This opportunity ends on March 2nd, so don’t get caught posing  

See the link for all the BPM Summits for 2012 http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2011/12/01/book-the-dates-in-your-diary-for-the-upcoming-bpm-summits/

Leveraging Rules Agility for Cost Savings:

The company has embedded business language and decision table rules into their software products for risk-based pricing and automated decisioning for tasks such as assigning interest rates, automating decisions for evaluation loan applications, and providing explanatory messages to loan officers and service reps. This allows the software provider and all the institutions, the capability to change polices and rules on the fly. This saves costs on changes.

Leveraging  Rules to Identify Revenue Opportunities:

One of their innovative uses of rules is for cross selling products based on credit report information for each of the served institutions

• The software application pulls a credit report and parses out payments and balances on existing loans and credit cards, and stores this information in collections within a .NET object (not the only technology option, but a good one).

• Rules run on each member in the collection of loans to evaluate savings when compared against the institution products

• Rule results are displayed graphically for business users, showing information including the type of instrument (e.g., Platinum Visa), monthly savings, payment amounts, and the priority of the cross-selling opportunity.

Net; Net:

Organizations are going to be pushed hard to not only show cost savings, but revenue opportunities going forward. Leveraging key technologies can allow of innovative solutions. This is just one example.

The above success story has been summarized and made anonymous to get the essence of the success documented quickly. The source of this success story is a technology provider named InRule Technology.

The Situation:

Imagine an influx of complex work that requires specific advanced skills at specific times. I am ware of several implementations where organizations are faced with the daunting task of keeping the skills up to date in real time while dynamically allocating work based on incoming streams, incoming events, timing based SLAs, and temporary chokepoints.

The Answer:

Several organizations, that I am aware of,  have BPM technology that evaluates the complexity of the work (case) and assigns work to the best person with the skills necessary to complete the case or a portion of the case. When the best resource is not available, the next best resource is selected (maybe just completed training with no experience). When the work is accomplished and the case is judged to be a high quality state, the resource skills inventory is annotated to now include the latest experience for that resource. If a case gets hung up it also goes through the same triage process.

Net; Net:

This is a great use of BPM that leverages data driven allocation and near real time updating. While this is not intelligent business operations, per see, it’s on the road to applying more experience(represented by dynamic data) to work allocation and intelligence.

The above success story has been summarized and made anonymous to get the essence of the success documented quickly. The source of this success story is from two technology providers (Appian and Kofax/Singularity). Each have customers leveraging this approach.

Health Workbench Approach:

This organization leveraged the strength of their iBPMS to create a health portal which became each individuals window on their own health. This organization created a custom health communication platform (workbench like with multiple customized tools) for each client/person managing their own health. This workbench included, but was not exclusive to providing a dashboard of recommended activities and actions. In addition rewarded activities were highlighted and encouraged. In some cases these activities were considered advisory and optional, but in other situations the actions were considered mandatory. Either way, individuals were provided custom content and participation groups to explain and encourage each action.

Complexities:

This approach requires a significant amount of configuration/rule changes in a narrow  time to change window as more clients and participants are added. In addition, current clients can be tracked  in real time and with instant preference changes. All of this has to happen on diverse technology platforms with diverse media types.

Results so Far:

The amount of change supported has increased five fold, new product types have been invented, and the cost of change has been reduced by 50% overall because less time is needed for each change.  All of this was accomplished without dedicated time windows for change because of visual validation and the speed of change inherent in the iBPMS.

Net; Net:

The result is a continuum of health customized by client and individual resulting in a better health experience. This is a truly adaptive and  mass customized platform that can be leveraged for increased life quality and longevity.

The above success story has been summarized and made anonymous to get the essence of the success documented quickly. The source of this success story is a technology provider named Pegasystems.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdq7q9cVJg&list=UUSNX50LYGXWV_e5UWZGPGbw&index=1&feature=plcp

The Business Problem:

This organization used a network of distributed businesses to reinsure risk. The company had the challenge to determine if it could broker risk with the most solid of partners. Quite often this need to happen quickly. It was all done backroom and not in a visible fashion. So each deal was costly and sometimes not timely enough. The requirements were demanding. The customer and broker could override any deals based on extensive qualitative and performance information about carriers in context. Automation was desirable, but the broker still stays in control despite any number of communications and conclusions. This meant that context had to be captured to insure auditability.

The BPM Solution:

Deliver “Knowledge in Context” while continuously updating a dashboard with drill down detail on client carrier selection decision, margin information, priorities, reason for selection. At any time comprehensive analytics on broker performance, carrier performance, customers, deals, client priorities had to be available. Additionally, this brokering capability needed to be on a global (Multilingual) platform, with opportunity for local behavior through rules, “skins” etc.

Net; Net:

The network of executives was pleased with the visibility this automation provided and the “back room” culture has been changed forever. Going forward this is a good base for a variety of analytics going forward. This could easily grow into an intelligence business operations solution when real time events will trigger automatic analytics, intelligence and actions.

