  with no results to show in production for at least a year and as a result, business sponsors often get disillusioned with BPM
• Lack of alignment between the investments across business strategy, process improvement and automation activities
• Business outcomes and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are rarely validated in terms of actual metrics
• BPM solutions are usually designed without considering the holistic Enterprise Architecture
• Confusion between value of BPM platforms  and CRM, EAI, ECM  platforms
• Average time to assess BPM needs, define technology specifications, evaluate alternatives  and arrive at a technology decision takes more than 6 months
• Role of BPM in enterprise technology stack is not standardized or defined

As a management consultant and a BPM practitioner, I have been through many situations in which I have helped organisations implement new BPM initiatives and turn around less successful projects. My experience in handling such challenges has allowed me to identify the specific characteristics of a successful BPM project.

The three main steps that can help ensure the success of BPM projects  are:

• Setting the vision, articulating the business problem and quantifying it

o  Educate IT and business teams about BPM fundamentals

o  Align stakeholders/ departments on initiative scope & priorities

o  Have a clear understanding of the business problem as it relates to business objectives

o  Identify a ‘Candidate’ process for the first project

o  Ensure business case and define KPIs for improvement

• Mobilizing teams and delivering a solution to the business problem

o  Ensure  there is business participation in all phases of the project

o  Ensure team composition has a well balanced mix of IT, process  and business user representation and expertise

o  Ensure business transformation supersedes technology goals

o  Select suitable technology platforms (Process/Rules/Integration/UI/BAM)

o  Agree upon and adopt suitable BPM methodology & standards. Don’t adopt a Big Bang approach! Iterative approach ensures ‘Quick Wins’

o  Ensure BPM design and architecture are scalable and built for change

• Measuring the outcomes and seeking the next business problem

o  Have clear metrics to ensure that the outcomes can be appropriately measured

o  Identify the roadmap with prioritised follow on opportunities

Adopting these guidelines will allow businesses to have better control over their ability to drive business change rather than react to changes placed upon them. IT will also have more flexibility to integrate existing systems that deliver solutions which are in line with business needs and end user expectations.

As new iterations of the same process or new processes are brought onboard, a momentum is created and what started out as a tactical solution becomes a strategic and dynamic process platform. In addition, the various systems that are currently used to deliver a silo capability to the various functions inside each of the organisation’s divisions can be exposed to other divisions (if appropriate) and therefore improve IT reuse and drive consistent working practices across the organisation.

I would be keen to hear your experiences and lessons learnt while implementing BPM programs. Drop a comment or email me at ilouw@virtusa.com.

Let’s see how companies can improve the quality of their product line content for enhanced marketing effectiveness and results. Listed below are a few steps, to be implemented in the order listed, that can play a key role in ensuring higher content quality:

• Content Audit: Fundamental to any content clean up act is an understanding of the “as-is” state of your company’s products. Getting to know the current state can help in proper scoping of the effort required. As part of this effort, all product content should be collected, modeled in a spreadsheet, and their attributes analyzed. This spreadsheet is known as the master product sheet.

• Datasheet Audit: As discussed in my earlier post, a lot of valuable information remains trapped within the product datasheet and some of it needs to be brought out at the attribute level for enhancing product tagging and search experience. As part of this exercise, additional attributes from the datasheets are added to the master product attribute sheet.

• Attribute Rationalization: Once the product master attribute list is complete, the “rationalization” task starts. As part of this effort, the task will be to bring down the total number of attributes by zeroing in on one attribute from among a group of similar attributes. As mentioned in my earlier post, “Primary Benefits” and “Key Benefits” are communicating the same message, so instead of using them both for different products the objective should be to select one of them for the product definition. This exercise will reduce the number of attributes significantly and get you well on your way towards efficiency.

• Creation of Standard Product Template: After the “attribute rationalization” step, the focus should be on putting an effort towards building a standard product template. Typically, enterprise content management products or e-commerce suites will allow you to build product templates with the option of future customization (adding or removing attributes). A template built out of consensus is easier said than done. However, in most cases, it will be a customization of existing templates. Strict governance control should be built around the template and its management.

• Migration of Content to New Template: The most challenging aspect of content migration, however, is not the actual migration, but populating the master product attribute list with content – especially the values of the attributes that were collected from the datasheets. This will be a painstaking manual job, as there is no easy shortcut. The good news is it will be worth the effort. Once the master product sheet is ready with the content, the content migration process can start manually, automatically or using a combination of the two.

A well thought out approach, on the above lines, will help organizations improve their content management process towards their various product lines. Our experience shows that those organizations that have a uniform, consistent and an integrated approach to managing their product line content have a higher probability of achieving market success.

We would be happy to hear your thoughts. Please drop in your suggestions in the below comment box.

The IT services community has many players.  Yet, few organizations are able to provide truly meaningful services that help their clients achieve their business goals.  Most organizations focus on one of two areas – technical IT services or management level services with deep domain expertise.  The powerful blend of capabilities from Virtusa and ALaS gives us the opportunity to combine true industry expertise with a global force able to deliver comprehensive solutions in a cost effective manner.

With the acquisition of ALaS, Virtusa has significantly expanded our depth of industry expertise in banking, financial services and capital markets. This enables us to assume a leadership position in the financial services industry, act as trusted partner to our clients and deliver end-to-end solutions across the banking and financial services (BFS) lifecycle.

Using a consultative, business-led approach in all our client engagements, our Platforming methodology and expertise in niche client-facing technologies to accelerate business outcomes for our clients has been our hallmark and unique differentiator. This acquisition represents an incremental step in our efforts to deliver unparalleled value to our BFS clients around TCO reduction through improved business efficiency; faster time to market for new products and services and enhanced consumer experience.

As a leader in our industry, we look forward to continuing to serve and meet the needs of our current clients as well as the organizations we are yet to engage.

Key Reasons behind loss of Product Content Quality

• Unsuitable content for newer channels: Most of the traditional product companies have been dealing with legacy content made specifically for print medium. Their ability to define a standard product definition, and ensuring its use across all channels, was not deemed a need in the earlier print-focused era where consumer experience was relatively transient. However, with the addition of more interactive channels such as web, mobile and social media, there is a strong need being felt for a consistent product definition across channels – as these channels enable consumers to retain the product knowledge longer. We have observed that existing attempts to maintain a unified product definition across channels has fallen short of meeting this need.

• Merger and Acquisitions: When one company acquires another company, along with its products, it’s not uncommon for the new company to have a different set of product definitions than the existing ones. As a result, the acquiring company will end up having product lines with different marketing and technical messaging than the customers are used to, which needless to say, is against the objective of providing a consistent customer experience.

• Unstructured content: The products of chemical or pharmaceutical companies usually have a lot of fairly technical attributes. For example, specialty chemicals have additional technical attributes related to their specific gravity, cohesiveness index, forms (granular, amorphous, color etc.), etc. Many of these attribute values are embedded in the form of a table within MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet), which are primarily static documents (PDF or Word). Since material property value is usually static (we don’t expect the specific gravity of mercury to change every ten years!), the content in these tables are fairly accurate. However, since they are in a non-interactive form embedded within tables, these values can’t be used for parametric search by the end users.

• Inefficient attribute assignment: Organizations with too many product lines will have attribution problems. Too many products with similar attributes assigned to them results in a maintenance and communication nightmare. For example, one product line might have “Primary Benefits” as a key product attribute whereas another might have “Key Benefits” though their meaning is essentially the same.

• Lack of discipline from product Managers: Typically, each LOB (Line of Business) within an organization has its own marketing team. When a call comes to update the product content, it often happens ad-hoc, and in isolation without consulting the other product line teams. As a result, over a period of time, the organization ends up having multiple product templates.

In this increasingly content cluttered business environment, the challenge for organizations is to uniquely position their companies, through a sustained and consistent messaging program. Organizations should take notice of the above factors; for many companies, their failure to do just that leads to the dilution of their messaging objectives. A systematic and holistic approach for ensuring content quality will go a long way in creating a positive perception of the company and its products.

How have you managed the various challenges in ensuring content quality issues? Do you have a formal process for content audit and dissemination? In the next post, we will look at various mechanisms that organizations can adopt for ensuring a consistent “content” experience for customers.

The webinar started with Jeffrey Hammond reflecting back to the early 1980’s with the introduction of the personal computer.  He offered his observation that many IT organizations are reacting to mobile devices and smartphones today in the same way IT organizations greeted the PC; with skepticism and doubt.  Today, the personal computer is a dominant platform for computing power, a major productivity tool and a huge segment of the technical market.  Hammond predicted that mobile computing will exceed the personal computer many times over.

Questions for Starting Mobility Program

Planning to start your mobility journey? Jeffrey Hammond said there are few questions that must be answered before you begin. These include  the following:

• Who are the target users of the mobility program – Customers? Employees? Partners or others?
• Do you have a mobility strategy in place? Who drives it?
• Which are the platforms and devices under consideration for your mobility program?
• Is the focus on HTML 5 or native apps?
• What skills need to be developed for building the mobile apps?
• What are the security and management policies?
• Have you considered global device and network diversity into your strategy?

Having clear and definitive answers to the above questions will be instrumental in the success of your enterprise mobility program.

Hammond then discussed the need to have a overall strategy before pursuing any mobile implementation or strategy.  Highlighting scenarios for both internal and external uses of mobile computing, he pointed out that a deliberate, precise strategy would provide maximum returns.  Getting too fancy too quickly would risk missing basic and critical uses that would deliver significant results.

Hammond ended with some very specific advice for the mobile platform.  The final comment in his presentation was that the audience must be prepared for a ten year journey but should only focus two years out given the speed of evolution of the platform.

Rohit Sharma, the leader of Virtusa’s global mobility practice, then followed, reiterating the need to develop a business strategy prior to embarking on the mobility journey.  Sharma offered suggestions around standardizing architecture and developing other useful standards.

Audience Feedback & Expert Views

We then started an extended question and answer panel discussion.

1.       Topic 1 - My first request for the two presenters was to give the audience guidance on how to choose between native app development, mobile web HTML5 or a hybrid approach.  Jeffrey offered some very specific app requirements that would influence the decision one way or the other.  For example, if the application requires specific features in the phone or support when the phone is offline (i.e.; airplane use) then native is the way to go.  Rohit added some performance characteristics that would drive the decision but cautioned that all browsers do not behave identically.

We then asked the audience a poll question and found:

Hammond was not surprised by the results and stated that his experience reflected similar findings.  Almost forty percent are pursuing the more generic HTML5 route while one third is writing native to the platform.

1.       Topic 2 – The next topic addressed the issue of having a standard architecture for mobile app development.  The two presenters discussed the issue of a rapidly proliferating number of platforms vs. the need for standardization.  An increasing number of platforms and environments will have far reaching effects for development, maintenance, testing and distribution.  Mobile middleware is an intermediate solution but that creates dependence on third party providers to keep up with changes.  We asked the audience a poll question and found:

Again, Hammond was not surprised; the responses reinforced his belief that we are in the early stages of mobile development.  Sharma felt similarly and mentioned that we have a long way to go before we get a firm grip on mobility.

To summarize, mobility has introduced a paradigm shift in the way we do our business. The importance and urgency for enterprises to embrace mobility and transform their business is increasing by the day. For those starting their mobile initiative, there is a need for a strong business case, a well-defined strategy, an executable roadmap, and a flexible and scalable approach to the program. A partner who can guide, innovate and deliver high quality outcomes for the enterprise can be the crucial difference between an effective mobile program and an also ran initiative.

Thanks to all who attended the webinar and again, for those who did not, you can view it here.

In 2009, Forrester Research VP Andrew Bartels cited US Department of Commerce data showing that we are in the fourth wave of technology investment.  Specifically, the four waves are:

• 1951 – 1976: Mainframe computing
• 1976 – 1992: PC computing
• 1992 – 2008: Network computing
• 2008 – 2016: Accelerated innovation

Each of the waves experiences two phases – innovation and growth followed by refinement and digestion.  The current phase of accelerated innovation is in the innovation and growth phase, coinciding with the global economic recovery cycle.  Bartels substantiates his position by analyzing the US IT investment to GDP ratio CAGR for each phase.  The average ratio for the growth eras is 4% while the average for the refinement eras is -1.13%.

That would seem to provide statistical evidence of what we observe in our daily lives.  Social networking, smartphones, tablets, and 4G LTE wireless network infrastructure are all converging in front of our eyes.  Innovation is exploding.  But, despite the fact that the banking and financial services industry sector consumes more technology than any other industry, we have seen little technology advances in our daily lives over the past thirty years.  True – ATM’s, online banking, online trading and debit cards are a far cry from passbook savings accounts; those conveniences seem paltry compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars banks spend on IT.

I watched two television commercials for banks recently with very different reactions.  One highlighted new innovations like being able to deposit cash or checks with no envelope or deposit slip – boring.  After all these years, is that all we’ve got?  Another showed a newlywed couple depositing the checks they received as gifts by taking pictures with their smartphones.  Now that’s innovation that we can really use in our daily lives.

But, there is so much more to do.  With location based services, mobile web, mobile search, social networking, sentiment analysis, context aware computing, augmented reality and an ever growing list of truly mind boggling capabilities, we are at the very beginning of the innovation and growth phase.  This is a phase when organizations and companies can embrace their customers through technology to truly enhance the customer experience.

Calvin Grimes from Fiserv wrote an article for Credit Union Times last week on mobile payments.  He says “…think beyond bolting on another piece of mobile software or a chip to handle payments.”  He also advises to get started now so as not to be left behind.

Last month, Jeanne W. Ross and Peter Weill wrote a great article for the Wall Street Journal – Four Questions Every CEO Should Ask About IT.  Their very first question is – Are we using technology to transform our business, or are we just adding bells and whistles to existing processes? Their question addresses the same issue as Calvin from a more generic perspective.  The application of mobile technology must fundamentally transform the business and the customer experience or we are simply replicating old processes through new interfaces.

The trick is, how do we get that done?  Is it IT’s responsibility?  The business side?  Marketing?  The answer is all of them and more in a highly collaborative and innovative environment that breeds new thinking and challenges the organization to go beyond conventional wisdom.

And, if you are wondering how to get started with the Accelerated Innovation phase by leveraging mobile as a technology, join our webinar – Overcoming Challenges in Early-Stage Enterprise Mobility Programs, tomorrow at 11am ET.  Register here.

You’re a product manager in a major financial or commercial company and you have just gotten the assignment of launching a mobile version of your product. You’re thrilled but you’re terrified. Your mind is racing. Where do you start? Pour yourself an herb tea or some other relaxing drink, realize that it will not be easy, and start planning. Even the organizations that appear as though they are miles ahead of you have probably only “mobilized” a small subset of their potential offerings. A major bank, for example, may be offering some exciting consumer goodies but, if you knew the mobile product team, they would tell you they have barely scratched the surface. The same bank’s B2B offerings are probably still on the drawing board at best.

How to begin? Start by looking at your firm’s internet capabilities. A lot of what you are going to be putting on that iPhone is already on your company’s website. Also, look at competitor websites to see what they are showcasing. Make a chart with a row for each of the web capabilities you offer for your product and a column for each of your competitors showing what they currently address with their mobile offerings. If your competitors are doing things on smartphones you do not do on the web, add new rows. If you end up with a chart that is mostly empty space, then your rivals are not too far ahead. However, they are likely working on the same project you are and who knows how close they are to launch. If a lot of columns are filled in, then you know what you need for table stakes.

Now it is time to start thinking about how mobile is different than the web. You can start with the idea that your mobile offering is your current internet offering on a device with a (really!) small screen – but, your customers will hate it. Guaranteed. At a minimum, make the screen usable. Then start thinking about the things that will make a mobile offering different. Phones take pictures and your laptop can’t. Phones know where you are and your laptop doesn’t. Phones can send and receive text messages to communicate in ways your laptop won’t. Web browsers are all pretty much the same but smartphones (iPhones, Androids, BlackBerry’s) are different from each other and much different from traditional feature phones. Then there are tablets. Some offerings pretend these are phones and some pretend these are laptops but the right answer seems to be in the middle.

What will make your product a winner in the emerging mobile space? Applying these concepts will give you a good set of basic ideas to get started. If the competition is already ahead, you may need to get to market quickly with a copycat offering and then come out with a more strategic 2.0 version. Use focus groups and similar techniques for customer feedback on features but remember that the big breakthroughs do not happen that way. And, to state the obvious, this is a big technical project and you need to be working closely with your technology team every step of the way.

Planning to kickstart your company’s Mobility program? You may want to listen to Forrester and Virtusa experts in our upcoming Webinar on “Overcoming Challenges in early-stage Enterprise Mobility programs.” Click here to get more details on the Webinar.

• HTML5 is monolithic, but browsers are not. It is misleading to divide browsers into “Supports Vs Not”.  Instead, individual HTML5 feature support should be evaluated in terms of browsers.
• HTML5 is fully backward compatible. You can simply upgrade your doctype to HTML5 without changing any underlying code; the page is still valid and will still work. There is no need to panic or to throw away any page!

Multimedia:

With HTML5, embedding media is as simple as using the <video> or <audio> tag in code – a quantum reduction in effort, compared to the earlier way of coding for video. No plug-ins to include or activate (Windows Media, Real, Quick Time or Flash) and less markup code means that a page can be developed with less code and a browser can download it quicker, parse it faster and render it sooner.

H.264 or MPEG-4 is currently the predominant standard of file compression encoding that is used by YouTube, Vimeo, iTunes and the other leading media sources. The Chrome 10 browser that was released in March of this year dropped support for H.264 in favor of “WebM”, a royalty-free compression format combining the VP8 video format and Vorbis for audio — clearly marking the big play Google is making for pushing their own WebM as a native standard in HTML5.

YouTube has an experimental HTML5 site where you can sign up and test drive your upgraded browsers: http://www.youtube.com/html5. After signing up for this Beta, you will want to test out for yourself, what WebM videos are all about. The default YouTube search returns a mix of formats so make sure to add  “&webm=1” at the end of the URL for any search you do and hit “Enter” again, so that the search returns only WebM videos. Clicking on these results will play the video without using Flash and instead by using the browser’s new native video capability.

Browser support for streaming formats is not yet standardized. As a content provider, you will need to encode media in three formats: WebM, MP4 (H.264 video and AAC audio) and Ogg (Theora video + Vorbis audio). The good news is that gracefully degrading to a Flash player does not require hacks or browser-sniffing.

Semantic Tagging:

HTML5 introduces a host of new tags intended to give semantic meaning to content without altering the appearance in any way. Tags such as <section>, <article>, <aside>, <header> and <footer> are the basic elements that will enable a human reader, and eventually a machine reader, to give context to the information in a page. Microdata is an extension of this idea, determining which custom dictionaries, meaning and context can be given to web content. This paves the way for better SEO, targeted searching and contextual advertising.

Validations:

Several new input elements obviate the need for writing validation code, thus reducing the total payload of a page and increasing maintainability. Input elements like email, url, number, range and search all perform validation and throw an error without the need for custom code.

Animation:

The “canvas” element of HTML5 when used in conjunction with CSS3 and javascript, provides a full feature set that allows graphing, vectors and animation. This is approaching the capabilities of flash (already canvas based cartoons are available on the web).

Offline usage:

HTML5 expands on the pre-existing cache that browsers had by making it query-friendly and more robust. All, or at least most webpages of a website can be completely cached in the local data store so that a user working in “offline” mode can still click and see the pages in their last cached form. In addition to offline web surfing, this API also exposes a SQL style browser database that makes possible, offline applications such as email and games. When an internet connection is re-established, the browser performs the synchronization of the applications transparently. The Google plug-in “Gears” which was developed for such functionality, will be replaced by the offline functionality of browsers.

Geolocation:

The Geolocation API built into browsers tap into either a “coarse” location or a “fine” location using a combination of IP address, closest WiFi location and GPS listener (depending on what is available or opted in). To address privacy concerns, requests for geolocation information can be explicitly accepted by a user before the API gets to work. Geolocation means that browser-based applications can now access GPS and/or cell tower triangulation information and provide location based services, reducing the need for custom SDKs and applications.

These are some of the major advances in HTML5, but this list is far from being comprehensive. HTML5 is here to stay, so internet success is going to be predicated by the adoption rate of IT Services organizations in the Web Content Management space. Have you recently used an application involving HTML5 in some way? What has been your experience and what are your views on the latest version of HTML? Please send us your feedback by submitting your comments.

HTML5 will make web pages portable across devices, platforms and form factors – an idea that supports convergence with the proliferation of tablets and smart phones. Problems of varying resolutions can be artfully handled through use of related technologies like Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs). The fact that all browsers will support HTML5 represents the holy grail of page styling and interface design – i.e., cross browser compatibility, which means no more hacks, browser-sniffing or code-branching.

There is synergy between Apple and HTML5 around the issue of Flash support; the Apple platform does not support Flash, and HTML5 does not require Flash. HTML5 and Google are also aligning because HTML5’s native video format (WebM) and the latest browser, Chrome 10, are both Google products! Contradicting the age-old dictum, it appears IT services may benefit by placing all of their user interaction eggs in the HTML5 basket.

