Create a Process Driven Enterprise

Six Questions about ECM You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask

You’ve probably heard a lot about how ECM software can improve your productivity and your bottom line. Maybe you are considering an investment in an ECM system. Or perhaps, like many early adopters of the technology, you are contemplating replacing an older system with software that is less rigid and more agile. Whatever your situation, there are some basic concepts with respect to the technology that can help enrich your understanding of the possibilities that implementation has to offer—whether or not you are new to ECM:

1. What is ECM and how does it differ from EDM?

It is understandable that there is confusion surrounding these acronyms. After all, many of us vendors are guilty of using the terms interchangeably. To be fair, both terms originated from similar needs. EDM, or electronic document management, was a term used when electronic imaging, management, and storage technology first came about. The purpose of an EDM system was to eliminate paper and make information available electronically.

EDM technology eventually evolved into enterprise content management (ECM) software. ECM still entails going paperless, but its goals are far more expansive than those of EDM. ECM lets organizations manage different types of content—not just scanned images. In addition, ECM is a launching pad to overall enterprise efficiency and connectivity, enabling workflow, automation, electronic forms (eForms), records management, and other advanced capabilities that deliver significant ROI.

Although the technology had advanced dramatically, the mindset, unfortunately, has not. Far too many organizations use their ECM systems solely for electronic storage and retrieval. In these cases, the system has become little more than an electronic filing cabinet, managing information statically rather than dynamically. Signs that a company has not evolved its mindset beyond paper processing include:

• Scanning and saving business documents after they have been processed manually
• Routing documents via email for processing after they have been scanned
• Printing out paper copies of electronic documents as part of standardized business processes
• Off-site box storage of the paper records

What is the difference between EDM and ECM? It seems like a simple question, but the answer can be complicated. The important thing to remember is that if you are using your ECM system solely for electronic storage and retrieval, expansion offers the potential for dramatically improved returns on your investment. Using an ECM system for simple electronic storage and retrieval is akin to using a smartphone just to make calls. It is important to know your system’s capabilities so that you can make the most of the technology.

 2. How can I get better performance from my ECM system?

If your ECM system is not performing up to your expectations, it is likely that your organization falls into one of the following scenarios:

1. You have not approached your ECM implementation from a business performance perspective. In this case, it is possible that in spite of advances in ECM technology, your organization hasn’t let go of a paper processing mindset. It is easy to fall into this trap. Processing information the same way that your organization has always processed information—in spite of advances in technology—means that you don’t have to go through the sometimes difficult exercises of change management, process analysis, and organizational assessment. Coming up with more efficient ways to process your information takes some work. Is it any wonder that so many organizations opt to continue outdated, inefficient practices?
2. You are using a legacy system that lacks the agility to be configured quickly and easily. This scenario is not uncommon for some of the early adopters of ECM—particularly those in the insurance, government, and healthcare industries. At the time that they were introduced to the business world, legacy systems solved a myriad of problems associated with document management. Unfortunately, for all of their robustness, they are typically very rigid. And because they are difficult to program quickly and easily, not only are they unresponsive to today’s immediate business demands; they usually have an extremely high TCO. You may be surprised to learn that a high-performance ECM solution can offer improved functionality and be more cost-effective than your current legacy solution.
3. You have processing bottlenecks, and your implementation hasn’t led to reduced costs. These are issues that could definitely benefit from a thorough process analysis. Check out the troubleshooting guide, When Workflow Doesn’t Work, to learn more.

 3. What is the difference between an ECM system and an ERP system?

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, also known as point solutions, focus primarily on structured data. ECM, on the other hand, manages both structured and unstructured content, data, and documents — even those that accumulate outside of processes that are strictly transactional.

ERP systems tend to be used to address specific areas of a business — accounts payables, accounts receivables, inventory management, HR, etc.— and they do it well. Oftentimes, these systems offer lightweight imaging and document management functionality. However, these systems do not necessarily lend themselves to the true enterprise connectivity afforded by ECM. ECM not only extends the functionality of ERP implementations; it connects your diverse departments, enabling security, access, and scalability for each of those different areas.

If your enterprise relies on the functionality of an ERP system, imagine what you could accomplish by integrating it with ECM software. You could implement electronic forms throughout your enterprise, which would provide the opportunity for self-service of your stakeholders and enable you to dramatically reduce incoming paper. At the same time, eForms would allow you to digitize incoming information immediately upon receipt. Technologies like workflow and BPM would enable you to automate the flow of information across your enterprise for significantly expedited turnaround and error reduction. Integrating ECM with ERP and other core business solutions helps you to extend the life of your existing systems, providing them with enhanced functionality.