The above success story has been summarized and made anonymous to get the essence of the success documented quickly. The source of this success story is a technology provider named Kofax/Singularity.

Managing the Surgical Theaters:

The first step in this intelligent operation revolves around looking forward to the scheduled surgical procedures for the coming day. The first step is to use simulation to schedule the surgical theaters and to make sure the right resources are in the surgical theaters at the precise moment they are needed. Patients and doctors are the primary scheduling components, but there are specialty nurses, attendants and workers that need to be scheduled in sequence. Surgical theaters need to be prepared for each medical procedure and different procedures require different equipment and different sub-procedures. Early every day a simulation is run with resulting charts to show the optimal sequence and overlaps in a time line fashion.

Managing the People Involved:

Each patient, doctor and worker has there individual time line with each staging area and surgical theater shown as a “going in” plan for every individual possible. If everything goes to plan the resulting simulation is the guide for optimal resource utilization with minimal impact on the patient while being cognizant of leveraging the rarest skills the best way for any given day.

Managing the Dynamic Surgical Procedures:

What make this IBO better than those I have seen in the past in the surgical management process is the ability to tag every person with a tracking device to watch the actual movement and completion points (milestones) with visible tracking on top of the original plan. So the state of the patient, doctors, nurses and support staff is know in “real time”. If something happens that takes the plan in an unexpected direction (longer procedure; patient reaction, worker delays and equipment issues), the plan can be re-simulated based on the complications/deviations and project a new plan in “near real time”. 

Net; Net:

This results in a safer and better experience for the patient in tandem with dynamic resource scheduling. Going forward each piece of equipment and it’s state will be known to predict potential unexpected/undesired states. For instance each scalpel will be tracked and it’s state of sterilization and factored into the original plan as well as the “real time” adjustments.

The above success story has been summarized and made anonymous to get the essence of the success documented quickly. The source of this success story is a technology provider named Bosch/Inubit. 

The iBPMS: Really?

With the emergence of social, mobile, presence and the cloud more people intelligence can be mustered to decisions, policies/rules, goals and radical process improvements instead of just polishing the stones (necessary, but not sufficient).  In addition, machine intelligence can be embedded and/or surround processes to assist the humans in a near real time fashion. While both of these trends will be strong for 2012 and beyond, the addition of context sensitivity/pattern recognition will be enhanced to detect expected and unexpected conditions in and around the processes. This will allow businesses to be intelligently reactive and proactive in certain situations.  The iBPMS contains strong aspects of all three, so this will become reality for some in 2012 and many in the up coming future. If you want to read Gartner’s view of the iBPMS see the following blogs and the research note entitled “Selection Criteria Details for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites”, published November 17th, 2011 as G00219274.

Additional reading:

http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=256&mode=2&PageID=2350940&resId=1852115&ref=QuickSearch&sthkw=sinur

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2011/08/08/next-gen-bpm-making-your-processes-smarter/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2011/08/23/next-gen-bpm-eye-candy-for-all/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2011/08/15/next-gen-bpm-encouraging-your-processes-to-listen/

Net; Net:

The iBPMS is not for every organization, at the moment, but sooner of later organizations will be pushed to add intelligence to their processes, even if it is adding real time BI. For organizations that are not interested in adding intelligence into their processes, the traditional markets of BPMS, workflow and integration can help organizations to save money and make progress.  Over time the business pressure will drive organizations to the iBPMS.

1. Recovery from some real nasty health issues and back to full steam

2. Sherry and I are at the 13 year mark of our marriage

3. The kids are all gainfully employed and the grandchildren are doing well

4. Andrew took a couple of new contracts as an Art Director in the LA area (animation for games under NDA)

5. Despite a six month forced time off; the art work continues

6. Leading a small group in our home (church related)

7. Won an art accolade and put up my new web site. http://www.james-sinur.com/career/

Paintings:

Digital Art

Find Process Flows in Legacy:

BCBS is using ABPD to discover behaviors and/or implied flows inside the legacy claims application. This helps spec out the new replacement applications/processes and look for better rule settings. If tweaks in the legacy application are found they can be used to save labor that can be applied to running parallel applications for a period of time.

Emulating and Extending Process Flows in the New Applications:

The ABPD technology can run the processes in the new applications quickly while the rest of the applications team can construct deep logic that is necessary to support the business and link to and via the processes. Some of these processes end up as temporary bridges and others will become permanent because of the processes optimization capabilities contained in ABPD technology.

Net; Net:

This is a pretty creative use of ABPD and different than I have seen before. Usually I see ABPD used for incremental improvement and better resource utilization for process/application operations. This is a smart replacement approach that leverages ABPD in the old and new worlds. Much better than “rip and replace” in my mind and saved BCBS adding FTEs to complete the conversion/extension.

The above success story has been summarized to get the essence of the success documented quickly. The source of this success story is a technology provider named Open Connect.