Long Term Benefit

HTML5 hype is focused mainly around its short term advantages, but buried under that is a feature that will eventually make the World Wide Web data-aware, context-aware and intelligent. The language will enhance the data organization of the World Wide Web and make it ready for the next generation – the Semantic Web. This “Semantization” will require retro-fitting billion-odd legacy web pages into the Semantic Web, possibly resulting in a deluge of work not seen since the Y2K days. IT Services can either anticipate this change, or more favorably, drive it. Here is a short discussion on how HTML5 will accelerate the second wave of the Web:

Today’s internet deals with data without any built-in context or awareness. This is reflected in that fact that performing internet searches is a skill that demands an understanding of text and context. Searching for “Japan” and “tsunami” simply returns all pages that have the words “Japan” and “tsunami” in them. The data store is not aware that that “Japan” is a country or that “tsunami” is a geological event. Results are ranked by proprietary search algorithms that guess context and relevance. This kind of targeted, parametric search is currently not in scope because data is not structured. Now let’s look at this other search example:  “List of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) alumni from class of ‘93 who weigh over 70 kg and majored in Mechanical Engineering”. A search like this would be commonplace on the Semantic Web, a world in which web data explicitly identifies MIT as a University, 1993 as a Year and Mechanical Engineering as a discipline of study.

This change will be powered by HTML5, which in addition to providing everyday benefits, is essentially a spring-board for launching today’s Internet to Semantic Web status or “Web 3.0” as its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee likes to call it. HTML5 introduces the concept of “microdata” which is a structured way for content providers to define custom dictionaries to assign semantic meaning to web content. Microdata is the latest avatar of RDFa and microformats. Search bots of the (near) future will become data-aware from the microdata and then enable targeted searches. How this will transform consumer and advertiser behavior is difficult to predict but there is no doubt that it will be a quantum leap in searching, knowledge discovery and targeted advertising.

In the second part of the blog series on HTML5, we will focus on other advances and benefits that will accrue from HTML5.

With less than 30 months left until the compliance date (October 1, 2013), healthcare entities will have to start taking stock, assessing their readiness and taking control of their planning activities.

Because the impacts of ICD-10 are widespread within and beyond individual organizations, it is very important to focus on these crucial first steps before embarking on the exciting journey of ICD10 implementation:

1. Assessment – Identifying business and IT impacts will help define the scope of resources, effort, and distribution needed to help with remediation
2. Project Governance – Identifying key stakeholders and establishing the project governance early on will help employees prioritize their responsibilities and focus
3. Define ROI – Defining Return on Investment (ROI) is crucial for the success of any initiative. Monetary gains, process simplification, and client response and satisfaction are some of the key metrics that help define ROI. ROI is one of the most important aspects of ICD-10 implementation that must be presented to the internal stakeholders. Showcasing the potential ROI from an ICD-10 implementation will ensure executive support and sponsorship of the migration process.
4. Provider Contracting – Analysis of existing contracts, claim analysis and claim adjudication will provide necessary information and serve as input for ICD-10 financial modeling tools. These modeling solutions will in turn help payers and providers re-negotiate contracts and improve provider satisfaction
5. Utilization Management – A review of existing ICD-9 Utilization Data will provide inputs to ICD-10 predictive modeling and help payers design programs focused on member health

These are some of the basic steps that need to be taken before ICD-10 implementation activities can be initiated. As outlined in one of our earlier blog posts, it is important that everyone understands the magnitude of the upcoming migration, both in terms of the process and the end results. This will ensure everyone is on the same page and will make for a quicker and smoother transition.

Have you started your ICD-10 Implementation process? What crucial first steps did you take? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Organizational users generally have the tendency to utilize their own tools for information dissemination between departmental colleagues or across departments in an enterprise. The newly acquired content management tool must be approved by these users before it is implemented. The point that we are trying to highlight here is that there are essentially two issues that must be considered when planning to use an ECM tool:

• Product Selection: Solving the first problem of tool selection is relatively easy but requires some investment. Enterprises can run an assessment cycle comparing the different products in the market and as well as conduct a mapping analysis with their requirements. This can help the enterprise shortlist a tool which can fulfill major requirements of their ECM implementation. .
• User buy-in: The second challenge is making users accept the product which has been chosen by their enterprise. The key to this is to consider user input. By following the product selection model, an organization will be convinced that the tool meets most of the use-cases from a usability stand point. However, it is important to make sure that everyone uses the tool, which will justify the cost of installation. It is important that user opinion and feedback is garnered and analyzed. An employee poll/voting can be used to take a honest opinion from the users bottom – up. The underlying thinking of that framework should be oriented towards acceptance of the new content management tool which an organization is planning to set up. This will ensure user needs are considered and will enable them to feel part of the decision making process and feel as though nothing was forced upon them for usage.

Our experience shows that successful adoption of ECM tools has more to do with users’ comfort level with the tools they are going to use and their comfort in embracing change. For this to happen, it is crucial to allow the users to be part of the decision-making. That way, we will get user buy-in and ensure a smooth and fast adoption.

The bottom line is that user acceptance will drive the success of ECM in an enterprise.  How has your experience been with ECM implementation within your organization? What were some of the major hurdles you have faced? Are there any best practices you have come across? We look forward to your comments and feedback.

Even larger companies have dealt with the horror of this scalability as they resorted to using traditional relational databases, eventually hitting limits that were unviable both financially and operationally. Google once ran off of 40,000 MySQL installations and Facebook was at one point spending $1M per month for specialized database hardware to serve their pictures.  These unviable solutions led to a re-evaluation of existing database technologies and led to the Not-Only-SQL (NoSQL)  movement.

The NoSQL movement is characterized by a move away from traditional SQL based solutions in certain storage and processing situations. The fundamental reasons behind this are simple:

• Not all your applications need relationships between data to be explicitly stored along with the data

• Moving the responsibility of interpreting data relationships out of the store allows for storing the data anywhere. That means you can simply add boxes as your data grows
• Storing your data as a set of key-value pairs as opposed to hard wired tables allows for more flexibility in storage design
• Absence of a pre-defined schema/tables allows you to easily extend your data model
• Data operations, both read and write, tend to be simple and lightweight in the absence of SQL processing and explicit relationship constraints

By moving the responsibility of access control, correlating related data, conflict resolution and maintaining integrity constraints to a programmatic layer separate from the database, NoSQL engines are able to achieve exceptional performance and scalability. Due to this separation of responsibilities, significant design skills are required to build solutions using NoSQL. A clear understanding of data management and data storage concerns is also needed. Industry evidence shows the returns are well worth the effort especially for applications that deal with explosive data volumes as their single biggest challenge.

NoSQL engines provide two fundamental infrastructure pieces:

• A way for you to distribute your data across different nodes; in other words, a distributed storage system
• A parallel processing solution that allows you to break up your data processing across different nodes

Most NoSQL databases use a high throughput distributed file system for storage and the MapReduce programming model developed at Google as their distributed parallel processing framework.

Conceptually, MapReduce is a simple approach based on organizing your data as key-value pairs and modeling the processing as a set of map-reduce operations. Say, for example, counting the number of occurrences of each word in a large collection of documents – a map function would be responsible for computing the frequency (‘value’) of each word (‘key’) at a document level and a reduce function would be responsible for adding all frequencies for each word. The input data, intermediate results, and the final results are stored in a distributed store. The advantage of MapReduce is that it allows you to distribute the processing of map and reduce jobs in parallel across multiple processing units.  It’s obvious by now that MapReduce is geared more towards batch or exhaustive processing and not as much towards the interactive processing that characterize most business applications.

Over the last few years, several commercial and open source NoSQL implementations have seen wide-spread industry adoption. Popular NoSQL implementations include Hadoop HDFS, CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Amazon Dynamo. Their adoption ranges from big ‘new economy’ names like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, EBay, Google, Yahoo and Rackspace to traditional businesses like LexisNexis, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Intuit, Hulu, and Fox. Google eventually replaced its 40,000 MySQL boxes with a MapReduce/HDFS based implementation. Facebook moved away from using specialized database hardware to a distributed database solution powered by Cassandra.

Fundamentally, because NoSQL is a solution for high volume data processing, I see it getting a lot of traction in the business intelligence space where intelligence is now being mined not just from structured data in tables and columns but also from unstructured data such as activity logs.

The gaining momentum of enterprise level adoption to NoSQL databases opens up a wide range of possibilities to resolve existing problems, which were probably hard to tackle with SQL based technologies.

Before Boris (@bevelson) began his session, I asked him “what is your definition of pervasive BI?”  His answer was a company in which BI is everywhere, data and information are readily available, and an organization which is poised to compete not only on the basis of its goods or services but on the quality of its decisions as well.  That definition places a culture of “informed decision making” at a premium and views BI as a vehicle to deliver the information upon which critical decisions are based.

In a broader context (data to insight process), Forrester defines Business Intelligence as Data Integration, Data Quality, Master Data Management, Data Warehousing and BI. With evolving technology advancements and demanding business environment, Boris highlighted why traditional BI is no longer sufficient -

• BI apps are not intuitive
• Requirements are changing very rapidly
• Lines between producers and consumers of information are disappearing
• Employees spend too much time looking for information, not analyzing information

According to a recent Forrester finding, the use of BI by enterprises continues to rise, but a lot needs to be done by enterprises to make their BI “pervasive”.

Boris further went on to highlight some critical success factors in pursuing BI projects:

• Insure tight alignment between business and IT.  This is true for any IT project and BI is no exception.
• Adopt methodologies and processes that create a flexible and agile environment.  BI requirements change rapidly and they change often — so rigid and inflexible approaches are bound to fail.

State of BI – Webinar Poll

During the webinar we posed two poll questions.

(I) How would you characterize your DW/BI initiatives:

• Just starting – 17%
• Deployed multiple data warehouses, marts and other solutions – 33%
• Have been deploying DWBI solutions for over five years – 50%
• BI is “pervasive” in my organization – 0%

(II) What are the major challenges in the implementation of DW-BI projects (multiple answers allowed):

• Cost of implementation too high – 33%
• Speed of implementation is a challenge – 42%
• Data Quality is a major issue – 33%
• Business not impressed with the reports – 33%
• Cannot build business case with definitive ROI – 58%

In question 1 above, none of the attendees indicated their initiatives  are “pervasive” which clearly shows that ‘Pervasive BI” has yet to take off. Further, per the results of question 2, a sizeable percentage of attendees noted issues and challenges with building a business case with definitive ROI. This is a main reason for the slow growth of BI in enterprises.

Ajoy’s session covered best practices and several case studies which highlighted the business benefits derived from BI projects.  He included a “cheat sheet” of the things to keep in mind when implementing BI projects.

Where does your organization fit in the BI landscape? Has the time for “Pervasive BI” come? What are the challenges you are facing? Share your thoughts, experiences and advice for the community by submitting your comments below.

You can access the replay of the session from here. Thanks to all that attended.

So has the meaning of value literally changed from what it was in the earlier days to the present? Or has Value in its representation evolved to “Value 2.0” i.e. becoming more user-oriented, keeping in line with the changing times? How are businesses upgrading themselves to meet the evolving juggernaut of customer needs and wants?

Driving Value – Its Imperative to be ahead of the Curve

Effectively managing customer needs and expectations has always been a challenge for enterprises. The age of Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media has only aggravated the “challenge” quotient. User-generated reviews, interactivity, social networking, and word of mouth are all re-inventing the customer experience and satisfaction of a product or service – from the stage of initial evaluation to purchase to its subsequent consumption and use.

For enterprises, staying ahead of the curve requires a steadfast and disciplined approach to understanding and knowing customer needs, and having the right enablers to meet the ever-changing customer needs. The focus of enterprises should be on generating value by emphasising technology investments that enable them to drive their future revenues and customer goodwill. A recent survey of 2,014 CIOs (representing over $160 billion in corporate and public-sector IT spending across 50 countries and 38 industries) conducted by Gartner reveals some interesting facts relating  to the state of mind of CIOs. Until recently, an average IT organization dedicated 66% of the IT budget for day-to-day operations. Increasing enterprise growth, attracting and retaining customers and reducing enterprise costs are the top three priorities for CIOs in 2011. Currently, 3% of CIOs have the majority of IT running in the cloud or on SaaS technologies, but over the next four years CIOs expect this number to increase to 43%. Over the next few years, CIOs expect dramatic changes in IT as they adopt new technologies that will enable their organizations to innovate, grow and succeed.  It shows that the focus of CIOs (based on business needs) is shifting from one of operational cost savings to that of driving future growth by transforming their businesses through identification and creation of new sources of value. This thought process clearly reflects the ground realities of the market – evolving and dynamic customer needs, rapid technology advancements and leaner and fast paced competition among others.

In the next few years, the technology savvy Gen X and Gen Y will take center stage in an enterprise, as baby boomers retire. They will expect tools and technologies in offices that they comfortably use in their personal lives. The era of digital convergence has already started. For the enterprises, it is imperative that they are open to adopting new technologies and platforms for survival and that they are in front of the opportunities that may come up through market disruptive forces such as a new technology, new business model, etc.

Value as a concept is notional and dynamic. With changing times, the significance and scope of Value will evolve. What is critical for enterprises is to not only survive, but to succeed by being ahead of the curve- the curve of ever-changing needs, technology adoption, and innovation!

These are some common sentiments of practically everyone in the healthcare industry who is affected by the ICD-10 mandate. More and more questions are starting to arise about the process that requires solid answers. Organizations must determine how long they can wait before starting the implementation process and must assess how the mandate will impact them.  Some organizations are also assuming that they are going to get a reprieve and that there will be an extension to the implementation deadline. However, the probability of this happening is very low, so it’s advisable not to factor it into your thinking and planning.

Following are 10 key considerations to think about if you have not begun your ICD-10 planning :

1. Determine your strategy and plan for your organization. Having a strategy is key to determining how to plan for the migration, understand how large the plan needs to be and decide what resources need to be included, etc.

2. Develop an internal/external communication strategy. Knowing how you will communicate your strategy and plan to all internal and external stakeholders is an important second step.

3. Educate all stakeholders and areas on the potential impacts and opportunities. It is critical that everyone understands the magnitude of the impacts caused by the migration process. Furthermore, it’s equally important that stakeholders are aware of the ability to take advantage of business transformation opportunities, which will be discussed later.

4. Recruit an Executive Sponsor/Champion. It is extremely important that you get executive sponsorship and support.  The reason this is critical is that when you are seeking support for budget, resources, prioritization and other senior leadership intervention that you have already secured your internal Champion.

5. Identify/determine the team that will be assigned to the project. Assign a person as the Project Manager. This person will play a key role in helping you develop your overall plan.

6. Set reasonable goals. Set attainable goals with senior management, the project team and all internal and external stakeholders.  These goals then get tracked as part of the overall project planning activities to assure that they are met and that any remedial actions are triggered to make the appropriate adjustments.

7. Determine your financial exposure. It is critical to understand the potential financial impact the migration process will have on your organization. This information can help you gain executive support and assist you with your internal messaging as you develop the teams to drive the strategic, assessment and tactical planning.

8. Assess the impact. The first phase is to perform an assessment of all potentially impacted systems and business processes – especially taking into consideration impact at the organizational level.  This assessment needs to review the organization holistically in order to gain a detailed-view of all potentially-impacted areas.  Remember that migration from ICD-9 to ICD-10 is approximately 70% business impact and 30% system impact.  Therefore, the business process flows need to be thoroughly assessed to determine if remediation efforts need to be considered.  It is also important to determine whether or not you have the resources within your organization to manage a project of this scope.  If not, it’s important to remember that you also have the option of seeking professional consulting services or a hybrid approach of the two to minimize your costs.

9. Take advantage of business transformation opportunities. The best kept secret from this conversion is the ability to take advantage of the business transformation opportunities created by this migration.  Some of the benefit areas can include better medical management analytics as a result of more accurate outcomes for reporting medical management process changes and disease management.  Additionally improvements in customer and member service due to increase in diagnostic specific dates. Organizations that start the assessment as early as possible will be able to take advantage of these opportunities — which have significant ROI and will assist in offsetting remediation costs.

10. Test, test, test. Allow ample time to test the migration process internally and with all of your stakeholders. This will ensure that there will be no issues with accepting ICD-10 transactions. It is also important that you test your new business processes and make adjustments as needed.  Too many organizations “shortcut” the testing phase and based on personal experience, I can tell you that this is a critical phase to achieving success.

When integrated into your overall plan, these 10 steps will help ensure your migration plan is a success and will help you take the leadership role that is needed within your organization.  Additionally, there are some great resources available on the web, which can be accessed, including experiences that other organizations have had and lessons they have learned. ICD-10 has been implemented in Europe, South Africa and other nations for several years so there are some great “lessons learned” available.  I encourage you to be the catalyst and “change agent” in your organization and help move this very important process forward.

• Reason #1: Lack of ECM Strategy and Roadmap: An organization’s vision, mission, objective and long term goals should be understood before starting an ECM initiative. The ECM strategy must be aligned with the organization’s goals along with well-defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). When coming up with the strategy, one must understand the past and current business needs of the organization and envision the future state. This in turn helps to create the right ECM strategy roadmap. In order to help prioritize ECM initiatives and ensure alignment with organizational goals, the ECM strategy must be clearly communicated to the business and executive management. One must follow a holistic approach in leveraging existing systems, applications, solutions and create an ECM platform by consolidating and rationalizing the existing ECM infrastructure and products without impacting the business. This helps in the standardization of ECM platform. Once there is a strong ECM strategy and roadmap in place, it is easier to radiate and spread the change.

• Reason #2: Resistance to Change: Change is something which every human being will resist initially. One must have a mindset of ‘change is something which is constant and will bring in opportunities’. There must be a clear plan for change adoption, first in terms of identifying the like-minded, change-avert people who can influence change in the organization. They must be instilled with confidence and convinced with a strong business case that the new system is valuable and that change should be implemented. If this is successful, this team will act as your Change Agents across the organization and will radiate the message and value proposition of the change to the entire organization. The key is to identify the right set of people who are change champions.

• Reason #3: Over Budget and missed deadlines: This is a common syndrome for many projects. It is highly common for ECM implementations due to the lack of understanding on chosen ECM Product features. Often times, most of the people look at the product features and assume that they are out of the box features of the product. However, when the content use cases are realized and implementation starts, it may turn out that the use cases require customizations, which would involve more development effort, thus impacting the project schedules. Hence while choosing the product, the emphasis must be placed on product configurations rather than customizations. More customizations would require more maintenance and support of lights-on projects. Because ECM implementations involve all the business and IT units in the organization, the dependencies within the groups must be thought out carefully and included in the schedule.

• Reason #4: Lack of Information Governance and Information Architecture: This is the key to any content managed site. Information Governance will help define the roles and responsibilities for content authoring, creation, review and approval – which are necessary to ensure that the right content is available on the sites. This coupled with scalable Information architecture is the back-bone of any content managed site. Information architecture which deals with Content Taxonomy, SEO, Intuitive User interfaces, User experience, Metadata, searchable attributes etc must be identified before the design of the site is laid out. Any wrong step in this process will lead to a non-user friendly and un-maintainable site.

• Reason #5: Lack of thoughtful, scalable and appropriate architecture: This is another key item which is necessary in order to build a strong, scalable content managed site. A great deal of forward thinking in terms of growth of user base, based on future business growth of the organization, must be taken into consideration while sizing the hardware. Other key items which must be considered are content archival process, site availability, and disaster recovery.

We would recommend that any organization that plans to implement ECM think through the above before they start their ECM implementations program.

How has your experience been? Feel free to respond below with comments and questions.

Clay Richardson (@passion4process) brought up several very interesting points:

• BPM projects are like learning how to dance.  Other than the costumes, BPM projects need to understand steps, roles and lead to successfully navigate project challenges.
• A wide variety of skills are necessary from process design to technology deployment.
• Most successful BPM projects today are led and funded by the business side of the                organization.
• It is important to collaborate with enterprise architecture (EA) as EA is crucial to the IT environment. If BPM projects are being led by the business side of the house, it seems like this is the ultimate showdown between business and IT. In fact, respondents to our poll indicated that misalignment of business and IT goals was the number one contributor to BPM project issues.
• BPM projects require strong links to master data management. While this issue may not be readily apparent, it was also mentioned by Vinay. If the BPM project is not tightly linked to the “single version of the truth” managed by MDM, process flaws will be extremely difficult to isolate. Was the error caused by a process issue or a data issue?

Vinay’s portion of the presentation offered best practices to achieve consistent results. He mentioned that a strong Center of Excellence implementation can help bring repeatable success. In our audience poll, almost one half of the respondents had not implemented a CoE, while twenty percent had one in place. Vinay ended his presentation with a “cheat sheet” summarizing his observations across dozens of BPM project implementations.

You can access the replay of the session from the home page of our corporate website. Thanks to all that attended and stay tuned for future webinars.

Let us start with organizations that do not have any IT automation of their processes [yes there are many startups and even small to mid-size companies that still manage with manual processes except for small packages used for accounting]. These organizations could very well invest in “Process Modeler” tools like ARIS. They must define and simulate the current process to understand the process bottlenecks and functional pain areas. They should not invest in a BPM tool until they have their core functions automated using an ERP or Bespoke method, depending on the current budget.