 4. How does ECM help with compliance?

No matter what industry you are in, compliance requirements are made up of three major components: privacy, security and accountability. You need to be certain that your stakeholder information is protected and secure. At the same time, you need to be sure that you are managing your records in such a way that they can be produced on request. (Or upon demand, as the case may be.) Your ECM system can help you maintain compliance in the following ways:

• Security. ECM offers unparalleled security of your protected information, allowing you decide who can access, view, sign, act upon, annotate, or distribute documents. An ECM system that supports redaction can guarantee that your customers’ personal information is not accessible to processing staff. ECM’s authentication and authorization measures further secure your confidential information, ensuring that identities are protected and that data is viewed only by individuals who need to see it for processing purposes.
• Audit trails. ECM enables digital audit trails of all business activity, offering verifiable evidence that shows who has accessed your documents (and when). If your company is audited for any reason, ECM provides you with the tools to demonstrate that you have taken every effort to enact privacy measures and secure your information. Inspections and auditing become significantly easier with digital records.
• Produce documents upon request. As you know, audits, assessments, subpoenas, eDiscovery requests, and right-to-know laws mandate strict financial penalties for organizations that are unable to provide records when they are requested. ECM solutions offer indexing capabilities to enable you to produce information on demand. Systems that offer enterprise search enable you to query your repository for text matches in non-text file formats such as PDF, TIFF, HTML, and JPEG. Enterprise search combines keyword and full-text searching, helping you to locate structured and unstructured data contained in files and other documents.
• Records Management. A high-performance ECM system allows you to automate the retention and disposition of your records. This ensures that records are not kept beyond the time period that is mandated by law. It also prevents records from being destroyed prematurely. A superior ECM system will also enable legal holds: records can be set aside for the litigation process and kept unaltered until the legal hold is released, but files are still available for staff to access and use. Seamless records management also enables companies to create retention plans for each document type, ensuring standardization and removing the human factor from the records management equation.

5. What is the ROI for an ECM system?

This is a question with variable answers, which are dependent on your specific needs. Are you considering a traditional on-premise ECM installation? Or would the monthly operating fee associated with a cloud based subscription solution work better for your budget? When determining ROI, it is is important to have a keen awareness of how the system would enhance your business goals as well as your work environment. Typically, the better you understand your business processes today, the better your potential to lower your TCO tomorrow. Consider that ECM offers the potential for significant returns in the following areas:

• Reduced costs associated with storage: Obviously, ECM software will help you reduce costs related to physical storage. But why stop there?
• Improved productivity: Implementing advanced ECM technologies such as workflow, BPM, eForms, and process automation will help you expedite turnaround without increasing your workforce. The technology also helps you reduce errors and better serve your stakeholders.
• Risk mitigation: ECM allows you to reduce discovery costs and risks associated with litigation in a way that is proactive rather than reactive. Audit trails, compliance with e-discovery requests, and records management capabilities enhance compliance initiatives no matter what your industry.
• Disaster recovery / business continuity: The idea of your business being affected by a natural disaster used to seem farfetched, unless you were located in a hurricane zone or an area that was prone to earthquakes. Realistically, with wildfires, floods, and severe weather becoming more prevalent, savvy organizations need to enact a contingency plan to ensure that operations are up and running regardless of environmental conditions. ECM is a crucial component of your disaster recovery plan. Furthermore, if your business is located in an area that is prone to disasters, a cloud-based SaaS ECM implementation may be the smartest way to protect your assets.

An investment in ECM has the potential to pay for itself in very little time. That said, it can be difficult to make broad-scale predictions with respect to how quickly ROI will be realized. One of the best ways to quantify an investment in ECM is with an organizational assessment. This will help you gain a more thorough understanding of what type of system would help you best reach your goals. At the same time, it would ensure that you are not overpaying for ECM modules that you don’t need.

6. What is involved with migrating information from an older ECM to a newer solution?

Are you paying a lot of overhead and a lot of money to service a system that takes too long to modify and is difficult to use? If you were an early adopter of ECM technology, you might be surprised by the degree of agility and affordability that the newer systems offer. And fortunately, if you are considering an upgrade, you have some options with respect to accommodating your existing ECM system:

• If you are replacing your current ECM system, you can migrate all of your necessary documents, files, and associated metadata from the original system to the new system.
• If you are retiring an ECM system but would like to leave your documents in their current storage location, your new system can import just the desired metadata and the pointers to all associated documents that are still housed in the previous locations.
• If you are continuing to use your current content management system along with your new solution, you may be able to leverage a repository plug-in. This allows you to import the document’s data into the new system but leave the document itself in the other ECM.  When you request to view the document, the new system will use the repository plugin to find the document in the other system and display it in the new system’s viewer as if it was in new system.  For example, if one of your departments is using SharePoint and the rest of your enterprise is using an ECM system, you don’t need to duplicate the actual document in two repositories; and yet, users can access the document from either system.

The big picture:

It is natural to have questions about how to best access, control, and use the information that drives your business forward. If you’d like to learn more about ECM software and how it can enrich your business, we’re here to help. Whether you are new to ECM or are contemplating replacing a system that is underperforming, you can most certainly benefit from consulting services from an experienced vendor with the technical and business expertise to address your needs. Discover how an organizational assessment, workflow analysis, and change management consulting can help take your productivity to the next level. It is never too late to learn how to get the most from your ECM system implementation.

