BPM, Cloud and Crowdsouring

In 2011 the world of Business Process Management went , mainstream,  There have been two Gartner events on the subject not to mention show cases by leading  vendors such as Pega Systems, IBM and Oracle to name but a few.   In addition, discussions in BPM forums are all a buzz with the latest trends as the movement  embraces other disparate technology trends to form ever more innovative business solutions.  Some of the most blogged about trends being Mobile and cloud computing.   O’reilly Radar’s computing  Jonathan Reichenthal, PH.D.  writes that “ it's clear that mobile is the new global frontier for computing” .  I believe we are also seeing a clear trend emerging from Cloud and SaaS to BPO and eventual adoption of even more unusual models such as crowd sourcing. 

BPM  and Gartner  analysts agree that the world is now appified , with  the explosion of Smartphones  IPads  we are linked into critical to processes 24 7. I find myself responding to emails from my bed at two in the morning because it’s so easy, convenient and fun.

My wife and I now compete  to find the coolest app that we can casually introduce over diner the current favourite is the bus finder which tracks the actual location of the selected busses en route you can now time the last pint at the bar to coincide with the No 48 rolling up to the stop across the road from the fox and goose

New capability such as geolocation, sensors, near field communications, cameras, voice, and touch can be integrated into functionality, there are now a proliferation and abundance of operating systems in the mobile arena.  “ Five billion people now use cellphones — about 62 percent of the planet's population — compared to less than two billion who have a personal computer. Within just a few years more people will access the Internet from a mobile device than from any other technology.”  O’Reilly Radar

The use case for mobile BPM are diverse  and exciting,  ranging from healthcare  to insurance. Doctors, for example, can now  “…show a patient a close-up of how the circulatory or respiratory systems works…” Blausen Medical's Human Atlas provides full-color, 3-D animations and illustrations about various parts of the human body.  There is also well docs diabetes manager which allows user to download the the app and manage their own care. 

 In insurance “… John Hancock is among one of many insurance annuities providser who now provide sales men with Ipads taking “advantage of the lightweight, full-color device. A Boston-based life and annuities insurer released an app, i-Illustrate, that allows producers to adjust illustrations of their life insurance products in real time while they're presenting options to consumers…”  Insurance technology http://insurancetech.com/business-intelligence/229402882

The issues of the future won’t be one of band width if the mobile providers have their way, the like of Fujitsu are to build a wholesale fibre broadband network in the UK, with the aim of offering next-generation services to five million rural homes.   The company ….will use Cisco's infrastructure kit in its bid to create the UK's second-biggest fibre network. Virgin Media and TalkTalk are already lined up to resell Fujitsu's services to consumers.   David Meyer  6 April, 2011 14:50

Aligned to this extension of business process to the consumer via mobile devices is the mounting of those same processes, in the cloud.  From 2008 – 2010, there was much talk and hesitancy around cloud based (Saas or PaaS based) services,  in 2011 service providers are embracing the technology and providing innovative services .   Frank Gens, chief analyst at global IT research firm IDC, and author of the December 2010 report “Predictions: Welcome to the New Mainstream,” states:  “  In 2011, we expect to see transformative technologies make the critical transition from early adopter status to early mainstream adoption of this next dominant  platform, characterized by mobility, cloud-based application and service delivery, and value-generating overlays of social business and pervasive analytics.”

The 2010 Gartner survey of BPM PaaS and cloud-enabled platform vendors confirmed this trend and revealed that a vendor that offers BPM cloud-enabled platform products is also likely to offer BPM PaaS. In fact, only 8 percent of vendors offered only their BPM platforms as a product while 59 percent of vendors surveyed offered the same capability both as a service and as a platform product.