Next let us talk about organizations that have most functions automated using a non-ERP bespoke application development process. These organizations have an option to either go in for an ERP, or, they can jump the maturity cycle by directly investing in a BPM tool. This kind of a decision can be made if their current automated applications are a) fairly mature, b) have good support from current vendors or c) have visibility for decent availability of technical and professional workforce. The advantages are:

1.  BPM is a process automation platform which gives organizations the flexibility to develop highly customized organization process

2.  Process Integration and monitoring of current bespoke applications helps in leveraging existing investment as compared to an ERP application

3.  In ERP, many organizational processes need to be changed to fit the package selected whereas a BPM tool allows an organization to maintain their current business processes while automating

The third and final category is organizations that are already mature in process automation with an ERP package. Should these organizations go in for a BPM tool? This is literally a million dollar question for organizations and especially true when current ERP vendors claim to bring add-ins that perform BPM functions. However, it is true that organizations cannot scale without BPM, whether it is offered as a add-in of ERP or a separate tool that sits on top of ERP. BPM is important because it gives businesses the flexibility to change according to market conditions without having to force fit the process to suit a pre-defined, one size fits all ERP package. So, having implemented an ERP package, organizations seeking to a) increase people collaboration in business process, b) predict process bottlenecks, c) have the flexibility to change to market conditions and last but not the least, d) have a flexible platform to implement the human process integration, should invest in a BPM tool.

Those who plan to start on their BPM journey would be better off knowing and understanding the risks and pitfalls involved with executing BPM projects. Virtusa is organizing a webinar to discuss and highlight the risks involved with planning and executing BPM projects. Senior Forrester Analyst, Clay Richardson, will present his insight as to why BPM projects experience a high probability of failed execution. Sign-up for the webinar, to be held on February 16th from 1-2pm US ET. https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/288194553

For those who have embarked upon automating business process in a big bang approach [automating business processes of multiple interlinked functions] the biggest challenge is how to ensure efforts related to integration do not blow up and deviate from the scheduled timeline. Some organizations think that having multi-vendor partners for implementation “de-risks” implementation schedule delays. However things can get un-manageably complicated if the coordination between the multi-vendors is not planned and controlled.

This is especially true because BPM tools are more platform configuration, unlike SAP which is a package configuration. This gives BPM tools more flexibility to suit organizational processes where SAP modules will test limits of configuration [and thus forcing organization to change their process to suit SAP modules]. This flexibility of BPM tools is a boon as well as a problem if not handled properly.

In a complex BPM implementation, organizations plan vendors, development teams, SMEs, business analysts, QA, Project Managers and so on. However they miss a key role that can integrate multi-function, multi-vendor BPM implementation challenges. And that key role is “Release Manager” or “Integration Manager”.

This is especially important when vendor A has to work on changes made by vendor B while in parallel, production changes are implemented for configuration done by vendor C. It can get very complicated. This type of situation is not uncommon while implementing BPM tools like PEGA. It is all the more important to carefully orchestrate the implementation in these complicated production delivery process.

Here the role of “Release Manager” or “Release coordinator” becomes very critical. He/she will ensure:

1.       All production upgrades are scheduled and deliveries are planned as per the schedule

2.       Component [in Pega Rulesets] changes are tracked before User Acceptance Test (UAT) and current versions are communicated effectively to all vendors

3.       Work assignment to multiple vendors is done by communicating the latest versions of the components

Without the above role, complex implementations can quickly become nightmare for UAT teams and the development teams and everyone will start working with cross purpose.

The Release Manager role should start work sometime during the first set of production release or UAT phase and should continue till the end of the project and all slivers.

For those interested to know on the risks and pitfalls involved with planning and executing  BPM projects, can register for Forrester-Virtusa joint webinar to be held on February 16; 1PM to 2PM US Eastern. Click here to Sign up. https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/288194553

Evolving Enterprise Value Chain

A great validation of the Mobile use of Facebook is that 60% of subscribers access through mobile browsers and most active mobile users are in Indonesia, South Africa, Kenya, Canada and the US, where at least 60% of Facebook users spend just as much time on a mobile device as on the desktop. The collaboration between social media tools and mobile operators and app developers has created a revolution in the adoption rate of social media across the deepest parts of developing and developed worlds alike.

This convergence of social media and mobility is creating a powerful wave that no company can stand to ignore. The only way any company can capitalize this wave is by bringing in a structured approach to the social media strategy and connecting the social media investments to social analytics and social intelligence.  The application of business logic on the social intelligence captured along with events that have significant impact on business can yield a powerful means of responding to the external world in real time.  These triggers and data can feed into the business processes within an enterprise thereby completing a logical value chain.

The above diagram gives a logical representation of the integrated value chain and data flow.  There is another aspect of social media that is internal to an enterprise in terms of collaborative business processes where collective knowledge sharing and decision-making can be greatly enhanced through social tools albeit within an enterprise scenario.

Let us look at what kinds of business processes are influenced by each of the constituents viz – the larger external population, partner community and employees.

• The larger population can consist of existing customers, influencers, potential customers and competitors’ customers. This group can influence the product decisions, pricing decisions, product comparisons, brand perceptions, customer expectations, grievances and product dis-satisfactions. The data related to these topics – when filtered correctly – and intelligence gathered can feed into or trigger the processes around new products, innovation, customer service, advertisement, marketing and logistics.

• The second group consists of partners, strategic alliances and suppliers. Partners can be dealers, agents, brokers who will not only use social media to voice their opinions and track a community but also wish to understand how they can leverage the larger consumer behavior to sell a company’s products and services. Suppliers can leverage social tools for real time collaboration and content exchange that can greatly enhance the B2B process efficiencies and supplier relationship management. Alliances can be of varied nature and social media can be a great way to keep them in loop for sharing various kinds of developments and initiatives and ensure that a community is developed for fostering greater depth of alliance and innovation.

• The employees, alumni and job aspirants groups are quite different in their social interactions but interconnected in many ways. How we design our social strategy for each of these groups can yield far-reaching benefits in terms of employee motivation, retention, alumni connections, attracting job aspirants and possible returning employees.  Creating a community through groups and blogs can keep the potential employees and job aspirants in a closed loop enabling them to tap job openings.

The list of possibilities is immense and we have not even scrapped the surface. Every passing day is opening up new ways of social media adoption and creative possibilities. It will not be long before social media tools will be an integral part of an organization’s value chain. A sure shot way of ensuring that the social media investments are aligned to business strategy, is to establish a connection between the business processes that drive key metrics and the data/ intelligence coming from social media.

Social Analytics & Internal Processes

An article published in BusinessWeek (Dated 25 October 2010 titled “Wanted: Social Media Sifters”) covers this topic in some detail. Companies such Coca Cola, Kraft Foods and Procter and Gamble are now employing social media analytics firms to sift through all the chatter and derive meaningful information that can help them define their marketing and branding strategies. Social intelligence is opening doors for more personalized marketing. According to a study by eMarketer, US advertisers will be spending about USD 2 Billion on social media next year – an increase of 24% over the current year.

The next wave in social media investments is directed towards an enterprise’s ability to participate in social media interactions, analyze the data that is generated through social  media sites and taking real time actions that govern the product, marketing, distribution and pricing processes.

If we can tie the business processes that govern marketing, product engineering, customer service and innovation to the data that gets generated through social media websites, we can start getting a better handle on the social media investments through the returns measured in terms of KPI’s.

A recent blog post by Anne Stuart titled “Getting started with Social BPM” touches on the topic of Social BPM and how collaborative processes can be influenced through social media.  Why is it so difficult to connect the two worlds of social media and BPM? One simple reason is that social media and related information is so dynamic that you cannot derive a pattern out of it. Whereas BPM initiatives are built around repetitive processes that have a finite start and end point resulting in a business outcome.

Social Media Landscape – Demography

Nearly 10% of the global population are Facebook subscribers and the count is increasing by the day. This fact signifies the reach and influence of just one social tool. There are different target segments subscribing to tools such as blogs, wikis, Youtube, Linkedin and other tools. A recent article by Nielsen on “Introducing Generation C: The Connected Collective Consumer” From Nielsen’s Consumer 360 Indonesia conference, is very insightful.  Key excerpts from this presentation are “Gen C is not a target audience but a community of digital natives that will partner with brands. To successfully market to Gen C consumers, brands must create fresh, cultural capital for Gen C to talk about – a process which also gives them “status” within their cohorts or “tribes” and social networks. According to Nielsen, Gen C is characterized by the following traits:

• Tribal behavior – form their identities by belonging and expressing themselves within “tribes”
• Social status derived by what you share – gain credibility by expressing opinions, sharing ideas, observations and thoughts
• Bee-like swarm behavior – mobilize as one with their tribes like bees around topics that interest them
• Social oxygen – Mobile devices have become “social oxygen”, enabling them to connect, create and share opinions and thoughts with their tribes
• Continuous partial attention – As experts at managing content and information, they engage in never-ending conversations, constantly “livestreaming” their experiences to the world
• Chameleons – Gen C consumers are “chameleons”, constantly changing and morphing their identities to simultaneously belong to as many different tribes as possible
• Co-creators – The social web has brought out “democratization of creativity”

The collaboration between social media tools and mobile operators and app developers is strongly influencing the adoption rate of social media across the globe. Stay tuned, as we discuss in our next post on how the convergence of social media and mobility is creating a powerful wave which organizations cannot afford to ignore.

In 2011, organizations that implemented BPM will look forward to service companies to help them realize BPM ROI through advanced concepts like process optimization, SLA improvisation and others. In this blog post I will delve into these concepts in a bit more detail.

BPM tools enable human and business process interactions and take automation to next level, where it becomes easy to 1) monitor work done, and 2) identify future bottlenecks in the work flow. It also enables converting rules [typically program constructs in legacy and ERP] into organization asset separate from workflow logic. This is a powerful concept, “a soft asset,” of which organizations will start realizing the benefits in coming years.

Process optimization and SLA improvisation hinges on the ability of organizations to view rules as a separate asset at a business level rather than as an IT investment.

Using BPM tools, organizations can convert all their policies including those that reflect compliance with government regulations into an effective organizational asset, a ruleset, and embed it into the business workflow.

Process optimization then would be primarily a task of intelligently changing the rule which in turn change the work process dynamically.

The possibilities of process control or optimization are immense. Following are a few examples of implementations across industry verticals and scenarios:

1.  Claims Workflow distribution: Healthcare claims manager can add additional resource for  approving claims USD 1000 and above looking at year end rush by just adding additional “Adjudicator role” at ruleset level. The workflow will then automatically distribute the work to two adjudicators.

2.  Telecom Revenue enhancement: A telecom company has introduced a new process whereby the family members of the subscriber get special sign-up discounts and based on the total group volume billing, the subscriber needs to get bonus minutes. Case management feature of BPM can help track every family package case and ensure delivery of timely benefits to the subscriber and the family.

3.  Process bottlenecks: Activity monitoring features provides visibility for the management in the areas where process gets delayed due to external wait scenarios like waiting for a document approval. Such odd or specific scenarios can be trapped using BAM feature of BPM and resolutions can be implemented.

As can be seen, BPM will enable organizations to create soft assets which pack more value whether in terms of optimization, brand improvement or in terms of overall organizational ability to service customers, thereby improving competitive advantage.

The year 2010 saw the arrival of the mobile app as an indisputable force to be reckoned with.  With iPhone and Android app stores carrying hundreds of thousands of applications each, there is no denying that apps have arrived.  As we watch new mobile devices, new social sites, and slick new apps being released with blinding speed we are quite possibly witnessing an inflection point in human history.  Consider this time the dawn of the true technology era.  Like the Italian Renaissance, we have our artists and visionaries.  Instead of Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Galileo in Italy we have Gates, Jobs, Berners-Lee, Metcalf, Joy, Torvalds, AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox PARC and Silicon Valley.  One hundred years from now historians may look back at this time and declare this period of time the start of the technology revolution.  Star Wars and Matrix are our Mona Lisa and statue of David?  Scary.

What have been some inflection points in human history?  In addition to the Italian Renaissance there were ocean faring explorers in the fifteenth century, impressionist painters in Europe in the late nineteenth century, the Founding Fathers writing the Constitution of the United States, early physicists in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and musicians of the eighteenth century.  These groups of individuals changed the course of human history forever.  Are we seeing our course changed as well?

One of the most sweeping changes in organizations today is the concept of enterprise 2.0.  The term itself was coined by Andrew McAfee in his book Enterprise 2.0 published in 2009.  In it, McAfee presents compelling data that organizations that invest heavily in IT outperform those that do not, and those that invest in advanced technologies to improve efficiency, communications and collaboration outperform all others regardless of industry or sector.  Since the time the book has been published, technology has continued its forward march and extended its embrace.  How is your organization using technology to improve processes and efficiency?

Recently, Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler of Forrester Research published Empowered, the sequel to Bernoff’s Groundswell.  Bernoff and Schadler recount story after story of organizations that have embraced social media to improve cycle times, customer relations and organizational efficiency.  They cite examples of United Breaks Guitars, Comast, Best Buy and UPS.  Organizations that once shunned the technology got on the bus with empowered individuals that could make a difference.  Are the individuals in your organization empowered to make a difference?

With every turn in our history there were visionaries that broke away from the pack.  There were winners and losers.  The stakes are higher than ever now.  Today, it’s all about new business models, advanced technology and innovation.  Is there a visionary in your industry?  Your company?  Who is responsible for innovation in your organization?  Do you feel yourself leading your industry or falling behind?

1. Market Shakeup

We saw some significant shakeup in the BPM vendor market with some acquisitions by the likes of IBM, Software AG  and Progress taking up Lombardi, IDS Scheer and Savvion respectively – three of the significant players in BPM. Pegasystems, Metastorm, Global360 and Appian are probably a few best-of-breed pure plays that continue to stand on their own. While this trend signifies that BPM is gaining attention and investments from some of the largest software vendors, it also means that the market is losing some of the focus and innovation that a pure play vendor can offer.

2. BPM-ECM-CRM Convergence

The convergence of BPM, ECM and CRM applications and technologies is becoming prominent with the evolution of social media, mobility, collaboration and multi-channel integration.  There is a mad rush for vendors in these three categories to offer best-of-breed capabilities around the emerging trends, grab a share of the customers wallets, and also be a prime point of access and usability for end users. Vendors like Pegasystems are moving into the CRM space and competing head on with leading pure-play CRM vendors. CRM vendors are building strong process automation, collaboration, knowledge management and social media capabilities. On the other hand, the ECM market is further consolidating and we are seeing a major focus on workflow automation around case management and content based collaboration.

3. Internal Consolidation

We saw a significant trend in technology and platform consolidation within large enterprises. Recession and pressures on capital budgets have triggered a major wave of platform rationalization and consolidation. This trend will only continue into 2011 and will not abate. The acquisition spree by the top five stack vendors (IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and HP) will complement this wave and we are likely to see growing presence and prominence of the stack vendors.

4. BPM as Transformation Enabler in Healthcare, Financial Services and Insurance

The size and shape of BPM programs is changing dramatically specially in the Healthcare, Financial Services and Insurance verticals. BPM has gained the status of transformation enabler in these industries where business agility and changing dynamics in the compliance, competition and customers keep the industries on their toes.  Coincidently these are also the sectors that have the highest percentage spend on the IT as a share of their revenues.  BPM programs in these verticals are driven by CXO’s, and the strategic impact envisioned from BPM is very high.

5. Big Vendors Lack Clear Strategy

Some confusion prevails within the stack vendors on their BPM strategy, which also puts many of their clients into a bit of quandary around BPM. SAP has not been able to show a clear direction to its clients on whether they should rely on SAP for BPM solutions or pick any other pure-play vendor. Having invested significantly in the SAP platform, clients are taking a wait and watch approach. On the other hand Oracle with its 11g launch, has shown a clear path that it is in the BPM game for the long haul. But owing to its recent release and unproven client successes, Oracle will take some more time to make any real dent in the market. IBM has continued to thrive on its multi-product approach ignoring the client demand for a unified BPM strategy. Between Lombardi, Process Server and Filenet, IBM offers choice as well as confusion. Microsoft has not announced any clear strategy around BPM other than investing in some basic workflow capabilities in SharePoint and dynamic CRM suites.

6. BPM on Cloud

Lastly, the cloud continues to be a disruptive force for BPM vendors and clients. While vendors like Pegasystems, Cordys and Appian have shown deep focus and demonstrated investments in offering cloud-based services, the rest of the BPM vendors have yet to show anything tangible. Cloud-based BPM is being envisioned by business stakeholders as a means to get out of the IT clutches in controlling the time to market and high maintenance costs. Thanks to Salesforce.com for setting a trend, BPM vendors are able to thrive on business driven initiatives and demonstrating rapid time to market and disruptive cost structures.

As a summary, 2010 has been a great year for BPM and possibly a turning point in many ways. This also sets the BPM space on a very strong note for the year 2011. Together, the immense possibilities thrown open by BPM, the business outcomes realized and the enabling technology trends set us on a faster and broader growth path for BPM adoption. However, we continue to be haunted by the lack of repeatable approach around BPM change management, governance, stakeholder alignment, enterprise architecture standards and user adoption. While the interest in BPM is growing rapidly we are also having an increased rate of project failures. Hence as we step into 2011, our focus needs to be on choosing the right business problems, right technology, right methodology and right teams to ensure that the promise of BPM as a transformation enabler is achieved.

As we scan the different industry segments, there are processes that cut across lead-to-order, order -to-cash, and trouble-to-resolve areas in all organizations. Each of these broader areas consists of many individual processes. In each of these processes, there is an opportunity to identify gaps or improvement areas around which innovation can be triggered. What are the innovation drivers? Launch of new products, improving the speed to market, optimizing costs, improving user experience and creating new markets are some of the drivers. Every step in an existing process that touches one of these should be tagged for promoting innovation.

Hence the basic focus needs to be around how we are capturing innovation at all levels of employees. Innovation at the operational level can be triggered by providing options / avenues to each process worker or role player to contribute new ideas. Innovation from sales side or supply side or distribution side can be captured by providing adequate means to contribute new ideas from each source. How do we infuse innovation culture into all aspects of our business?  But as we capture innovative ideas, the process needs to be established to capture, collaborate and execute on these ideas. Maturity of innovation can be measured by how an organization has built its processes and systems to remove the element of uncertainty around innovation. This is where the process of innovation needs to be established so that it complements every single process that we are designing or automating.

Innovation is a very broad term and many companies are looking at this word as a branding statement. Translating this broader vision and statement into tangible business value is a struggle many companies are facing. If we can provide our clients with a repeatable framework comprising of business consulting and leveraging their assets across DATA, CONTENT and PROCESSES, we will be able to bring this vision to practice.

Some thoughts around where BPM plays in the Innovation space:

1. New product development processes, which are usually much unstructured, collaborative and run for a lengthy duration, are ripe candidates for automation. Successful companies such as 3M are led by innovation.
2. There are many opportunities around customer driven innovation which companies are not leveraging today. How can we leverage social media for customer driven innovation and the larger value that resides in the client base?
3. How do we differentiate between innovation outcomes and the process of innovation? Our solutions can focus on facilitating innovation within and outside an organization through approach, automation and measuring the outcomes. Can we help clients to measure their “Innovation Maturity Index” and provide a way to continually improve? How can we bring the suppliers, customers and employees into the innovation value chain?
4. Innovation does not happen by itself. For some companies it is a way of life. For some it is branding driven approach. For others it is driven by their need for survival and fight against the competition. Businessweek ‘s coverage on “Most Innovative Companies” provides some interesting information. We all can take a leaf from these innovation led companies and assess what can we offer that suits our capabilities and our target audience.

The drivers of innovation can be external or internal. But one thing is common for both – the organization’s ability to incorporate it as part of its culture and DNA.  What does your experience say?

1.   Trial to non-trial conversion

All the trial users can be effectively monitored by their application usage so that eventually they can be converted to subscribed/paid users. Using web analytics one can:

a.   Identify critical success factors for trial to non-trial user conversion such as frequency of usage and which features are being tested by the user etc

b.   Analyze the failed cases and make the program robust by focused marketing and training efforts to the trial users who are using the application sparingly.

2.   Study leading financial indicators and identify risk to the revenue

Web analytics can reveal active and inactive clients and their usage in a specified time period. Inactive accounts, over a period of time, will tend to terminate their subscriptions impacting revenue. Using this data, financial performance can be evaluated for the next period and feed this information back to business for taking necessary risk mitigation actions.

Usage can be monitored at a more granular level e.g. whether all the subscription/features purchased by customer are being used. This usage information not only reveals if there is any risk of downgrading subscriptions but also helps to pursue renewals.

3.  Fall-out

Web analytics can measure order conversion rate by tracking how many items users added to the shopping cart and how many of them fall-out from order conversion.

Similarly while registering to a new product, how many users fall-out from completing their registration? Fallout may be either due to the process requiring the customer to enter too much information or too many clicks to finish. Using web analytics complete path analysis can be done to optimize the UI flow so that success rate can be increased.

4. Identify terms violation

Usage stats can let the sales team know if a customer is overusing the number of subscriptions bought by sharing their IDs. Sales team can use this information to notify the respective customer or use it as an up-selling opportunity.

5.   Visitor loyalty

Loyal visitors can be counted on for assured revenue. Visit frequency determines the level of visitor loyalty to the application.  Higher frequency generally indicates higher loyalty.

Frequent reports can be generated on usage to study visitor loyalty and appetizers can be sent in order to make the visitor return again and use the application/service if they visit infrequently.

6.  Welcome kits for the new users

Printable or digitized welcome kits can be sent to all the new users who are registered and visiting the application for the first time. Personalized welcome kits sent after carefully reviewing user profiles will improve first time visitor experience

Reports can be generated for all the first time visiting users along with other necessary information in web analytic tools.

7.   Aid in decision making for new feature development

Web analytic tools allow establishing correlations between two different traffic variables that needs to be studied in a context. For example, how many users visited the application during last month from Japan? Or how many users viewed a search result with highlighting on. Better correlations and drill down capabilities at various levels facilitate decision making in new feature development.

8.       Notify/alert users regarding a feature issue and seek feedback on upgrades

At times there may be a technical snag in a key functionality and communication needs to be sent to a select audience. Web analytics offers a way to identify the users who used that functionality in that specified time and reduce redundant communication to other users. Also when a feature is upgraded, feedback can be obtained by reaching out to select users who use it most.

9.     Optimize UI experience

Web analytic tools can track browsers, OS, locale and bandwidth/domains used by the users while accessing the application. Application testing efforts can be invested in these areas accordingly so that UI experience can be optimized.

Also end to end response times can be studied to optimize user experience.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. Drop a comment, below.

Web analytic tools can collect, analyze, measure and report on Internet data which will help in understanding user behavior and application usage. The data captured using other sources, like CRM tools, can only help inform reactive action and not proactive measures. For example, it is possible to identify how many users cancelled their subscriptions using tools like sales force, but not how many users will cancel. With Web analytics, customer usage patterns and associated pain points can be identified up front and that can help companies be proactive about those pain points and, hopefully, in the end game, retain those “at risk” subscriptions.  But, that is just one example out of many more “business benefits” you can expect to get out of using web analytics.

Following are five such benefits discussed in this post:

1.  Discover training needs:

What does it mean if users are visiting a particular section of help very often or not using certain features at all?  Often applications grow complex with time and these indicators signal that users need training in certain areas of the application.

Web analytics can help the training team identify user difficulties and training needs by capturing the usage data. Since this data is supported by customer usage traffic, training team can build custom training solutions to their customers. The following graph shows increased usage for a particular feature after targeted training for Customer “C”

This proactive support not only leaves a positive impact on clients but also improve the chances of retaining the revenue from the subscriptions.

2. Evaluate market penetration and market needs

Web analytics provide a very good platform for analyzing how a new feature is perceived by the market every time a new release happens. Usage statistics tell you if marketing efforts are enough to encourage the clients to try the new feature or understand if there are any specific market needs.

For example: In one of the projects using web analytics it was identified that application usage in Japan was relatively low. Subsequently “localization” was recognized as the key to penetrate into the Japanese market. After “localization”, Japan grew to the 2^nd largest customer base.

3. Customer Centricity and Revenue Modeling

Being customer centric offers sustainability and long term revenue. Web analytics tools offer ways to help the customer to get best value for their investment. For example a client’s ROI can be best optimized by analyzing their usage statistics and determining the right feature and entitlement mix.

Since the tools can track actual usage by a customer, new revenue models such as pay per click can be introduced so that user will pay only for the actual usage. This will increase the faith in the offerings and also allow the buyer to optimize their spending.

4.       Optimize cost and Channelize investment

Usage can be monitored for third party content and tools used. This data will help in analyzing various investment decisions. Let’s say an application is using “News” content services from a third party and based on usage statistics, management can

i. Justify the investment made

ii. Consider renegotiating royalty/license fee if the feature is sparingly used

iii. Can evaluate building in-house expertise, if the feature becomes a selling point to reduce dependency

Resource utilization can also be analyzed from usage statistics to make necessary adjustments to the investments.  For example, one might invest in additional hardware for highly used features. Since decision making capability is strongly backed by the supporting information, return on investment is more assured.

5. Find upselling opportunities and identify selling points to the new customers

It is possible to conduct “selling point research” using web analytics to identify what additional functions and entitlements customers are interested in. Usage can be studied at different levels such as customer level (company-wide statistics), user role/user level, etc. These different bench marks can be useful references while drafting customer specific up-selling strategies and also for identifying selling points to new customers who have similar profiles as that of existing customers.

We will discuss some more benefits in the next post. Stay tuned!

Application Retirement

The most common was the issue of application retirement.  One presenter used the metaphor of the red outfit she bought for the occasion.  She said that she already had three but needed another one.  Her general philosophy is if she buys a new outfit she has to throw two away.  But she never does and her closet is a mess.  Her declaration?  “Your IT portfolio is the same as my closet.  We’ve all been on a buying binge but we never throw anything out.”  Is it surprising to anyone that business agility is compromised?  Applications must be rationalized to facilitate business transformation.  The time for application rationalization is now.  (Some of us need closet rationalization as well.)

A New Era of Enterprise Application

Which leads us to the next statements eliciting audible gasps from the audience – the twentieth century application is dead.  The PC is dead.  Enterprise applications have not fundamentally changed for the past twenty five years but they need to start now.  Sure they run on an improved OS or parallel server but the compute paradigm has not changed for over two decades.  Mobile devices, cloud computing, software as a service, social networking and a host of new services are providing platforms for the creation of a new architecture for business technology optimization.  Monolithic, siloed applications must be replaced by flexible, cross functional, component driven applications not yet conceived.  Providing the pressure is a new generation of worker, the digital native.  This is a generation that has never known a world without a microwave oven or mobile phone.  Their home video games have more power than Web servers.  Sit them down in front of a Windows XP machine and your organization exudes an old, outdated and bureaucratic company they’ve only seen in movies.  They want to know why they can’t get to YouTube and Facebook.  If today’s enterprises have any hope of regenerating their staff with fresh blood they must confront this collision of old and new and do it now.

Innovation

And finally, innovation.  Innovation is now critical.  And, it cannot be accomplished without the participation of external parties.  Without someone from the outside, insular “group think” stifles creativity.  Someone is bound to say “that’s a stupid idea” and all innovation ceases at that moment.  Outside participation offers fresh perspective and new life to solve old problems.  Innovation must also incorporate the customer experience view.

These three mega trends are actually tightly related.  Create new, twenty first century applications and retire the old, antiquated apps one by one.  Harvest them and throw them out.  Restructure them for agile and flexible business support as well as the ability to recognize and leverage multiple platforms, new and not yet released.  Be innovative when these new applications are designed.  It was mentioned many times that the most critical skill in this process will be the conceptual architect, which we have very few of now.

Thinking back twenty five years reveals no new breakthroughs in enterprise application architecture.  But in this age of iPad, Android, cloud computing, software as a service, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter think forward twenty five years.  The landscape cannot be the same.  To fight the change only postpones destiny.  As Wired Magazine proclaimed in August of this year, the Web is dead.  Every device is now connected to a high speed network and provides a window into a vast universe of content and compute power.  The dividing lines cease to exist.

Apple is now porting iPad OS functionality to notebooks.  In five years, the only difference between devices will be the form factor.  Need data entry and high speed key capability?  Use a device with a physical keyboard.  Need to communicate?  Use a mobile device.  Want entertainment in a midsized form factor?  Use the tablet.

What does the future have in store for your organization?  What is your plan for business transformation?  Who is your chief innovation officer and how are you going to get through the next twenty five years?  It’s bound to be a wild ride.

Here are the steps and some best practices that we have used in selecting WCM system for our customers:

1. Plan the WCM selection process

From our experience, and depending on scale and need of an organisation, four to six weeks should be enough time for selecting a WCM system. You should identify a team with a good WCM subject matter expertise to document requirements, facilitate, and run the selection process.

2. Define your business goals in selection and deployment of WCM

You should start the WCM system selection process by defining your business goals and how you want to measure those goals. This will help in identifying some of the core requirements for WCM selection process and measuring its success after implementation.

3. Involve stake holders across your organisation

Involve diverse stake holders from different departments in your organisation in the WCM selection process from start to end.  This includes stakeholders across communications & marketing, IT, finance, procurement, support services, etc. who will be impacted due to the introduction of the new WCM system. Briefing them on how you will conduct the process, about their roles and keeping them involved and informed in the entire process will ensure stakeholder participation and commitment to the success of the program

4. Capture user stories from stake holders and prioritise the user stories in consultation with all stake holders.

A good requirements list is key for the WCM selection process. One of the best ways to express your requirements is through “as user stories”. User stories follow the following format:

“As a <role>, I want <goal/desire> so that <benefit>”

Expressing requirements as user stories filters any abstract requirements that stake holders generally provide, thereby making the user stories concrete.

Avoid specifying too many user stories and also comparing the WCM products through a similar feature matrix. This may result in the short listing of all expensive and feature-rich (that you would never use) WCM products, where as a mid-tier WCM system could be a fit for your business needs.

5. Shortlist to 4 or 5 WCM products

Short listing from many of the WCM systems to 4 or 5 can be a challenging task in the entire WCM selection process. While short listing the products, start with core or overriding user stories such as:

• Top business user stories – e.g. globalisation, requires complex workflows, etc.
• Your existing technology stack, standards or technical architecture
• Your budget
• Publishing processes and methodology

By doing the above, you can drop most of the products based on your overriding user stories.

Here you may want to seek the help of an external consulting company or subject matter experts who have broad knowledge of WCM systems and experience in running a WCM system selection process.

6. Issue a RFI if your procurement process requires one

If your organisation’s procurement requires an issue of RFI, then you will need to issue a RFI to short listed vendors. The shorter and more focussed your RFI is, the easier it will be to assess the responses from the vendors. Attach your user story document with the RFI so that vendors will understand and know your business goals.

7. See and experience the WCM system

Once you have shortlisted the 4 or 5 products, selection process should concentrate on experiencing the product by means of a vendor demo followed by a trial period. Make sure you set the time limit and a fixed agenda for all vendors. Prepare and advise your internal audience on what they need to look for in the demo.

You should also ask vendors to provide access to the demo environment for at least a week so that you can test out basic tasks such as content creation, workflows and publishing process yourself.

8. Consider Total Cost of Ownership

Lastly, you should consider total cost of ownership that includes:

• License model, license fee and vendor support costs
• Technical skills and knowledge required by internal staff and their training
• Your current infrastructure and the cost required to migrate, integrate or commission a new infrastructure

Selecting a WCM system that suits your organisation requires a disciplined approach as outlined above. Do you know of additional best practices that have not been covered? We would love to hear your thoughts.

• Multi-Channel Publishing and Content Reuse: This is indeed the central theme of media convergence: organizations need to reuse the existing content and deliver the same across multiple media channels after content repurposing. Traditional content management systems (CMS) lack the ability to carry out multi-channel publishing since media like mobile or social media are relatively recent phenomenon. However using proper integration touch points organizations can get a start on this. Start small and gradually incorporate more channels to your content ecosystem. There are multiple mobile publishing systems in the market these days. After careful evaluation on features and interoperability with your traditional web CMS, integrate the two using standard APIs (application programming interface). Your web CMS will be the primary repository of content and its management whereas mobile CMS will allow you to repurpose the content with proper presentation layers based on device types. You can read more on publishing on mobile channel in this post.
• Cloud based Applications: Though organizations need to take control of their core content by having in-house CMS repositories, their need to permeate the content into social media and associated applications like user polls, forums, ratings etc. can be met by configurable cloud based solutions. The key will be the integration of these applications with your network infrastructure. This is increasingly becoming an industry trend.
• Get Ready for HTML 5: As we all know, HTML5 is still under development.  However, it will be the next generation mark up for web interactivity with a lot of emphasis on cross platform (read: mobile and television) interoperability. Your organization should by now have a possible HTML5 compliance road map ready with potential budgeting and resourcing decisions taking place early next year. With HTML5 supporting richer applications like video and images, many existing plug-in video players might be rendered unnecessary. Likewise, based on the final version of HTML5 we will see a lot more consolidation and exciting consumer-oriented content applications.
• Globalization and Internationalization: Another aspect of media convergence is a truly globalized content being served to your channels. This allows you to truly merge both distribution channels (web, mobile, television and social media) and your regional and cultural footprint into one seamless, uniform, locale-specific experience for the end users.  For that, translation services applications need to be tied to your content authoring and reviewing workflow.
• Content Synching across Media Channels: We already talked about this issue in our last post. We can indeed synchronize content like a TV schedule (which is very dynamic in nature and often experiences last minute changes) with other channels like Web, mobile and social by integrating a TV schedule feed with your content management system. This, in turn, then repurposes the content to publish in downstream channels like Web, mobile and social media.
• Ad Server Integration: Creating a uniform cross platform experiences also extends to your advertisement partners, who would likely love the idea of extending television slots to other channels through intense rich media based advertisement or any other form. Using proper APIs it is possible to specifically place targeted advertisement banners and flash videos contextual to the content on the media channels.

These are some of the most discussed solutions that we come across during our interactions with partner clients. I am pretty sure there are other unique solutions and innovations in this space that are thought out and implemented continuously. We’d love readers to share their stories with regard to media convergence solutions.

Big-bang process excellence initiatives are being undertaken in many large enterprises. Usually these are driven by Six Sigma leaders, Operations team or Strategy teams. The goal is mainly to establish a linkage in cross functional business processes and derive a value chain. These initiatives are taken as one off activities and usually have time bound intensity. Usually these initiatives cover large number of processes and the goal is around establishing a baseline and not so much about transformation.

On the other hand the business and IT teams undertake multiple initiatives which are focused on automation around certain process areas. These activities are centered around BPMS implementations and may or may not leverage the process excellence initiatives.

This gap between process excellence and automation/ transformation initiatives is leaving a wide opportunity for enterprises to bridge. One approach to bridge this gap would be a funnel approach where we start with large number of processes under the process excellence initiative and bring down the number to a small set of critical processes which are ripe candidates for transformation and alignment to strategic goals.

This problem is also compounded by BPMS vendors not having a strong focus and capabilities around Enterprise modeling and process excellence. Metastorm is probably a unique stack with provision modeling tool which brings together EA, BPM and process modeling.

If organizations wish to achieve a better ROI on their process excellence initiatives, they need to align the stakeholders between Operations, Strategy, Business and IT leaders.

The atmosphere at the event was upbeat and positive.  Most attendees were inquisitive and looking for new technology solutions.  iPads were abundant in the audience, lighting presentation sessions like lanterns.  Gartner provided tremendously valuable sessions and insights into trends as well as tips and techniques for technology implementations.  The vendor mood was cautiously optimistic, with predictions that the long nuclear winter of IT spend crunch is thawing.

All this points to further pressure on the IT environment albeit a different form of pressure.  End users will become increasingly aggressive in their search for business transformation.  With SaaS, cloud, mobile and social applications available to the masses the business community has the ability to engage at will, with or without IT involvement and support.

Organizations that have developed agile processes to evaluate and implement advanced technologies will surge ahead, extending their leadership.  As those organizations broaden their leadership positions, laggards will continue to fall behind.  The differences will be staggering looking in from the outside.  From the inside, it is worse.

Leaders with agile processes, strong collaboration, IT optimization and a culture of innovation thrive on competition and change.  They seek disruption, embrace it and flourish in times like these.  They relish every opportunity to make their competitors’ lives difficult.  Business agility is what it’s all about for them.  They don’t feel pressure to succeed, they apply it on others.

On the flip side, the laggards struggle.  Instead of trying to do things better, they increase the number of initiatives and programs which only exacerbates the situation.  They attempt to fix inefficient processes by increasing the volume of work.  Since their culture loathes risk, is not collaborative and cannot innovate, the increase in activity is actually detrimental and makes everything worse.  The pressure increases.  Tempers flare.  Political divisions create gaping holes.  Nothing gets done.

So, what does that have to do with BPM, efficient processes, enterprise 2.0, mobile computing, application rationalization and our normal topics of discussion?  Everything!!!  Enterprise 2.0 is a state of being of companies that thrive on change.  2.0 enterprises communicate often.  It is part of their makeup.  They don’t have to try.  For others, attending meetings is a struggle.

BPM offers increased agility, improved efficiency, reduced costs and competitive advantages.  Old legacy application portfolios drag companies down, limiting responsiveness and flexibility.

So from the tone of the ITxpo conference in Orlando, those companies that have invested in BPM and have adopted enterprise 2.0 practices are poised to seize their destiny.  Those that have not will be watching the rear license plates as the leaders pull away.

Next up, ITxpo Cannes.  We’ll see if the atmosphere is the same.  I’m certain the food will be better.

Developing a search engine for Asian languages with 100% precision and recall is extremely challenging because of various orthography variants as described below.

Orthographic Variants : Each CJK language has multiple scripts. Japanese has four: Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, and Roomaji. Chinese has two: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Korean has three: Hangul, Hanja and Romoja. An example of the complexity arising out of this is that the word ‘telephone’ can be written in at least two different ways in Chinese (电话 and電話).

Cross Orthographic Variants : In addition to a word being written in multiple different scripts, a word can be written in many more ways by replacing each character/substring with an equivalent character/substring of another script, without changing its meaning. For example, in Japanese, the word ‘handling’ (取扱 in Kanji and とりあつかい in Hiragana) can be written in two additional ways: とり扱い or 取りあつかい

Miscellaneous Variants : To compound the problem further, each of the CJK languages has its own set of unique variations:

• Hangul has significant spelling differences between North Korea and South Korea
• Hanjul also has two broad forms: old and new
• Traditional Chinese has variants across Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Central China
• Kanji can be classified into Simplified and Traditional
• Katakana orthography varies based on the presence or absence of a ‘macron’ (a dash-like symbol indicating long vowels) or a ‘nakaguro’ (a middle dot between words)

Search engines developed for English and other Latin scripts have comprehensive dictionaries to support whereas with Asian languages, there is no standard dictionary available. This leads to poor recall characteristics in solutions that rely solely on dictionaries.

Dictionary challenges can be gracefully overcome using n-grams which splits words into a list of character subsequences, each subsequence being exactly n characters long. For example, the word ‘John’ has the character bigrams “Jo”, “oh”, “hn” and the trigrams “Joh” and “ohn”. Though n-gram improves recall (~100%), it comes with many precision issues. For example, a search for 東京都 ルパン上映時間 (which means “Tokyo, Lupin movie, playtime”) will also match 都 京都 パン (which means “capital city, kyoto, bread”).

While there clearly is no solution that can provide 100% recall and precision, an effective alternative is a hybrid solution where a stream of text is tokenized separately using dictionary-based morphological analysis and n-grams, thus biasing the relevance ranking towards matches in the morphological index as opposed to the n-gram index. Such an approach can vastly improve user experience on large corpuses by providing more meaningful results first followed by noisy matches at the end.

Our experience with customers, including some of the world’s largest providers of digital information, require the development of innovative tools and approaches for realizing acceptable levels of recall and precision over large corpuses. Our experience has also taught us the importance of incorporating in-depth understanding of the corpus and representative end user queries as a critical input to determining the most suitable strategies.

Have you come across other challenges and issues? What has been your experience? Your thoughts are welcome.

As pointed out earlier, organizations are facing stiff challenges to share their content with the intended audience in newer media platforms like smart phones and tablet PCs. Following are some of the common issues associated with publication across multiple channels.

• Media Specific Content: Organizations need to decide what content to serve on which media. Based on the capabilities of the platforms and cost of access, organizations need to draw a configurable strategy that will allow them to repurpose their content and serve it to a specific media in the optimum way – taking into account media real estate, screen resolutions, usability and cost of access. Since the capabilities of the media channels are rapidly improving and the cost of access is also decreasing, the strategy will be an evolving and configurable one with more rich content being served on web and smart phones.
• Content Reuse: Reuse of the same content for different media channels is probably the biggest value driver for media convergence initiatives. However, it is easier said than done. The messaging that organizations deliver across media channels will often vary with segmentation across audience based on the channel they use. Hence sometimes repurposing content involves more than just reducing the volume of characters to fit into the screen real estate. Proper editorial team structure and workflow needs to be designed with the aim of maximizing content reuse and yet maintaining channel-specific messaging.
• Content Synchronization across Channels: Organizations need to deliver consistent content across the channels in real time. Otherwise a disruptive customer experience erodes the value you are trying to deliver. For example, if a television channel has different scheduling information shown on the web than what is on the TV that is a cardinal mistake. You can’t afford mixed messages in these days of fleeting customer loyalty. The true convergence aims to make the user experience transition across channels (print, TV, Web and mobile) completely seamless.
• Social Media Messaging: A lot has been written and said about the emergence of social media as the most efficient content channel and what organizations should do about it. Recently, the  public outcry in the blogosphere over the redesigned GAP logo and the subsequent withdrawal of the same is a clear example of the power and agility of this medium.  Millions can share their views overnight and can make your brand the most popular or most hated. Because of the rapid permeating nature of social media, organizations need to get their messaging absolutely correct as there is hardly any chance or scope to look back and make corrective actions after content is published in social media. Hence the need to have processes with strong editorial review built into the publication system.
• Monetizing Content across Channels: With audiences flocking more towards new age media channels, monetizing the content with newer revenue models has become the norm these days. What will be your strategy? Will it be subscription based, pay as you consume,  or will you share content in exchange of newer currencies? These days some are allowing you to consume content in exchange for you sharing it further to your networks. Your “download now” link is activated the moment you “retweet” the link of the content or share it in Facebook or LinkedIn. Bottom line – the content application needs to be nimble enough to adapt to these newer rapidly evolving revenue models!
• Contextual Advertisement and Promotions: Multi-channel advertisement and promotions are important for retailers. The intelligent and contextual dynamic advertisement on the web or mobile brings in additional revenue for the organizations. If it is in co-ordination with other channels it makes the user experience consistent throughout. That does not however stop retailers from offering web specific promotions or contextual dynamic advertisements.