The insurance industry throughout 2009 – 2011 has been busy, according to “Insurance technology” replacing ageing claims processing systems with modern BPM solutions.  While not a BPM solution “ Intellect SEEC is a pure-play SOA-based cloud offering comprising 10 platforms and more than 70 products. The Polaris proprietary Insurance knowledge shelving and wiring framework (L0) has more than 100 business processes, and more than 1,000 business cases documented in the areas of product management, asset/broker management and customer management, spanning new business, policy administration, claims, billing and accounting, risk management, investment and reinsurance….” http://www.insurance-business-review.com/news/polaris 

This technology ups the ante for BPO organisations and potentially changes the game in the insurance industry as more and more core services are offered on the cloud, allowing insurance vendors, to “stick to the knitting”  of product design and marketing and leaving the administration and processing to, cloud based IT service  providers.    Other organisations such as DST systems who have provided multi tenant BPO solutions to the insurance industry for the past 40 years are now providing SaaS based multi tenant record keeping as a service. 

As the entire value chain of insurance provision moves the cloud, insurers may also want to avail themselves of other low cost services, and Crowd sourcing offers one such option.  Jeff Howe is usually credited with being one of the first journalists to coin the term Crowd sourcing….. as the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call….”
There are now a vast array of websites that offer  a whole range of services from banking to Fashion design and ideas banks to Mutual Funds Management.  For example Grameen Bank provides loans to the poor in rural Bangladesh, solely based on mutual trust, without the need for collateral.   Another Example is ZOPA loans, where individuals give loans to other individuals, as they say on their website, “cutting out the banks” or a fashion design company allows customers to determine which of their designs is to be put on sale or, the “Huduma” project in Kenya which uses crowd sourcing to monitor the effectiveness of services such as health and education provision across the country. 

From these examples it is easy to see that companies will soon begin to embrace this Crowd sourcing  as a way to solve their own problems Eli Lilly, for example, uses Inno Centive a brainpower initiative launched in 2001 to provide a market for people to help develop drugs and speed them to market”  Inno Centive is now made available to a network of subscribers including Boeing, DuPont  and  proctor and Gamble who post their thorny problems on the site to be solved by eager brains with intellect to spare. 

Recollections from Gartner BPM Conference London 2011

I recently attended the Gartner BPM Symposium in London, and from my observations four key themes emerged, in the era of the social network, Social CRM was topical, mobile, analytics or what I prefer to call predictive processing and of course no IT conference would be complete without some discussion of Cloud computing  and indeed the theme "BPM in the Cloud" was discussed.  

Today we will look at Predictive Analaytics, the remaining themes will be looked at in the later instalments.
Daryl Plumber, Gartner analyst, predicted that analytics would take centre stage in the next wave of BPM implementations.  We are already seeing that in CRM applications for complex cross sell and up sell decision trees for customers Chordiant, now Part of Pega systems provides one the industry’s leading CRM decision engine.   Meanwhile my colleagues and I have been defining a  defining architecture that incorporates analytics into the continuous  improvement  cycle.  We found that although many of our customers had invested  both in BPM and Analytics solutions they had not integrated them in a holistic way.  All too frequently raw process data was being fed into analytics engines to be turned into dashboards or worse still static reports. 

Managers are already churning through a deluge of data, in the form of email alerts, reports, dashboards and now tweets and blogs.  What we want to do is make processes self aware such that they change or at least suggest changes based on real time information.  There are endless scenarios and where this could be useful, an insurance company receiving a spike in calls regarding accidents from a certain make of car for example, might want to raise the premium on those models based on the increased risk. They might also want to send a letter to the manufacturer asking them to investigate the pattern  and save managers hundreds of hours by having the process suggest or even implement the changes themselves.  Rather than waiting for human intervention and potential loss of revenue, customers or damage to reputation.

With the increase in the frequency and volume of data humans are no longer able to digest absorb and make decision quickly enough.  More importantly some patterns of behaviour are invisible to the naked eye.  Today’s Analytics sophisticated analytics engines are able to read, absorb and interpret, terabytes of data detect and find patterns.  These patterns can be translated to rules which we can then incorporate into our processes.   We call this predictive analytics and targeted solutions  are coming soon.