There are quite a few other factors that play important roles in media convergence strategies like choosing the right CDN (content delivery network), streaming technology, cloud computing, load balancing etc. However, these are infrastructure-related issues and out of scope of our current discussion. What has been your experience while dealing with media convergence related issues? Feel free to share your views and stay tuned for part two of the series where we will be discussing some of the exciting solutions that are coming up in the media convergence space.

Many of our client meetings and in flight project reviews have been focused on issues around governance. The topic of BPM governance is becoming every BPM program managers’ key need. Mostly, BPM governance is being discussed in various forums but seldom have we seen a tangible action plan or investments in BPM governance. Many clients are expressing their pains without being able to articulate the relevance to governance. In most scenarios, the problems surface after the first project has been rolled into production and we start spawning multiple BPM initiatives in parallel. The excitement of rolling the first project into production soon leads to frustration as we are unable to repeat what we did in the first project as well as scale the different constituents around SDLC, infrastructure, support, QA and staffing.

Some of the key challenges in BPM governance implementation have been around defining the needs and a roadmap, justifying the investments, finding the key sponsors and defining the long term strategic vision.

Many organizations which are worried about BPM governance, have been bitten by issues such as a correct and repeatable BPM methodology, definition of key roles involved in BPM programs and availability of skilled resources, high ramp up time, choosing the right technology, business-IT alignment around goal definition, infrastructure issues such as scale/costs/size and sponsorship, ownership of BPM programs and lastly continued optimization and post production support of BPM programs. As more clients are seeing the first few projects move into production they are facing challenges around these stated areas.

What does BPM governance mean?

BPM governance is a set of best practices around establishing right methods, roles, RACI matrix, SDLC, BPM technology selection and implementation, infrastructure and skills enablement – so as to ensure that every BPM program follows a clearly defined path and achieves predictable outcomes. BPM governance helps an organization to track their BPM maturity level and move towards an optimized model. It is meant to address most of the common pitfall areas which are causing many BPM projects to fail.

BPM governance initially involves an assessment of an organization’s goals around strategic, organizational, process and technology areas affecting BPM programs and clearly defining a roadmap to achieve the desired state. The journey starts with defining the key metrics which will help build a business case for BPM governance. Once we are clear about the goals, it is easy to define a phased approach to implement governance. Establishing a BPM center of excellence (CoE) will be an important step towards establishing a governance model. Many organizations have established BPM CoE’s without a clear mandate, operating model or investments. This does not help achieve the governance objectives.

In a nutshell, BPM governance must address (1) Methodology – comprehensive and repeatable (2) Team structure, skills assessment and RACI matrix (3) Infrastructure management (4) Optimization and support after Production.

An advantage of being a process analyst is the concession to pose certain types of questions to the senior management of large organizations – on subjects that few will otherwise discuss.  Allow me to defend my case for asking these seemingly naive questions, by drawing parallel from some common fallacies discussed in economic theory. Through these questions, a process analyst avoids the errors an economist or scientist does, when trying to arrive at conclusions of an experiment.

• ‘Why should these activities occur in this particular sequence?’

The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, is associated with the common notion ‘after this, therefore because of this’. In other words, ‘event B occurred after activity A, therefore activity A is the cause of event B’.

In organizational processes too, many such activities are performed (or avoided), because people ‘believe’ that they should be (or should not be) carried out in sequence. Whatever the reason for such beliefs, it is advised to analyze the process and ask this question until you get a convincing answer.

• ‘What value does this activity add to the overall process?’

The fallacy of composition arises from the inference that, ‘since it is true for a part, therefore it is true for the whole’.

In describing organizational processes, how often have you heard, ‘Department A did that and they got great results, so we decided to implement it as a best practice across all departments’? Not that it is always wrong to make such decisions, however an analysis of benefit (and cost) is necessary. It is essential to ask this question to make sure that it will actually work for you.

• ‘What if …?’ – Also known as ‘scenario analysis’ is a very useful tool for TO BE process design.

The trap of Correlation and Causation (also known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy) is described best as ‘with this, therefore because of this’. That two events correlate does not automatically imply that one is the cause of the other.

Analysis of empirical data and events is often used to design processes. It is essential to identify the components (tasks, activities, participants etc.) of these processes and perform scenario ‘what if’ analysis by excluding, including and using different composition of components (or sometimes using different components altogether). Such exercises, when performed carefully and extensively, reduce the risk of falling into this well known trap.

These questions have rescued me on countless occasions from reaching erroneous conclusions. Properly executed, one will soon discover that they also help as effective navigation tools through the process mapping exercise. What other questions have you found helpful in analyzing processes?

Implementation Phase

Requirement Strategy: As the name suggests, this phase will involve implementing the WCM package that we have already selected based on our inception phase effort. This particular phase can be broadly categorized into following activities.

• Defining Web Asset Scope: Before we even begin elaborating on the high level requirements from the inception phase, we need to decide on the scope of the project from a web assets point of view. Typically, organizations will have a family of web-assets (Internet, Intranet, Extranet) acquired over a period of time. Whenever a new WCM package is selected for implementation, it is not wise to bring every such web-asset under the gamut of a proposed WCM solution in one big bang implementation. Instead, organizations are required to take a multi-phase approach, thereby first selecting a sub-set of web-assets which can make the biggest impact and yield the highest ROI. Typically, the customer facing website(s) of the organization will be prime candidates for the first phase.
• Site Design and Workshop: Usually, a WCM implementation also involves having a relook at the look and feel, navigation and functionalities of the website(s). Since the technology landscape is changing and most of the sites will probably be at least 4-5 years old since last major design change, typically, there is a lot of room for improvement including new web 2.0 features such as user generated content (review and ratings), corporate blogs, page sharing, faceted navigation, rich media experience etc. Some organizations may also go for a complete brand overhaul and new corporate identity. Re-designing the current website(s) with cutting edge web navigational experience requires holding a detailed design workshop with business stakeholders from marketing, sales, creative and legal departments along with web design experts. The outcome of this workshop should be high level site wireframe which will eventually become a detailed wireframe set.
• Use Case Development: This activity should start in parallel with site design workshop. The primary objective of this activity will be to create functional use cases after having requirement sessions with functional stakeholders. For any WCM implementations, there are two primary types of use cases:

o   Site Functionality Use Cases: Primary actors for these use cases will be site visitors and your customers. Typically, for major WCM implementations involving multiple channels (“Products”, “Services”, “Education”, “Collaboration”, “About Us” etc.) of a big corporate website, detailed sessions should be conducted with stakeholders of each the channels mentioned above to come up with required use cases.  These use cases should be created in parallel with wireframes for the site.

o   Admin Functionality Use Cases: Primary actors for these use cases will be the content authors and content approvers who will engage in creating, editing or deleting content, approving content based on defined workflow and publishing it. Since this is the core area of any WCM package, most, if not all of the requirements will be provided out of the box by the WCM. These requirements can be mostly met by configuring the application by defining proper content model, setting up desired workflows etc.

• Content Attribute Model Development: This artifact is one of the most critical in ensuring the success of any WCM implementation. Content models are the content object comprising of various attributes with varied properties like maximum character length, data input types (dropdown, large text body, html widget etc.) and validation (character, integer). Efforts should be made to make sure we have maximum re-usability of these content objects. If there is an “article” content object, it is expected that we might use the same content object across channels I mentioned before for expressing similar kind of content.
• Non-Functional Requirements: The non-functional requirements will capture items like site availability, usability, browser supports, technology stack etc. This will be most common with any regular application implementation.

Requirement Artifacts:

• Sites Scope Document
• Site Functionality Use Cases
• Site Wireframes
• Admin Functionality Use Cases
• Content Models
• Non-Functional Requirements

Surely while we are in the implementation phase, what SDLC model (Waterfall, Agile, Hybrid etc.) we choose will have a lot of bearing on the level of maturity of each of these documents before design and development can start. I would love to hear about your experiences while dealing with WCM-related requirements gathering initiatives and any specific advice that might add value to the effort as a whole.

Tom Austin (@tomaustin) and Nick Jones (@cynick) opened the conference with a message that “you are not in control.”  Our organizations are integrally connected with so many internal and external dependencies that it’s not feasible to control it all.  Those dependencies and their resulting complexities are growing exponentially so it is impossible to manage.  That is our reality today so we must accept it and prepare.

Their keynote then looked to the future with a quick peek at the past.  They showed a picture of the Apple Newton (remember that?) side by side with an iPhone 4.  The astonishing thing is that they are only ten years apart.  Comparing predictions of the future from 1995:

• The desktop of the future is, in fact, not a desktop
• The future of end user computing is not about computing
• The office of the future is not an office
• Office automation????
• Personal assistants are still a future

Looking forward ten years into the future, they asked some provocative questions about what will be in place in 2020:

Will the OS for your device be as transparent as your automobile transmission?  It’s there, it does its job but nobody really thinks about it.  Now, it’s Android vs. Mac.  Will it matter?

• Who will be the big technology players in 2020?  Will Google reach the point where the US DOJ breaks them up for monopolistic behavior?
• Will customer support be far worse than we ever imagined with all the social networking, mobile computing and ubiquitous connectivity?
• Will most IT services move to the cloud?

Nick Jones’ part reminded me of why Gartner conferences in the UK are so much fun – the humor.  In his typically wry and cynical way he discussed the movement of technology to a much simpler state, where non-technical users will be able to access and leverage technology directly.  Collaboration, email, IM, social, content management, and accessing structured and unstructured data will have very simple interfaces intuitive for everyone.

All of this was a way to say “it’s coming, it’s inevitable, prepare yourselves now for it is upon us.”  From there the conference addressed specific tactical issues confronted by organizations every day.  The attendees were prepared and eagerly consumed the information.

My presentation picked up exactly where Tom and Nick left off.  For thirty minutes I examined the term Enterprise 2.0, explained why anyone should care and drilled down into three case scenarios.  The scenarios looked at three specific areas – social media, mobile computing, workflow/collaboration – and traced the origin, journey, destination and next steps from actual case studies.  You can download that presentation here.  While Tom and Nick focused on preparation, I defined specific programs and issues to address.

Many discussions on the exhibit floor involved enterprise social media programs.  Most attendees stated that there was executive level interest/fear in social media and teams were at the event to investigate options, uncover risks and seek advice and counsel.  Having spent twelve months rolling out our own social program it was interesting to hear that we are all facing the same issues regardless of geography, industry or private vs. public sector.

In general, the attendees seemed willing and eager to tackle today’s challenges as well as tomorrow’s.  The mood was upbeat and the Twitter stream was thriving (#gartnerpcc).  This group seems ready and able to meet the future.

Inception Phase

Requirement Strategy: The primary goal of collecting requirements at this phase is to facilitate the selection of a CMS package. The selection committee, which will also define high level business requirements, should comprise of both technical teams as well as functional groups. This will ensure that an even representation of both functional and technical requirements are captured, which will become key inputs in package selection process. While collecting the strategic WCM requirements, effort should be made to not let WCM vendors define the problems and solutions for you. These fundamental requirements should arise based on internal debate and should be backed up by tangible key performance indicators (KPIs). It is also important to look beyond the current set of requirements and accommodate future roadmaps of the organization including possible acquisitions (Scalability) and entry into multiple geographies (Internationalization) in the inception phase requirements set. Potential miss of a requirement like internationalization capabilities of a WCM product, although it might be three years down the road, might make the current selection of a package a complete waste of investment in the immediate future.

Requirement Artifact:

• The high level business requirement log will be signed off by all the concerned stakeholders of the organization and will be used as a yardstick to evaluate competing WCM packages.

Stay tuned for part two of this blog post which will discuss the implementation phase.

1) Same content delivered in multiple languages

2) Separate sites or content specific for languages and country sites. E.g. a dedicated website with French content for your customers in France

3) A mix of the above two where the corporate sections contain generic content and branding, and some sections of the site or types of content is targeted at local users. The generic corporate sections of the site could either be in one language or the base content translated into multiple languages and created at a corporate level. The country-specific types or sections of the content could be created within the local country by the local content authors.

The type of Globalisation model that you choose to use will depend on whether centralisation of content authoring is more important to you or whether you prefer the delegated content authoring model. Whichever model you adopt, there are some considerations that are important and need to be addressed when creating globalised websites:

• Localisation of layouts and graphics – Be aware of cultural sensitivities to certain images and colours as they could have negative connotations in some countries, so select images and colours carefully. Design of the local country sites will also need to take into consideration layout requirements for certain languages such as Arabic, which requires content flow and layouts to be arranged from right to left. Certain languages require greater screen real estate than others, so any corporate UI design guidelines should incorporate requirements for local languages and country sites.
• Translation of content using automated tools – For organisations that want the same content delivered in multiple languages i.e. type 1 globalised website, translation engines such as Google Translate and translations.com could be used to automatically convert content from one language to another. The translated content will still need to be proof-read and modified by a person, but the automation step will significantly reduce costs of translation. Our Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Practice has built translation tools that have been integrated into CMS products such as Open Text Vignette, Alfresco and SharePoint to provide a seamless user experience for content authors.
• Localisation of content authoring (CMS) tools – For organisations that have content authors in the local country sites (i.e. type 2 of globalised website), it is important that the authoring interface is configured to use the native language of the user.  Research suggests that support costs can be significantly reduced if the UI is in the user’s native language.
• Consistent User Experience – This may sound obvious, but organisations should create a UI Style Guide for all corporate websites. It should, of course, take into account the needs and sensitivities of the countries for which you’re creating local sites.

These are some of my thoughts on introducing globalisation for websites. I’d love to hear about your experiences relating to the topic.

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.”

Here is a view of those platforms in practice:

Enterprise 2.0 describes a culture and a state of being for an organization.  These are organizations that embrace technologies in all their forms and utilize them for their greatest advantage.  These are technologies that help create efficient processes, improve the customer experience, reduce costs, accelerate the introduction of new products and services or win markets.

From the internal view, Enterprise 2.0 involves adopting technologies to help streamline processes, reduce cycle time, improve business agility, enhance the customer experience and generally run a more efficient operation fueled by the latest technologies.  These technologies include development platforms like BPM, but also include mobile, collaboration, social media, and other new platforms.

Externally, Enterprise 2.0 is all about embracing your online presence and everything about it.  Rather than shut down communications for fear of negative recriminations, the Enterprise 2.0 mindset embraces the collective and all it has to offer.  It communicates in real time, engaging its constituency rather than broadcasting.  In both cases, organizations view technology implementation as a means to improve the business.

Why should anyone care?  Because organizations that embrace technology outperform those that do not.  McAfee states that those organizations that not only embrace technology but also use Enterprise 2.0 as a business transformation catalyst outperform all others in their sector.  His conclusion is the connection is undeniable.

Need more?  Eventually, the next generation of worker will be completely immersed in “technology”.  They will have no knowledge or recollection of black and white televisions, corded telephones, or life without PC’s or Playstation.  In fact, if you ask them now they don’t think of things as “technology”, they just are.  They will expect to do business this way.  If we don’t provide an conducive environment we will be inhibiting progress and the growth of our organizations.

Organizations that successfully make the leap don’t do so randomly.  They deliberately chart their course(s).  They build programs.  They foster innovation and harvest resulting business solutions.  Some go department by department.

For example, human resources recruiting.  HR 1.0 uses high priced recruiters, advertising and sites like Monster.com.  They may have internal recruiters that scour the marketplace for candidates.  HR 2.0 uses the company’s Facebook page to help build an image.  They not only engage job sites but they interact with communities in social media.  Their recruiter networks are their LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

Marketing 2.0 uses online technologies in a similar way.  All demand generation activities in every domain, physical or virtual, are coordinated and synchronized.  Instead of a PR blitz launched by a press release social networks are engaged far before an announcement is made.  This way, once the announcement hits the press any Google search returns multiple listings.  Building this repertoire in advance helps build credibility when the launch is executed because the market has been conditioned prior to the launch.

Both of these situations highlight a significant shift in mentality.  Historical HR behavior would be to keep the hiring process as stealth as possible for fear of presenting too much about the business requirements.  Marketing techniques of the past relied on big bang approaches “under embargo”.

Shifts of this kind require not only the development of a technology platform but a shift in culture and mindset.  Of the two, the change in mindset is the most difficult.  I have led teams that have developed the platforms and thought “ok, what is the next step?  We accomplished what we set out to achieve, how do we take the business to the next level?”  Taking it to the next level involved engaging many more individuals and convincing them that there was a better way; no easy task!  But innovation is infectious and once the process started it took on a life of its own.

Is your organization Enterprise 2.0?  Does it aspire to be?  What changes need to be made to fulfill the vision?

Listed below are a few key considerations that organizations need to contemplate while defining and developing a mobile publishing strategy:

Mobile Web strategy

Today, more than 25% of customers typically access websites through their mobile device.  If a portal is not catering to these customers they risk losing them to a competitor’s better mobile portal. Identifying the requirements for this portal, analyzing what needs to be developed or deciding whether it should be a cloud-based or hosted model  are some of the factors that need to be analyzed as part of this assessment. A strong mobile web strategy can go a long way in serving customers, irrespective of the mobile devices and platforms they’re using or will be using in the future.

Mobile App Strategy

With maturing app platforms and increasing adoption by customers, defining an app strategy has become increasingly important. Before determining an app strategy, the following questions need to be raised:

• Which devices are your customers using?
• What similar apps have they already downloaded?
• How do you want to position your app compared to those of your competitors and what’s the value-add from your app?
• Who can access these apps and who can’t?
• Should it be paid or free service for customers?
• Which use cases are you solving through these apps?

Answering these questions will help in constructing a better app that can provide higher value to the customer.

Commerce Strategy

A well defined commerce strategy is useful especially if organizations need to use the mobile channel to increase the top-line revenue directly through additional sales. What kind of services / products would you like to sell? Identifying your target market and integrating with e-commerce engines among others is key to determining this strategy.

RoI Measurements

Without identifying proper RoI metrics, organizations should not invest in mobile solutions. Whether using simple RoI metrics like the increase in the numberof visitors per month, number of apps downloaded, number of web impressions per day  or using more mature metrics such as revenue generated from mobile devices, reduction in customer service costs  – it is essential for organizations to track the benefits from the investment they have made.

Content strategy

Content is king; it is essential that organizations decide on the content and the right channel for sharing it.  It may not be necessary to display every single piece of content on all channels. Alternately, you may want to provide specific services on mobile that may not have been possible through regular web coverage – such as location specific content, mobile barcodes, etc. A proper content strategy not only improves customer service, but also helps organizations to provide innovative solutions to these customers.

Ensuring that organizations evaluate these criteria while developing their mobile publishing strategy can help them to enhance customer experience and ensure customer delight. We are very interested in hearing any other approaches you may have taken while defining your own mobile strategy.

The typical definition of an operational data store (ODS) is that it’s a set of logically related data structures within a database. The data within an ODS is integrated, volatile and at a non-historical granular level that is designed to address a set of operational functions for a specific business purpose. The ODS must also be based on the enterprise standards for data management for the organization.

To understand the purpose of the ODS and when it is an appropriate solution, its characteristics must first be defined.

Characteristics of an Operational Data Store

• Subject Oriented

The ODS contains specific data that is unique to a set of business functions. The data therefore represents a specific subject area.

• Integrated

Data in the ODS is sourced from various legacy applications. The source data is taken through a set of ETL operations that includes cleansing and transformative processes. These processes are based on rules that have been created through business requirements for data quality and standardization.

• Current (non-historical)

The data in the ODS is up-to-date and is a current status of data from the sourcing applications.

• Detail

Data in the ODS is primarily used to support operational business functions. This means that there is a specific level of granularity based on business requirements that dictate the level of detail that data in the ODS will have.

The decision making process to determine if an ODS is an appropriate solution requires business analysts and the data management team to conduct assessments on the set of business processes that must be executed in order to complete transactions or operational reporting requests. These assessments are truly effective when utilizing an approach that includes business process management (BPM).

The candidate set of business functions should be the set that is mostly data dependent with close attention to any issues or pain points where inefficiencies and ineffectiveness are highlighted.

Armed with this type of analysis and an understanding of the characteristics of an operational data store, the team can now articulate clearly what their needs are. If the results of the business process analysis reveal that the business unit has transactional/operational issues meeting their aggressive deadlines, data quality errors with the legacy sources or a supporting application that has aged or is designed poorly, chances are that an operational data store is an appropriate solution.

Based on the defined characteristics and the business process analysis, the true purpose of an operational data store is clear. The purpose of an operational data store is to make data available for a specific set of business functions. This data represents a non-historical integrated view of the legacy applications. It enables the business unit to complete transactional functions and/or operational reporting specifically with a current snapshot of data at a specific level of granularity. The data is processed through a series of ETL operations to integrate and transform to a set of standards where data quality and uniformity are the goals. This data is kept in a database with specific constraints including referential integrity which ensures that all data is relatable and that immediate access is provided to the business unit.

The operational data store is a vital and complex component of the enterprise data warehouse framework. It is a multi-purposed structure that enables transactional and decision support processing. It is essential that the characteristics and the business problem are clearly understood. In this way, the ODS is purposed and designed specifically to meet the operational needs and requirements of a specific set of business processes while adhering to the corporate standards of the organization as a whole.

Recently, I spoke with Mike Vizard of IT Business Edge.  We discussed many compelling reasons why an organization would pursue application rationalization.  Cost reduction, increased business agility and business transformation were at the top of the list.  But, even with those stakes most organizations are reluctant to give it a try.  There are many reasons why, some legitimate, others not.

One of the most legitimate reasons is that some applications provide very specialized support for certain functions.  It would be unwise to eliminate them in a wholesale fashion.  That specialized support might be unique handling for a particular process in a given geography or with a specific partner.  Some products and services require their own individual processes.  And, during the course of post merger integration, applications should be phased out carefully.  Virtusa has found that these specialized functions are few and far between; certainly the minority in a large and unwieldy application profile.  In addition, if there is unique support for a specific function, there may be no reason to maintain the entire application system, rather harvest the most critical components.

Firms must take an aggressive stand against proliferation to find out which applications are critical.  I spoke to a CIO last month who told me that his company has over 100 applications that he doesn’t know what they do.  I asked him what he was going to do about it and he said “unplug them one by one until somebody complains, then plug that one back in.”  In 2008, Gartner analysts Jim Duggan, Valentin T. Sribar wrote “issue the application hunting license.”  Others advocate treating the application portfolio like your clothes closet – add one, throw out two – to prevent bloat.  Whatever the approach, IT optimization is not likely to be the result without an aggressive strategy.

Ann All, also of IT Business Edge, commented on Mike’s post.  She attacked the problem from the process point of view.  Her post asks “Is the CIO the right person to champion process improvement?”  The topic is also hotly debated on www.ebizq.net in the discussion thread “Who Should Lead a BPM Project?”.

The CIO is certainly a prime candidate.  In a project that requires support for a multi departmental, multi function process that intends to rationalize redundant applications the CIO may be the best choice, particularly if that project intends to leverage BPM technologies.  Also, the CIO is a typically a neutral party not favoring one specific group.  The CIO also has an in depth knowledge of the technical challenges involved and the general nature of the application portfolio in question.

Other candidates include an executive sponsor from one of the constituent departments or functions.  The downside to that individual is that they favor what they know best, the operations and requirements of their group.

The opposite is true of a neutral observer, an executive sponsor that is not involved in any way with the resulting system.  That person may not have an in depth understanding of any of the business issues or implications involved with the project.

In any case, a strong orientation to process and a strong leader are traits that are critical for success.  Process flow work is not easy and certainly not second nature to a vast majority of the general public.  There are more companies that are poor at process than there are companies that excel.  By its nature any project like this will be matrix managed putting a premium on leadership skills and persuasion.

Business technology optimization is a challenging and daunting task.  Creating more efficient processes can often be a catalyst in the pursuit of IT optimization.  Take the best and shortest route and make sure you have a partner that understands managed transformation.

• Presence of pockets of user resistance across organisations and departments
• Inadequate understanding leading to poor adoption due to immaturity
• Lack of executive sponsorship
• Absence of a strategic plan to adopt BPM i.e. adoption tends to be tactical (departmental)

Business users, practitioners and technologists all differ in their opinion of what BPM is and what is hype, theory and practically achievable, but there does seem to be a consensus that it has the capability for sizeable and  realizable benefits when implemented correctly.

Research from analysts and practical experience from BPM implementations have shown that moving from theory to practice is a big challenge for most organisations and I would argue that it is purely due to not being able to gain a clear assessment on the ROI. BPM Return on Investment (ROI) can be broadly categorised in the following ways:

• Automation – In a nutshell, automation is the conversion of process actions from a current operation that requires manual human intervention to a new operation that is performed in an automated manner.
• Quality – Processes typically require the collection of data in a specific form and validates that actions were taken, in the appropriate manner by the appropriate personnel. Quality processes can also include the collection of measured data (audit log and performance metrics) to support proof of quality for the product/output produced.
• Compliance – Common characteristics of compliance include adherence to a known set of operational policies and procedures, recording substantiating evidence that such compliance occurred, auditable trails for all compliance requirements and auditable records of change to the process or operations that could have a potential effect on adherence to compliance requirements. Because BPM is specifically designed to model and manage all business processes, it is ideal for achieving compliance for virtually any regulatory or partner requirement.
• Management & Performance Monitoring – BPM is an excellent tool for improving the management of a business. The primary functionality available to aid managers includes alerts and escalations based on Business Rules, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and managerial process views. Management ROI is driven by real-time reaction to disruptions and proactive addressing of potential disruptions or adjustments to personnel activities to meet current business/customer requirements.
• Optimisation – Performing process analysis for identifying potential cost reductions and ‘tuning’ the enterprise towards optimal performance requires that the metrics these process activities are based on be defined during the process modelling stage. This step is essential to successful analysis and improvement of a given process or a collection of processes.

BPM is very ‘real’ and has great potential for benefits realisation. Organisations that have taken the leap of faith have proven this and for the majority that have kept up the momentum and focused on finding additional opportunities in their organisations, have gone on to gain incremental value from the adoption of a BPMS and BPM.

In an economic climate where there is continual scrutiny of operational and discretionary budgets and compliance and regulatory demands, any opportunity for demonstrating cost reductions, good governance and efficiency gains should be treated as a priority.

To summarize Yee, problems with SaaS typically fall into three categories:

1.) Many ISVs try to migrate an older or niche product to SaaS instead of their most successful offerings to prevent competing with themselves and “killing” their license revenue.
RESULT: Bad SaaS solutions that do not sell.

2.) SaaS solutions require a mature provider organization with extensive runtime operational capabilities (monitoring, provisioning, etc).  Many traditional ISVs do not have the operational skills or knowledge in house and their applications do not typically have the runtime support required.
RESULT: Poor reliability and performance

3.) SaaS can actually solve the problem of shelfware. If the pay-per-use model is used, then businesses do not accrue the costs for SaaS solutions that are not adopted by the organization.  This allows organizations to try new technologies and solutions with low risk.  The problem is that many SaaS solutions are being offered with pay-per-seat models derived from the COTS software licensing model.
RESULT: SaaS shelfware costs are equivalent to COTS shelfware

I documented the pressures that result in this poor execution in my last post, ISV Model: Evolution at Play? These problems indicate that ISVs are trying to cross the chasm between the old paradigm and the new SaaS paradigm.  Whenever new paradigms occur there are always more losers than winners as the transition is under way.  The current problems are just a confirmation of the transition.

In order to not only survive the transition, but to thrive, organizations need to be aware of the issues and have a strategy for selecting those SaaS solutions which provide greater value and will still be around once the market completes the transition.  My earlier post, 10 Factors to Consider When Selecting SaaS Solutions, documents what SaaS users need to look for.  It is also helpful for SaaS vendors to grade their solutions and get an objective assessment on how favorably the market will view their offerings.

For both the ISVs and SaaS customers, the issue is not “Is SaaS Dead?” but who will be the winners on the SaaS battle field?

For the last few years, there has been a distinct trend towards a “consumerization” of IT. To a great extent Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) has been a fall out of this rapid transformation sweeping the technology and business landscape.  It is bringing in revolutionary changes to the way that organizations use technology for enhanced customer experience. The emphasis is now on a “user centric” approach to developing and deploying applications.

So how does the new consumer-driven IT differ from the earlier technologies for providing an enhanced experience for users? Has there been a substantial shift in the thinking and approach of vendors towards developing solutions that have a direct impact on customers and users alike?

Traditionally, vendors developed products and solutions with a focus on avoiding failure and emphasis on searching the right answer. The motto was to make the right product the first time. Little or virtually no customer research was done to understand the customer or user need. These resulted in product failures and recalls, user antipathy and frustrations among others. The last decade has seen a slow transition in vendors’ approach to product and solution development, largely influenced by rapid technology advancement, new process methodologies and demanding customers/users. Vendors today are customer driven, with high up-front investments in customer need research, and are open to adopting an incremental and iterative approach to product development. Unlike earlier, the focus is on asking the right questions during the various stages of development, increasing dependence on experiments and user experiences and rigorous testing.  This leads to developing the right product through a continuous improvement approach – dependence on trial and errors, and constantly going back to customers for feedback. To a large extent, this approach has helped in mitigating many of the user concerns of technology not being user centric.

Taking the example of Usability: in the overall organizational IT needs and expectations, it has long been a bête noire for technology vendors and solution providers, with users having “less than happy” experience using the technology. The simplicity of this platform lies in making it a user friendly interface which is easy to adopt and use. In today’s highly technology enabled environment, the “Gen Xers” and “Gen Yers” need anywhere, anytime access to information for personal or professional use. The advent of smart phones and easy access to internet is empowering an employee to work “virtually” and “on the go.” So, what have been the latent needs and expectations of the current generation of users towards usability that were not effectively addressed earlier? Many of the studies and user feedback have highlighted on few criteria, which provide some insights into the users areas of concerns while using technology.

• Ease of use: simple and efficient to use with easy access and navigation
• Intuitive: Adoption of a technology has direct correlation to its intuitiveness
• Appealing to senses: Technology adoption is directly influenced by the sensory and visual perceptions of the user

• Speed: One of the demands of the users has been the speed of the application. Many times, due to slow processing of the application, the user’s perception and orientation to use the application is drastically changed

To a major extent, E2.0 has been addressing many of these issues. If we look back at the conventional corporate environment, the flow of information would follow just one path i.e. top to bottom or bottom to top. In today’s dynamic and fast moving business environment, with teams and partners located remotely, the speed of operations has become crucial for business success. The “consumerization” of IT is enabling users to create, modify and manage information with ease, resulting in increased productivity. At the end, happy and motivated users lead to enhanced efficiency and higher business value for the organization. Would it be then right to say that the ”consumerization” of IT is leapfrogging organizations to a higher platform of business agility and responsiveness?

I look forward to your thoughts and perspectives on this tectonic shift in the technology and business landscape.

Many BPM tools and systems have evolved with the objective of leveraging existing investments in ERP systems, where the bulk of the core IT processing is being handled. BPM tools are expected to make ERP more agile by plugging gaps in human interaction and workflow process in enterprise IT systems.

For enterprise IT systems to be agile, they should be able to do the following:

• Map the human actors in a organization and their actions in a holistic business process life cycle
• Allow organizations to easily separate out and store (as an artifact – decision rules) the decision making criteria for every step in the process
• Make it easy (with due approval process) to change the rules of such decision points and accordingly re-direct the process
• Calculate the time taken to execute each process
• Ensure effective process management, which will enable stopping and re-starting of processes based on certain approval requirements
• Predict the efficiency of a step in the business process based on the volumes generated in one of the previous steps
• Depending on the outcome of decision rules, enable effective traversing of the workflow in the reverse direction and take another path (backward chaining)

So, how can we bring in agility to enterprise IT systems like ERP that lack in many of the above requirements?

BPM tools have built-in connectors or adapters that can listen or tap into many of the modern ERP systems. These adapters allow control of ERP system process, bring the flow control into the BPM system and allow intermediate human decision process to be executed.

Let us take the case of an accounting ERP system that does reconciliations and generates exception reports. Without a BPM system, all exception reports would wait for human intervention to check the value and quantity of exception to route to appropriate verifying authority. Typical ERP systems will not have tracking in terms of time taken if there were multiple levels of verification for an exception report. If new rules have been introduced owing to regulatory requirements or change in accounting practices, they will not reflect in the ERP system unless there is a huge investment to modify the ERP system. These challenges make the accounting ERP system inflexible and non-agile for the evolving and dynamic needs of an organization.

However, if a BPM system is implemented to tap into the reconciliation process it can stop the process once exception reports are generated, and take over the automation of verification process, which was earlier a manual routing process. The BPM tool will be able to effectively perform the following:

• Route the exception reports to multiple levels based on the pre-set exception value and volume criteria
• Pull in appropriate documentation of regulatory rules (company, government or accounting practices) along with exception reports through integration with a content management system for easy reference to the person verifying the exception
• Tap into database and forms as appropriate and allow relevant modifications
• Keep a system of records for such modifications for future audit purpose
• Track the time taken for different set of approvals
• Enable changes in the decision and rule criteria in the BPM system without really modifying the core accounting ERP, in the event of regulatory changes
• Update relevant databases and re-trigger re-conciliation process of ERP and obtain the second set of verified reports with no exceptions

With this facilitation by the BPM tool, the accounting ERP can become more agile as compared to its original process cycle, benefiting the organization in multiple ways.

BPM can play a vital role in making an ERP system agile and adaptable to the dynamic needs of the business. I am looking forward to reading your experiences and thoughts on the subject.

Any Web Content Management implementation requires a sound strategy and a plan for migrating existing legacy content. The following approach will help in successful migration of legacy content:

• Identifying Content Source: This is the first step that one should take while developing the migration plan. Typically organizations will have multiple websites running on multiple technologies (.net, cold fusion, java etc.), acquired over a period of time through acquisitions and mergers. This makes the source of content an unwieldy mix of varied and often outdated technology layers.
• Auditing Content Volume and Type: It is critical to know what we have before we decide what we want to have. Organizations can have a host of different content types spread across a myriad of web assets. These include dynamic and static content, downloadable files, entitled and non-entitled content, etc. It is important that we create an inventory of legacy content to better scope the scale of migration.
• Migrating Legacy Content versus Creating New Content: A new Web Content Management application also gives organizations an opportunity to create fresh content targeted towards its existing and new audience through a focused branding and marketing impetus. A decision towards making new content however, has to be dealt with discipline and caution since it requires involvement and coordination of creative, marketing and legal departments. Typically these departments will have their own operational priorities and will need to fill in extra hours to create new content. A decision towards making new content however, will reduce the scope of migrating legacy content.
• Retiring Existing Content: Organizations carry a huge amount of legacy content which is no longer relevant and hardly has any footfall from viewers. This can be verified by using regular web analytics tools like google analytics which can give you an accurate picture of how popular your content is and the number of unique visitors to your website pages. Organizations using web analytics tool can get this data instantly and decide on the fate of un-popular and irrelevant content.  Those organizations which do not have a breadth of analytics coverage across all web properties might have to make a decision based on experience and age of the content. Retirement of existing content also leads to less scope for migration.
• Cleaning and Enriching Content: Existing legacy content may need to be cleaned up before being migrated to the new application. This also presents an opportunity to structure and tag the content in SEO-friendly ways.
• Automated versus Manual Migration: One important decision after finalizing the scope of the migration is the method of the migration. There are quite a few options available, each of which has its own pain and gain. Typically large scale migration needs to be automated in nature. This is done either through custom built scripts or specialized migration tools which are nowadays a regular part of common Web Content Management applications. There are also some independent vendors out there who have developed proprietary migration tools for common CMS packages.  However, in certain situations, doing a manual migration of the content makes more sense. Typically if the depth and volume of content for a particular channel of the new site is shallow and static in nature, it makes more sense to do a two-day manual content migration rather than spending money on creating automation scripts around them.

Diligent execution of the activities mentioned above is essential towards creating a winning site migration strategy. It is important that you are aware of what you want to migrate, the time and support needed from non-IT staff of various lines of businesses for creating fresh content or cleaning up existing content and the tolerance level for content quality post migration. Lastly, it is imperative that you make content migration higher up in the priority list of items and give advance notice to all business stakeholders of the level of commitment expected from them.

We look forward to continuing this conversation. What has been your experience while performing migration of site content? Please feel free to share your secret sauce of success or any learning experiences you may have gone through relating to content migration initiatives.

The Standish Group, an IT research organisation, documents this annually and has historically found that 31.1% projects are cancelled before completion, 52.7% of projects will cost 189% of their original estimated cost and only 16% of projects are completed on-time and on-budget.

Apart from the typical Project Management and Software Delivery Governance and Optimisation improvements that can be adopted to improve this situation, a further and probably more advantageous approach would be to adopt ‘Problem Architects’.

Solution Architects (the opposite of Problem Architects) are more commonly technical specialists focused on defining a technical solution that is usually heavily dependent on ‘clear’ business requirements often formulated by users and project Business Analysts. In most cases, this tends to be an inexact science as it is often too complex, too ambiguous, and has lots of errata due to tight project specific deadlines.

Forrester 2010 research has found that:

“…40% of organizations now have an established business architecture program. And most of the rest are working toward creating one. For a large majority of EA teams the question has shifted from ‘When should I start my business architecture effort?’ to ‘How do I get business architecture moving?’…“

Jeff Scott, Senior Analyst at Forrester has found the following based on his research on the subject:

• “…Capability maps are not just for the business. A number of EAs are interested in building capability maps for IT. They see capability maps as a powerful tool to help improve IT’s ability to serve the business. Another perspective was, ‘If you can’t get the business to engage, start with what you know (IT) and build on it’…”
• “…Business architects from the business have a different perspective…Their business-focused viewpoints brought a lot of depth to the discussion, though it left me a little uneasy about the future of business architecture in IT. If business architecture really takes off, will it be able to survive as an IT function?…”
• “…Traditional EAs are challenged to become business architects. As I spelled out the details of how to become a more business-focused enterprise architect, one architect expressed her frustration. ‘Wait a minute! I came to IT so I could work on technical problems – not business problems.’ Her comment clearly articulates what I see as the number one challenge for EAs over this decade. Am I a technologist first and business person second or is it the other way around? I don’t think EAs will be able to keep one foot in each area for long; they will have to make a clear choice. It’s going to be a hard one…”

Introducing a Problem Architect, aka a Business Architect, early in projects is a good way to establish the scope and focus of the problem to be solved. It’s non-invasive to the business users because everyone can agree upon the problem at hand and it’s complementary to IT because it helps mitigate the risk of guessing what the real problem is.

I welcome your thoughts and experiences on this subject.

1. Ownership of the selection process – Business or IT? Business often wants to take the lead as they intend to leverage the tool as a transformation enabler and hence want to see how the tool can facilitate continuous optimization of business processes, provide abstraction and reuse of business logic, and enable change in near real time. On the other hand, IT wants to ensure that the tool fits into the larger enterprise architecture, integrates well with the enterprise systems and meets performance and scalability expectations. Having the right level of participation from both sides is the best approach and ensures the tool is well accepted and adopted over a period of time.
2. Need based selection or Top-down approach: When the selection is being made for a specific business problem, the focus is on ensuring that the critical use cases are handled well. In such cases, pure-play vendors usually stand out as they are able to demonstrate how well the product can be configured to meet the business expectations. Some of the pure-play BPM products also have pre-built process frameworks that provide distinct time to market and best practice related advantages. A top down approach usually suits best when picking a tool for enterprise adoption. Such selections not only consider the BPM capabilities but also ensure adaptability to the enterprise systems and standards. An ideal approach will be to select a product for critical business needs but also scan the larger enterprise needs and ensure there is buy-in from multiple lines of business. Else the selected product will be discarded after few applications are rolled out as it doesn’t meet the larger enterprise requirements.
3. Features critical for the selection process: BPM products must have basic features such as process modeling and simulation, workflow and case management, BAM, integration and Rules engines. Most of the leading BPM tools handle these features well. But as we start looking at specializations such as managing content based workflows, Case management, straight through processing, heavy transaction processing, services orchestration and complex integrations, reuse of processes and rules etc, there is a very clear differentiation that emerges between the tools. It is very essential to take a look at business requirements beyond the immediate need on hand and ensure that we account for common requirements across lines of business while selecting the BPM tool. Tools selected in urgency might solve an immediate problem but can become a liability over a period of time, eventually leading to failure of BPM as concept itself.

Based on our experiences with clients across industries and scale, we have seen these challenges appear time and again. Organizations planning to select and implement BPM solutions will have to consider the above challenges and plan their product selection exercise in advance.

If your organization is starting afresh and planning to implement BPM for the first time, you might be interested in a BPM Test Drive Approach, which can help create a roadmap for long-term BPM use and mitigate some of the risks inherent in implementation.  Education about BPM concepts, implementation and technology aspects will be key elements of BPM Test Drive.

These market and technology driven onslaughts are compelling ISVs to look for alternatives.  On their part, ISVs can respond by digging in and marketing the advantages of the licensed product model over the SaaS approach by using lower prices, suite-based offering and bundled services. Alternatively, they can compete on the cloud battlefield.  Digging in will do little except forestall the inevitable.  While there are certainly benefits to the licensed product model in some circumstances – and some market niches where it will remain a strong, if not the dominant, model of software distribution – the growth of SaaS alternatives will steal market share in most product categories.  This will leave traditional licensed product vendors fighting over a ever shrinking slice of the pie.

As ISVs move to compete in the SaaS marketplace, they will need to change their approach to overcome some core challenges to success.  There are two basic strategies they can adopt.  The first is to repackage their existing product offerings as SaaS solutions.  The second is to embark on the development of a new SaaS solution that either complements or replaces their existing product offerings.

Repackaging an existing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product as a SaaS solution often leads to disappointing results.  This is not because the strategy is not valid, but more often due to the business’ motivation to get something into the marketplace as quickly as possible with little investment.  This approach demonstrates a basic misunderstanding about the differences between a COTS and a SaaS offering.  A successful SaaS offering requires an operations organization and would involve changes to the culture and marketing and sales departments of the company.

“What many do not understand is that making the transition is more than just re-architecting the software .It is often a fundamental re-examination of the business itself to fully understand the organizational and cultural transition issues that are required for a company shifting from a product- to services-based focus” – Transition to SaaS: An ISV Cookbook, C. Burns, December 29, 2008

The R&D organization must learn that to develop a successful SaaS product requires devoting as much effort to providing operational and administrative functionality for both operators and users as it does to providing solution functionality.  This would include items such as self-service on-boarding, subscription management, e-invoicing, payment processing and delegated user administration.

An ISV needs to recognize that an operations organization will need to be created with experienced personnel.  This requires a significant investment that often can only be made by reallocating funds from existing departments.  Needless to say this usually results in significant organizational friction.  The success and failure of a SaaS-based offering can just as often be traced to the operations as it can to the functional strengths of the solution in the marketplace.

The result of the growth of SaaS in the marketplace is that traditional ISVs will either be displaced by pure-play SaaS start-ups or they will transform themselves from ISVs to SaaS vendors providing services instead of products.  In either case, it spells the end of the ISV model as we know it.

What about the financial justification for this kind of project?  Is the cost an expense or an investment? The project will without a doubt require significant upfront investment in order to reap the back end rewards.  Most IT organizations understand that this upfront investment will payback significantly in reduced downstream maintenance costs and improved business agility.  How can the IT function acquire the support it needs to pursue this kind of project in a time when budgets are tight and expected benefit horizons are contracting?  Is there a financial argument that can be constructed to justify the upfront expense?

By examining the structure of the rationalization project the financial impact may not be as debilitating as it may seem.  Different aspects of the project budget can be recognized in different ways.  The first, and most common arrangement, results in a ratable expense over the period of performance of services.  The benefits of such a model include a predictable and consistent expense that allows for basic budgeting and planning.  The second, and not so conventional arrangement, results in certain costs being capitalized and expensed over a much longer period, which significantly reduces the initial expense in year one.  The benefits of this model include an expense reduction in year one as well as a predictable and consistent expense in subsequent years.  The second arrangement is not as common, but can be applied in practice based on capitalizing costs associated with the rationalization efforts and depreciating those costs over the useful life of the related assets (IT software and/or hardware).

The amount of the project that can be capitalized will depend on the amount of project expense that is devoted to upfront analysis and assessment versus the execution and deployment of the new environment.  Analyzing hardware and software costs, network build out (if required), physical construction, and the costs associated with various stages of the SDLC will help determine how much of the true cost would be depreciated over the life of the application.

In his post IT Budget Constraints Drive Application Modernization, Mike Vizard believes the time might be right.  He cites a Forrester Consulting and HP study which found, “…more IT organizations appear willing to take on the risks associated with an application migration in order to accommodate substantially lower IT budgets that appear to be with us for at least the next several years.”

Has your finance organization partnered with IT to understand all of the financial options available to support a project of this kind?  Have you been successful budgeting for a project in this manner?  Perhaps this solution can help organizations with the “courage” mentioned in a previous post titled “The Next Frontier in IT TCO Reduction”.

Next step, let’s look at a project budget in detail to highlight the exact benefits of our second approach.  If you have examples, comments, questions or suggestions, please comment here and we will look to incorporate your feedback.

Agile over traditional practices brings in significant value; however our experience indicates that it is no silver bullet for the ills of enterprise application development.  Agile practices are developed based on several fundamental assumptions about the environment within which the project is executed.  In the right context, all promises of agile come alive; in the wrong context agile can add significant risks to the successful delivery of an engagement.  Especially in a global delivery environment, careful consideration of risk factors helps you avoid potential significant failures.

The following guidelines can help in deciding whether a project using the global delivery model is suitable for agile development:

1. Environment

Applying agile practices to an environment steeped in traditional development methodologies requires a significant mindset shift. Proper understanding of what agile development means, willingness to change, and executive sponsorship are important for the transformation to happen. If the organisation is open to undertaking risks, is innovation-driven and has a mindset for continuous improvement, then the required change can be easily accomplished. A strong agile champion at the top is critical for the success of an agile development project.

A tightly time-driven project creates the right environment for all stakeholders to come together quickly, build working relationships and create momentum. Other dimensions – such as the number of stakeholders, the existing level of trust between users and IT, and the overall collaboration culture – can significantly affect the outcome.

2. Partnerships

In a multi-site, multi-partner project, the quality of relationships among partners plays a significant role. The openness of partners to sharing feedback for the benefit of the project, the availability of the partners to participate in multiple sessions, and the overall level of trust play key roles. Partners must share realistic expectations and be willing to listen and empower each other towards project success.

3. Nature of Requirements and Solution

The essence of the agile approach is to develop software iteratively and deliver it in usable increments that provide value to the business. The nature of the requirements, as well as the solution to meet them, plays a key role in executing the project using agile methods. The refactoring effort involved for incremental development may not be justifiable when the requirements are frozen upfront. The feasibility of segmenting the requirements and developing them in smaller chunks, the frequency of requirement changes, the business’s ability to quickly prioritise requirements, and the criticality of the application are all important factors in analysing the suitability for an agile approach.

4. Scope and Time

When the project has a fixed timeframe, the agile approach is particularly useful for getting maximum business benefit within the given time. On the other hand, projects with both fixed timeframe and scope may not provide enough flexibility for the business to reprioritize or change requirements once the project commences. Agile development is best suited for projects with fixed time and cost, and variable scope.

5. Team

Agile development favors individuals and interactions over processes and tools. The approach is more people-centric; hence, team composition plays an especially important role in assessing agile suitability. The availability of the right skills and the team’s ability to collaborate play significant roles in the success of the project. With high dependence on tacit knowledge, it is vital to maintain a stable team. Dynamically changing teams should opt for a more traditional development approach instead of a people-oriented approach.

By carefully assessing the five factors described above to understand the “ground” conditions of a project, you can assess the project’s suitability for agile development in a structured way.

Our experience in global agile delivery suggests that agile and traditional approaches are not the two ends of a continuum. Our Agile Suitability Assessment approach is based on a risk-benefit analysis framework that considers the complex nature of the environments in which the projects are executed. We evaluate numerous environmental parameters, including client readiness, team readiness, the commercial relationship, the nature of the target solution, and a host of other aspects before recommending agile development for an engagement.

One of the most common pain points for enterprises who have invested millions in implementing large scale Enterprise Content Management or Web Content Management Solutions is that their intended users are not able to use it because of its perceived complexity. To publish a simple article on a company website, a business author may have to perform five different activities involving different modules like static content, content object creation, workflow etc. involving multiple clicks and a myriad of steps. The whole experience is intimidating for any business user. To a great extent the complaints of the users are absolutely justified and part of that comes from the fact that in today’s world of Blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking tools, the task of publishing has become tremendously easy and smooth. Once we get used to that level of user simplicity it is difficult for us to accept or even work with enterprise tools which are a generation or two behind in usability and simplicity. Striving to improve business agility through Enterprise 2.0 led initiatives, today’s enterprises are willing to invest in technology solutions such as ECM and WCM. Product vendors need to keep this in mind and make their applications user friendly and more logically intuitive than they are today. This will not only help the adoption of the tool but also go a long way to reduce the training expenses. At the end of the day enterprise users will always want to use applications which are user-friendly and simple to use.

However we still need to find a solution for enterprises that are saddled with complex content solutions. Simplification and user-friendliness of Content Systems can be achieved by developing a simplified intermediate interface between users and the content application. This tool can be used by the business users to enter content which will then be transferred to the content application automatically. Another option for simplification will be that of employing a team of highly skilled individuals of the content application to enter content on behalf of the business users. At Virtusa, we have come across such scenarios where clients have asked us to develop a tool and also provide a team of content authors who can be on the job from the word go. Typically during the tool development process our team of trained content authors maintains business continuity by entering content that they receive from the business users. What has been your experience while dealing with Enterprise Content Management applications as far as usability is concerned? Do you share similar concerns and issues? Feel free to share your experience and any solutions you have implemented that have effectively resolved usability issues.

The purpose of a CoE is to act as a nucleus for promoting and managing the collaboration of people, processes and technologies around key organisational objectives by ensuring the application of best practices, education and training, support services and technology awareness.

In most organisations, this is an extremely complex challenge, especially if the level of organisational maturity is low and their existing operational model is disjointed. That said, more mature and integrated organisations find the exigency and necessary focus for adopting a CoE a challenge.

As already stated, a CoE performs many roles and as an enabler underpinning a foundation for continued improvement, in most cases, is not always a ‘once size fits all’ solution. Deciding on what functions it provides to the organisation and how these are created, implemented and provisioned to wider cross functional teams is therefore a key consideration in the early stages of planning.

Typical core functional areas that form part of any CoE include the following:

• Resource Management
• Skills Management
• Knowledge Management
• Standardisation and Reuse of Assets
• Development, Implementation and Governance of Standards and Frameworks
• Implementation Support and Advisory Services across the Software Development Lifecycle
• Marketing and Communications of the CoE Objectives and Values

The list is just an indication of some of the primary considerations, but to ensure that value is derived on an ongoing basis, a clear focus should be kept on when and how the CoE capabilities are implemented and evolved. Governance is therefore essential in ensuring a consistent alignment with the organisational objectives and BPM Adoption and Improvement Strategy.

In future posts I will discuss how organisational models can be combined with CoE capabilities (deployment patterns) to derive specific IT and Business value.

Based on my experience working with various global enterprises, I’m jotting down some of the best practices that many organizations typically miss out while developing a globalization strategy.

1. 1. Categorize content – global, regional and local
   Categorizing content into these types not only helps identify content that needs to be published globally versus locally, but also it provides category-specific security, personalization, workflows, etc. during content creation and presentation.
2. Establish globalization success metrics
   Defining metrics around globalized content allows companies to validate the success of the global website. Defining metrics such as ‘number of visitors / page views / etc. for each international site’ would enable country administrators or content creators to improve the quality of content. If the translations are being done by third-party firms or by translation engines, metrics such as ‘number of translation errors’ can help the organization evaluate these vendors and improve translation memories.
3. Define user experience strategy
   Understanding user experiences is important for any Web portal and is critical for a global website. Developing a global (and local – if necessary) brand guide, style guide, UI guide, navigation guide, etc. can help make user experience seamless and consistent.
4. Simplify translation workflows
   While defining translation workflows, organizations tend to overcomplicate, causing creation delays and alternate content flows. The objective should be to keep it as simple as possible. Managing it within 3-4 steps would be optimal.
5. Define publishing guides for different countries
   Publishing needs may differ from country to country. While some prefer to publish all translated content at once, others may publish the parent content (say English article) first and then the other translated content later. Publishing guidelines around the publishing processes and dependencies provides transparency and clarity for all content creators.
6. Test translated pages on multiple browsers
   It’s a common mistake that IT departments test only English pages on multiple browsers, but not other languages. Since different browsers have different capabilities, there is a need to make sure content in all languages appear appropriately in different browsers before going live.
7. Plan for multi-lingual site search
   Search, a key component of any portal, needs to cater to multiple languages. Making sure that the search engines provide support for multiple languages is a key. At times, organizations may also want to enable search of documents / Web pages in other languages too. Make sure that translation architecture, defined for the global website, supports that.
8. Understand usage of color
   Color represents different aspects in different countries. While the color ‘red’ represents ‘happiness’ in China, it represents ‘death’ in Egypt and ‘anger’ in Japan. Understanding these differences can help use the right color themes for the same pages on different country sites.
9. Plan for right-to-left content display
   The portal needs to account for displaying content (such as Arabic) on right to left basis. The portal page template needs to ensure this is appropriately accounted for.
10. Develop guidelines for translation providers
    Irrespective of who does the translation, at an organization level, there is a need to provide guidelines for translation. For example, words that can’t be translated, specified translations for certain terms, tone of translation, messaging during translation, etc needs to documented and clearly conveyed to translators. Some of these can be taken care of by Translation Terminologies/ Dictionaries, Translation Memories, etc, if automated translation is being done.

Some of these best practices can not only be taken as the basis during development of a portal, but also can be used during Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendor selection and translation vendor selection activities. As content published on portals becomes more complex (such as videos, RIA, etc.), the underlying design for the multi-lingual portals needs to be well architected and of robust built.

If there are other best practices that you know of, please do share them with us.

Part of their position is the belief that the wholesale benefits of the labor arbitrage and staff augmentation approach that fueled Indian offshore growth wave is coming to an end.  It’s been a decade of hyper growth and the sector will start to level off as organizations have successfully achieved large scale reductions in TCO through the use of offshore labor.  With legions of offshore developers available to enterprises around the world competition will focus on rates as savvy sourcing managers continue to seek cost reduction.  But, assuming that labor cost can never reach zero, how much lower can it go before quality and service risk outweigh the cost benefits?

One of their positions is the value that IT services companies provide will have to shift to business outcomes, not pure labor arbitrage.  One way to do that is for IT services companies to create reusable assets to accelerate the deployment of solutions.  These assets are a form of intellectual property created on the engineering principle of “create once, deploy many”.  Without infringing on the confidentiality of the client, services companies will be able to build better systems faster by institutionalizing and repeating success.

Another, potentially more contentious, position is that enterprises will finally have the “courage” to embark on application rationalization projects.  Application rationalization refers to the complex and redundant IT estate created by decades of M&A activity, packaged application deployment, bespoke application development executed by armies of cheap labor and systems that have never been “sunsetted”.  In a recent discussion with a health care payer, they admitted that they had eighteen claims payment systems.  Banks have a litany of account opening systems.  Telco’s have multiple billing systems.  Every industry is plagued by large, complex, unwieldy account portfolios.

Fig: Achieving Business Agility through Application Rationalization and Software Platforming

How much does it cost an organization to maintain 18 payment systems?  How long does it take to make changes to those systems to offer new products and services or improve the end client experience?  Call it lean, agile or any other term, an application portfolio of 1 or 2 applications is inherently easier to deal with than 18.  If the organization can rationalize those 18 applications while utilizing today’s BPM technologies to streamline process flow the organization realizes a double win in the road to business transformation.

Why is now the time and why would McCarthy use the word “courage”?  Because labor arbitrage has yielded the easy TCO reduction win.  Each dollar of staff augmentation (as rates approach zero) becomes increasingly difficult to achieve.  And, moving the work from one low cost destination to another, potentially politically unstable, location becomes rife with risk.  The time is now because the next area to deliver sizeable TCO reduction is application rationalization.

So, why courage?  Because this is complex work, requires knowledge of the domain, and cannot be shopped to just any low cost provider.  The project requires extensive analysis of what works and can be harvested to create a leaner platform.  The result must be a more agile and flexible system that can quickly and easily meet the demands of the business tomorrow, not just today. That means not only the business logic but the technology platform as well.  Can it be shifted to the cloud?  Can it be mobile enabled?  Can the content be distributed to multiple platforms including iPad?

Courage, because this is the real frontier!  It requires business acumen, IT optimization and technology vision.  The initiative must bring together all of the skills and disciplines IT and business have been honing over three decades.  This is not a simple technology implementation.  This is the big time.  Does your organization have the courage to do it?

In the latter part of the last century, product manufacturing industries began implementing Lean production systems across their operations.  Lean Manufacturing helped to create a culture of excellence within the businesses that adopted it and eventually revolutionized the way goods are made.

50 or so years later, Lean is now table stakes in most industries, including service organisations, to remain in competition.  Lean principles including Total Quality Management and a culture of Continuous Improvement are recognized as absolutely essential to modern manufacturing and most service industries.

It is now high time for IT operations to establish Lean principles as fundamental business technology practice.  There is much to be gained: faster concept-to-market, reduced cycle-time in business processes, improved quality of service and superior customer experience.  These principles form the foundation for the next generation of IT Services: Lean IT.  The focus of the last generation was cost reduction through labor cost arbitrage in India and other countries. In the next generation, IT Services companies will learn from more mature industries that have implemented Lean to transform how work gets done and value is created.  IT Services will combine the efficiencies of the global delivery model with leaner, less wasteful approaches.  IT will deliver business results through leaner operations, with a focus on creating competitive advantages including: superior customer experience, reduced transaction cycle-times, increased productivity and improved quality.

Because of the unique requirements for delivering Software as a Service as opposed to deploying a system behind the corporate firewall, a mature SaaS solution should be evaluated against different factors and criteria.  Ten of these factors are:

1. Subscription Management – The ability to manage your subscription by adding features, increasing the number of seats, changing payment methods.  Is this available through an online interface or do you have to talk with an account representative?  Mature SaaS solutions generally provide an interface for this to reap the lower support costs.
2. SLAs (availability, performance, scalability) – Providing some Service Level Agreements (SLA) for availability, performance and scalability are very important.  You will be at the mercy of the SaaS provider, with SLAs that could materially impact your business and leave you with no recourse.  Mature providers know this and are willing to provide assurances.
3. Data import/export – While the service provided by a SaaS solution is the main value, often the data accumulated has a large value as well.  The ability to get data into the system and out of the system is in important consideration.  This is also important to prevent vendor lock-in, especially given the relative immaturity of the SaaS market.
4. Integration – While the service provide by the SaaS solution can be compelling, it is usually only a small part of the overall business process for an organization.  The ability to integrate the SaaS solution with other enterprise systems either behind the firewall or in the cloud can be critical to realizing the long term ROI goals of a SaaS solution.
5. Configuration/Customization – SaaS solutions provide a standard set of out-of-the-box functionality.  Most organizations will not mesh directly with the standard feature set.  The ability to configure and customize the solution can be the difference between a successful adoption by the organization and another piece of shelfware in the cloud.
6. Delegated user administration – Once an organization subscribes to a SaaS solution they should have complete control over the administration of their users.  For large scale adoption, greater than a few dozen users, the ability to delegate user administration to different areas of the customer organization is critical to being able to manage and roll out the software.  The SaaS solution should provide a complete set of capabilities for user management.  Relying on the SaaS provider’s support for user administration is another sign of an immature SaaS product.
7. Security – Closely related to the user administration is the security administration.  Being forced to follow a set security model (e.g. a fixed set of roles and permissions) will inevitably lead to frustration.  While the security model of the solution is fixed, organization differences require security customization to lie in the hands of the SaaS customer.
8. Reporting – In order to manage and integrate the SaaS solution into the larger business process, reports are often crucial.  Unlike COTS products, you do not have the option of rolling out your own reporting system for a SaaS solution.  A mature SaaS solution typically has a flexible reporting engine, a comprehensive set of standard reports and the ability to customize and run ad-hoc reports as well.
9. Monitoring – Given the pay for usage model of SaaS, monitoring capabilities are important.  Can you track the availability of the solution?  Do you know when you exceed your current pricing tier and can expect a larger monthly bill?  Can you track the usage of your users day-by-day, hour-by-hour?  These are all important capabilities for managing the SaaS solution to insure success and a positive ROI.
10. Business viability – The viability of the vendor is also important.  If a COTS vendor goes out of business, then you may not receive updates or upgrades to your product, but you can continue to do business and plan for a transition to a new solution.  With SaaS, when the vendor goes out of business you may be left high and dry.  Can your company survive if a critical business process is unavailable for a month or two unexpectedly?  The quality of the business can be as important as the quality of the solution when choosing a SaaS solution.

As companies contemplate SaaS solutions they need to look beyond the functionality provided to some of the unique issues with the SaaS model.  While SaaS has some compelling advantages compared to the traditional COTS product or custom development, it also has its own set of “gotchas.”  Don’t be another SaaS horror story, pick your solution with care and consider all the factors.

If one would like to develop a native app for the iPhone OS, they must either take a time machine back to 1988 and learn the nasty, archaic language known as Objective-C, or they must take a leap of faith and hope that Apple’s recent Developer Agreement changes don’t apply to Adobe and other vendors offering tools that translate various languages into native iPhone code.

If instead, one would like to develop a more portable app, designed to run on most any device, there is one technology that has produced more buzz than a hummingbird on steroids.

Enter HTML5, the apparent panacea of the software industry.  Is it supported by iPhones and iPads?  Check!  What about Android?  Yup!  And those old clunky things we still use at our desks and lug around in our travel bags, what are they called again?  Oh yeah, computers – do they support HTML5 apps?  They sure do!

So, then problem solved, right?

Well, not so fast.  As nice as it would be to code an app that can be run on any platform, there are some things to consider before drinking the HTML5 Kool-Aid.

Are we done yet?

The HTML5 specification is, hmm how shall I put this… still in its suggestion phase, otherwise known as a “working draft” by the W3C, the braintrust behind the spec.  The authors, in the third paragraph of the most recent draft, even go so far as to state “Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable.”  Really?  And developers are still expected to get excited about using HTML5 in professional, production-ready apps?

Get me out of this thing!

HTML5 is still bound to the browser, and as such is somewhat restricted in what it can do.  In addition, developers are at the mercy of the browser vendors, who get to decide which aspects of the HTML specification will be supported and which will be left out.  Most good browser vendors are ahead of the curve, supporting much of the spec already, and planning to support many more features in time.  Others seem to be more reluctant and slow moving with their adoption.

So as a result, HTML5 developers are forced to either scale back their usage of certain features, taking a “least common denominator” approach, or throw caution to the wind and just hope that browser vendors will start adopting new features more rapidly (don’t hold your breath).

It’s Déjà vu all over again

Being tied to the browser also causes another headache for developers (a headache that javascript/css developers should be intimately familiar with) – inconsistent rendering.  You can be guaranteed that the app you’ve meticulously developed for the iPad will look great when rendered by its WebKit engine on its 1024×768 screen.  You can also be guaranteed that the same app will look atrocious when rendered in IE 9 on a 1024×768 monitor, or when rendered on a Linux/Firefox laptop with a 1024×768 screen.

So then a developer must inject logic into their code that detects the OS/browser/version combination, along with code specific to each combination, to ensure that the app looks the same no matter where it is run.  And this is the future?

Why can’t there be an open source plugin, similar to Flash or Silverlight, that browser vendors must support in order to be HTML5 compliant?  That would solve all our problems!  You would get pixel perfect rendering!  Your app would be lean and mean and free of any case statements!  It would be awesome!

Why can’t we band together and demand such a solution?  Think about it, it could work!  I’ll start a petition… wait… what?  Oh yeah, I almost forgot, we’ve done that before.  It’s called Java.

Oh well, I got excited there for a moment.

I can only do so much

What if you want your HTML5 app to be able to use the nifty features of the iPhone or iPad?  Well, aside from basic functionality, you’re out of luck, at least for now.  Device specific features such as the accelerometer, camera, compass, and multi-touch display are currently off limits to non-native apps.

You’re so negative, I’m positive!

Although the tone of this article might lead you to believe that I am railing against HTML5, the truth is that I am very much rooting for it to succeed (and I think it will).  What I am trying to point out is that there are things to consider before jumping into the technology.

In the long run, I’d be surprised if HTML5 weren’t a huge hit and the technology of choice for app developers.  In particular the combination of the iPad and HTML5 has the potential to be a real game changer, both in the consumer realm as well as the business world.

Even in its current state, there are still some categories of apps that could benefit from using HTML5.  One such category is Enterprise RIA’s.  Such apps are typically deployed to internal users, in a controlled environment.  Having such an audience would afford developers the luxury of targeting specific OS/browser/version combinations.

If you are considering using HTML5 in your next project, take the time to weigh out the pros and cons.  And if you decide not to use it now, make sure to keep tabs on the specification’s progress, because when you have Google and Apple behind something, it’s very likely that it’s here to stay!

What do you think of the viability of HTML5?

I have worked in many diverse organisations in my career but over the past year I have been in some interesting organisational situations that has highlighted the fact that the human species has a very interesting way of adapting (or not) to Change.

I am reminded of a post that I wrote some time ago about how critical it is to consider the affects the introduction of Change (technological solution e.g. BPM or other) will have on the ‘status quo’ (real or perceived) of people in an organisation. In my experience, I have found that companies that are open to Change does not always mean they react well to it when it is imposed on them. Often this is due to type of culture in the organisation, in other cases it is just due to complacency.

In a dysfunctional organisation it is often the case that a naturally high capacity for adapting to Change exists. This is normally due to the nature of broken processes, lack of systems, miscommunication and indecisiveness. This capacity to adapt is not necessarily a good thing as it is used as a coping mechanism, and in most cases used as a way to justify organisational behaviour – “We have always done it this way, why change?” or “Nobody told me that there is a better way or that a process exists so we just did our best” or “That is just the way we work!”.

That said, the converse is also true. Some organisations believe they are running optimally because they have defined their processes and use some form of measurement criteria to try and enforce compliance. Although this is a step further in terms of Process Centric Maturity (process adoption and feedback via metrics) it will still not deliver an organisation that is responsive to Change. The key ingredients that are missing manifest in various forms but I have found the most common organisational aspects that are also required include:

• Leadership – A vision that is communicated to and understood by the organisation
• Governance – Clear roles and responsibilities for people across the organisation
• Applied Standards and Consistency – Not just processes that no one understands or follows but the ability to work in a way that contributes to the organisation and allows for improvement on an ongoing basis
• Personal Respect and Open Communication – Clear messages from Management as to what needs to be done and the ability for employees to challenge/clarify as required. Recognition of their contribution is also vital.

In conclusion, …

I have posted on many occasions on how an iterative approach to BPM development and implementation can deliver incremental business value. This approach is very tightly aligned with that of Change Management in an organisation and the adoption of BPM as a platform for delivering incremental Change.

In my experience, the challenge faced by both IT and Business is the age old one of “if there is no immediate problem to be solved, don’t try and fix something that is not broken”. No matter how tempting it is to introduce Change (for change sake), if the immediate problem and the benefits are not well understood an existing/potential project tends to turn into a cycle of continual recalculation and justification rather than a vehicle for ongoing delivering success that can be built upon in future.

That said, if there is however a clearly defined business problem that needs to be addressed, and it can be quantified in terms of ROI a BPM project or any other initiative both IT and Business are in a much better position to deliver success.

One of the key methods to reduce failure points and accelerate the project is to eliminate abstract and lose requirements through prototyping and workshops. Another critical success factor is to prioritize scope for a production delivery in 90 days.  Iterative development and keeping business teams on board with the development cycle and testing can also yield dramatic improvements in success rate. The non-traditional nature of BPM technologies and the capabilities they offer can sometimes lead to gaps between business expectations and IT delivery.

As we move into an enterprise BPM roll out phase, the most common challenges we see are the following:

(1) Reuse of assets

(2) Reduce cost of ownership

(3) Repeatable standards and methodology

(4) Knowledge management

(5) Skilled resource assurance

(6) Infrastructure optimization – hardware and software.

The biggest accelerator and enabler, during a large scale adoption phase, is a “Business Process Competency Center (BPCC)” or a BPM Center of Excellence, which institutionalizes the key aspects of governance and reuse. Most companies have yet to launch a formal BPCC owing to their being in varying stages of BPM maturity cycle. A BPCC offers a strong platform for ensuring success of enterprise-wide BPM implementations, and it is only a matter of time before a BPCC becomes a crucial component of every company’s BPM adoption strategy.

Web 3.0

Time & again people tried popularizing Web 3.0 as the next ‘big’ trend after Web 2.0. Tim Berners-Lee termed it as ‘Semantic Web’, which stood for a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so computers can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web. Search plays a key role in Web 3.0, but providing context to the search is the key. For example, as Jonathan Strickland explained, being able to get intelligent search results when you need to get contextual information about theater, movie, restaurant, cab, etc. was a time consuming task. You may still face this challenge if you’re using laptop or desktop. But Mobile technologies have changed all of that. I can’t think of a future that uses Semantic Web without a mobile device. So, should we call Web 3.0 as ‘Mobile Web 3.0’ instead? Mobile Publishing is a good example of the ‘Mobile Web 3.0’. (Check out the webinar on Mobile Publishing for more details. Alternately, read my blog article here.)

Content Enabled Vertical Applications (CEVA)

While analysts have talked a lot about CEVA in the past, the vendors have been rather busy with acquisitions & portfolio consolidation. They’re also busy integrating their systems with other infrastructure platforms to ensure better corporate adoption. Although all ECM vendors claim to have industry solutions, many do not have end-to-end CEVA solutions for specific industries challenges. CEVA is not dead though. As the consolidation finishes and as players try to differentiate themselves from others, they’ll start providing more targeted offerings for industries through industry-specific product(s) customization and integration with other enterprise systems such as BPM, BI, ERP, CRM to solve vertical challenges. System integrators on the other hand, having the right industry expertise, already have industry specific CEVA to cater to their customer requirements. Very soon, I think you’d see some of these system integrators having vertical solutions being acquired by product companies to roll out their own CEVA offerings. (Check out Virtusa’s CEVA offerings if you’re interested)

Free Open Source ECM Systems

On my last count at CMSMatrix, there were 1000+ ECM systems, many of which were open source systems (both free as well as commercial). So, how many of these free open source vendors provide entire gamut of ECM capabilities, leave alone their ability to scale and be commercial viability for mid-to-large organizations. Few commercial open source ECM vendors are prospering because of the ability to get more funding to build more robust platforms, but the other free open source vendors are still niche players catering individual pieces of ECM (web content or doc mgmt or portal or email, etc.). Although they’d want to expand to become a complete ECM player, I think it’s very challenging since they already face a stiff competition from incumbent infrastructure vendors. Free Open Source ECM Systems, seen as a big trend lately, are therefore a flop. That said, these free open source vendors may be a good fit for managing specific types of content at a departmental level. What purpose would you buy them for? (Want help evaluating open source ECM systems, check out this interesting blog post)

While some technologies may be too early to market, due to which they had to be revived, quite a few of them were probably simply hype. Do you see more ECM trends in the market that has gone through the ‘Hype, Flop & Revival’ cycle?

On the one hand, social is terrifying to many IT professionals.  It reeks of teenage ADD, wasted time, no defined ROI, inappropriate behavior and disclosure and all things bad on the web.  End users are going out and doing it on their own signing up for services with their credit cards without IT’s knowledge.  At one conference a presenter admonished “give up, you cannot control it”.

On the other hand, social is inexorable and will not be deterred.  Its relentless march continues as Twitter reaches fifty million Tweets per day.  Handset manufacturer exacerbates the problem with the release of their Devour handset built on the Android platform specifically for social media.  Major consumer brands like Pepsi are diverting huge amounts of their marketing budgets from traditional advertising media, like the Super Bowl, to social media.

At face value social would seem to clash with the disciplines of IT in areas like BPM.  The unruly world of social media would not seem to conform to the rigor of enterprise processes.  Upon closer inspection social would benefit greatly from the discipline and offers great opportunities for expanded collaboration and interaction along what would normally be an insular process.

Each step in a process has the opportunity to benefit from engaging an expanded audience.  If one is looking to conduct a financial transaction, one can ease the “buyer’s remorse” by satisfying the urge to consult a wider audience and do a little research.  We’ve all been there.  We walk into the store and eye that new mobile device that has seduced us with that big new screen.  We pick it up, hold it, type on it, fantasize about possessing it…and put it back on the shelf.  We know we want to buy it but we walk through the display area just to look at the other options to convince ourselves that we are making the right choice.  This baby is going to require a minimum 2 year commitment.  Is it that good?  Buyer’s remorse.

Enter social media.  I’m able to read the hashtag about what people have to say about this device.  I can ask questions in a forum and participate in a threaded discussion.  I can read reviews.  I allay my fears.  The remorse is still there but “I’m not alone”.  If I have a problem, there will be others like me and we can bond together to seek solace if not remediation.

What about a surgical procedure and the patient experience?  I wrote a post for ebizq.net (http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/tech_tomorrow/2010/04/forget-the-buzzwords-how-do-we-improve-the-customer-experience.php) and imagined the patient experience of the future (hopefully not too distant).  I tried to avoid any specific references to technology that would cloud my imagination.

Many processes and many industries can re-tool themselves for a better customer experience without technology limitations.  Is IT prepared?  Are the underlying foundation applications agile and lean so they can support a new generation of application?  Can IT embrace, implement and execute platforms fast enough to meet the velocity of the demands of the business?  Does IT need to control everything or should it let the business community do it on their own?  What does it mean to succeed?

BPM is where people, process and technology come together in a new context to orchestrate business execution.   Silos are to be broken down, broader technology integrations are to be implemented and a new set of methodologies and tools are to be deployed to create seamless flow(s) of operations.  I find that when the right context is set and the ‘ah-ha’ moment is reached, BPM adoption accelerates and greater operational efficiencies are achieved.

Bring together a business person, data management technologist, a web specialist and transaction system owner and you will get a minimum of four different perspectives on how to implement a new business process not to mention what BPM is.  Each respective discipline will see BPM through its respective lens.  Would you not agree that a data management person has a context and keen eye towards data efficiency thus a business process must hold to master ‘data principles’ such as normalization?   Might a system transaction owner be reluctant to share business intelligence around the ‘transaction’ in another process and instead demand that any processing be initiated and completed within the transaction system to maintain integrity?

Setting a context for BPM in an organization brings together the various disciplines.  The trick is to enable folks to see the power of BPM through more efficient processing while balancing the demands and policies of the various disciplines.  For example, implementing a business process to update a customer address can incur significant debates in an organization because it can cut across the enterprise.  Illustrating the process with the various technical components and working with each technical discipline to understand the needs, policies and trade-offs begins to set the context for implementing the business objective.  The ‘ah-ha’ moment occurs when folks start focusing on the higher level need of the business objectives and begin to collectively make decisions to create seamless and effective integration of the technical components and business processes.

Getting to the ‘ah-ha’ moment is the magic.  Setting the context makes it happen.   The key is to find the right set of messages and activities to enable an organization to understand and bridge their current context to the ‘new.’

• DWBI Project Planning: Does the bid consider an End to End (E2E) impact on the DWBI platform in the proposed project approach? Have the requirements been peeled into Source System changes, Data Integration changes and Business Intelligence layer changes? Were delivery dates independently planned or dependencies considered for each of them?

• Working with non-DWBI teams to accomplish project goals: If the bid is for a System Re-Platform project that involves core technology layer changes, has a system cutover plan been included with the proposal?

• DWBI Business Continuity and High Availability Mechanism: Has a rollback mechanism or running a parallel system been considered as part of the effort estimates?

• Software Configuration Management Strategy: Has a “code freeze” time been mandated in the proposal to effectively push changes to production systems?

• Streamlining/Governing non-DWBI development efforts: Is there a mechanism to streamline and govern the usage of new data available in the Data Warehouse? Has metadata been published on reporting / adhoc query tools effectively to be used by power users who need to use the data? Do the power users have access to a documented guideline to develop reports or query the newly published data and functionality?

• Data Lineage and Impact Analysis: Will the business glossary terms, their relation to columns in the database and report attributes including derivations, consolidations and aggregations be documented?

• System Performance: Is there a mechanism to point out which line of code, in the newly introduced functionality, attributed to degradation in performance?

• DWBI Skill Requirements: Does the proposed staffing model consist of BI personnel who understand data and Data Integration personnel who understand BI? Is the team led by a DWBI certified Project Manager/Lead?

• Code Quality: Can code quality be measured? Can some of the metrics below be inferred from the metrics the vendor is capturing during the project life cycle?
  1. Right First Time
  2. Defect ratio per change (Quality Index)
  3. Performance metrics of the system
  4. Coding Metrics like Review comments per change, Code Quality, Documents for a change, etc.
• Productivity Gains: How does the vendor plan to measure productivity gains and efficiencies as his team gets familiar with your DWBI environment? Are there any reusable tools, solutions, components that are considered to be built as a part of the bid and who owns the IP rights for them?

I welcome your comments on the relevance of this list as you benchmark them against responses you receive for RFP’s.

Computer Economics have found that based on an annual survey of 200 IT organisations, there has been a marked decrease in ‘in-house’ IT staff ratios for application programmers and system analysts. It has declined from 25% of the IT staff on average in 2007 to 20% in 2009.

The tasks performed by these roles typically focus on those performed during the Software Development Lifecycle and includes activities such as:

• System design
• System analysis
• Software development
• Testing
• Maintenance of application software

In contrast, the analysis found that:

“… the decline in application programmers and system analysts over the three-year period was offset by growth in related functions, especially business analysts and business intelligence personnel.”

In my opinion, this can be attributed to various factors but I would propose that most of the business solutions that organisations have implemented over recent years have focused on reducing cost, increasing efficiency and ensuring better decision making.

On average IT departments spend at least 80% of their budgets on development and maintenance. Reducing this will have a direct impact on the bottom line.

At this point you may well be asking – “So what? What has any of this got to do with Business Process Management?” The answer, it has everything to do with it.

BPM is a catalyst for ‘Change’ as well as a vehicle that can be adopted to drive standardisation, shortened delivery lifecycles, alignment between IT and Business users which in turn leads to a more responsive and effective business. A key component, and I would argue a mandatory prerequisite, is that an organisation should clearly understand how to adopt BPM, as not just as a tactical tool, but rather as a strategic way of delivering continued business improvement.

As with any new initiative, comprehensive preparation ensures a better chance of successful outcomes. Part of that preparation is having the right people with the correct skills. In my experience, BPM projects can fail for myriad of reasons, but the one that is always underestimated is the need for a project team (Business and Technical) that is familiar and experienced with BPM concepts, iterative development methods, extensive technical skills (not just BPM tools) and above all have the ability to quickly adapt to changes in business and technical needs within an organisation.

The type of logistical, financial and management investment required to create and maintain such an ‘in-house’ team and capability is more often than not far too costly for even the largest of organisations. This, however, does not mean that BPM should not be adopted as a viable way to deliver the afore-mentioned organisational benefits. It just means that it may require a bit more focus and creativity when choosing the best operating model that will match the culture, budget and objectives of the organisation.

In future I will be exploring various topics I have raised in this post. In summary, I would suggest that if you are involved in a BPM initiative or are considering embarking on a BPM journey, take some time and consider the following:

• What are the key objectives that need to be achieved as part of the initiative?
• Do the correct skills and resources exist in the organisation?
• What gaps in knowledge, skills, experience, and culture exist that can’t readily be closed by internal teams?
• What criterion has been specified to ensure a successful outcome?

Traditionally organizations used a lot of different tools (home grown or from vendors) to satisfy their ECM needs.  While the solutions were an answer for an immediate problem, this caused several challenges related to integration problems and losing the content intelligence in the process.  In recent days, I’ve personally seen many customers inclined to consolidate the various tools in their entire ECM value chain to reduce complexity and improve decision making capabilities,  by persisting with the content intelligence.

This consolidation is also being compounded by the M&A activity happening among many ECM vendors.  Most of these vendors are going back to the customers and asking / helping them to move to a more homogenized platform to meet their end-to-end ECM needs.  This thought process is resulting in several trends in the market place such as consolidation, convergence with BPM and Analytics tools as well as many customers are taking back a step and reviewing how social media / Enterprise 2.0 needs to be factored into their ECM roadmap.

My prediction is that customers won’t be jumping on platform consolidation just for the sake of it, but will take this opportunity to review their current and future needs and map that to the vendor landscape.  This opens up an opportunity for strategy reviews, tools selections and related development / implementation related work.

I’m interested in your thoughts on this.  Are you seeing a similar trend?  If so, how are organizations embracing consolidation-related challenges?

Look at the average IT project plan and see how much time is spent in testing. Doesn’t it strike anyone as odd that the customer first pays people to put defects into code during development, and then pays a second time for people to take them out during testing?

There have been lots of rants about software quality and it’s not my intention to add another one. Instead, I’d like to engage on a concept that isn’t new, but is finally gaining traction across our industry: Lean.

The time people spend putting defects into code is wasteful. The effort to detect them during testing is also wasted; it creates zero economic value.  And of course the time we spend taking the defects out is money down the drain. Why not just stop this nonsense and do it right the first time? In a nutshell this is what Lean is about – it’s not rocket science, but, somewhat surprisingly, as an industry we still don’t see testing as wasted effort. There is a reset of thinking required.

There are a lot of root causes for why quality remains a myth in IT and it will take a lot more words than this short post can afford to get after them all. Some thoughts I’ll explore in future posts include: how Lean thinking addresses the overall system of people, process and technology in IT to drive improvement in quality; what lessons we can learn from companies in other industries who transformed their competitiveness through Lean; and why now is the right time to increase the value our services by applying Lean concepts to the work we do for our customers.

1)    What is BPM and how are BPM concepts different from ECM/CRM/ERP?

2)    What is the value for Business vs IT teams?

3)    What are the right applications for BPM in a given industry?

4)    What is the business case and have we identified the key metrics/KPIs for improvement?

5)    What is the role of Business vs IT?

6)    Where to start – what are the right steps?

7)    What is the right BPM methodology?

8)    What is the difference between process excellence and automation?

9)    How do we cut the right scope, keeping the business goals intact?

10) Which is the right BPM technology?

A wrong decision or an incorrect step can create hurdles in future stages.  A methodical approach consisting of BPM education, problem evaluation, technology evaluation and rapid prototyping can accelerate the time to market as well as help in ensuring all lose ends are closed. A key element of this exercise would be to work with a partner who has implemented multiple technologies as well as one who provides a balanced view of multiple technologies in an objective manner.

As the global economy recovers we enter an age of unprecedented change.  Technologies such as intelligent mobile devices, high speed internet access, wireless communications, digital content creation and delivery, advanced process management and insightful business intelligence give today’s leading companies a vast array of tools to create new products and services.  Those preparing for the recovery will dominate the landscape.  Those continuing to struggle with yesterday’s recession will remain in the rear-view mirror.

With more assets at its disposal than any time in history, IT is a critical strategic enabler of the road to recovery.  After decades of expansion and contraction it is IT’s responsibility to introduce these new, advanced weapons to the business.  Only through a tight partnership can the entire organization seize the opportunities before it.  Industry leaders know this.  It is steeped in their culture to the point that the blend of technology and business requires no conscious thought or effort.

The Virtusa blog will offer readers our perspective on how companies can evolve to a higher state and blend technologies into their business fabric to become leaders in their industries.  We hope you find our insights valuable and appreciate your readership.