SOURCE: docfinity

Social, to Knowledge Management's Rescue?

Knowledge management — as most people think of it — never existed. So anyone proclaiming its "death" can't be right. How can something that never existed die?

Let me explain.

Knowledge Management Meets Enterprise 2.0

Last week I read an interesting article by Nick Inglis (@nickinglis), “Knowledge Management rises from the dead.” In it, Inglis suggests the resurrection of KM is due to Enterprise Social Networks (ESN), which got me thinking. In spite of what I said above, I do believe knowledge management is alive and kicking in various forms and doing very well in specialist niches across a number of industries. I use Claire McInerney's definition for KM: “KM is an effort to increase useful knowledge within an organization. Ways to do this include encouraging communication, offering opportunities to learn, and promoting the sharing of knowledge objects or artifacts.”

The post argues that many KM initiatives fizzled out in the late 90s or early 2000s because the technology tools could not facilitate the capabilities required for a broader uptake. My take — what many people consider to be KM is actually Information Management, and that in the late 90s and early 2000s, many organizations were doing good things on the unstructured information management front. That time saw the introduction of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) strategies, many ECM suites and platforms, a focus on metadata and taxonomies and web based collaboration tools. And then came Enterprise 2.0.

MIT's Andrew McAfee coined the phraseEnterprise 2.0 in early 2006 to describe the use of new web 2.0 tools and techniques to internal enterprise systems. This concept worked for me because McAfee provided us with the SLATES model for assessing systems and their use. Move forward one year and a lot was going on in the E2.0 world:

• Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) expanded on the original E2.0 model with his expanded FLATNESSES model
• David Gurteen (@davidgurteen) coined the term KM 2.0, suggesting that E2.0 “social” technologies would push us into a new way of looking at KM
• Microsoft release SharePoint 2007, a huge improvement over the 2003 version and introducing basic social tools like blogs and wikis to many enterprises (and with add ons such as NewsGator, even more functionality).

So eight years ago we had a major KM luminary like David Gurteen suggesting E2.0 / social would push us into a new way of thinking about KM. In the eight years since, not only has SharePoint moved on by two major versions (both of which have been somewhat deficient in social collaboration functionality), but the market has proliferated with tools and platforms like IBM Connections, Jive, SalesForce Chatter, TIBCO Tibr, Yammer, ThoughtFarmer, ThreadKM and many, many more, reaching new levels of maturity, and being joined by start ups on a regular basis.

Nothing That a Teaspoon of Social Wouldn't Help

Back to the article. Inglis states that knowledge serendipitously captured in a social collaboration platform is in essence "feral knowledge" (as opposed to well classified knowledge). This concept doesn't work for me. Writing something down in a platform doesn't constitute “knowledge capture.” I believe knowledge is mostly tacit and in our heads. Efforts to capture and share knowledge generally turn it back into information, which brings us back into information sharing and information lifecycle management. 

Inglis goes on to write:

“One major problem that ESNs have is not the capture of knowledge, but the transfer of knowledge from the individual to the collective. Yes, ESNs are searchable, but they often live in a disconnected space, separate from primary systems for managing information. To move from Capturing Knowledge to Transferring Knowledge throughout an organization, ESNs need to continue their march from fringe outlier systems to connected enterprise systems.”

On this we agree. Social collaboration functionality does need to be embedded in business processes and into the major business applications that facilitate them. And enterprise search platforms can provide an enhanced capability for linking information content residing in various silos.

Let’s take a look at Hinchcliffe's FLATNESSES E2.0 model with a KM viewpoint, to see how social is continuing to change our view of KM. 

• Freeform: “Old style” KM platforms were criticized for making users jump through hoops to enter additional content. The freeform nature of social tools helps with usability and user experience while enabling information capture
• Links: Link to content and perhaps more importantly to people, through rich profiles or content they published, their comments, likes, etc. Finding the right people (expert finding) has always been a key KM concept
• Authorship: The egalitarian approach to content creation. Although I don’t necessarily agree that “capturing” your every working moment in a blog constitutes knowledge capture and transfer, it certainly can build up the searchable corpus of useful information
• Tagging: Potentially one of the most useful elements of E2.0, the use of simple and situationally appropriate metadata without recourse to overly broad or complex taxonomies is highly important to KM
• Network Oriented: Small pieces of information, that are re-usable, but are also easily discoverable an addressable across the network, that can be surfaced in a news feed
• Extensions: “Other customers who purchased this book, also purchased these ones” — extending the references to an individuals previous transactions or operations. In a KM context this can be useful for gauging both provenance and authority of a source and assisting in navigation towards other useful information
• Search: A crucial element from a KM perspective, the search capabilities of a social platform, or its abilities to open up and be indexed by an enterprise search platform actually under pin many other functionalities. There is no point in capturing all this stuff if search cannot surface it for re-use
• Social: The truly transparent exchange of information either within groups, or across the enterprise as a whole — this can only benefit a broad KM strategy
• Emergence: “The sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” In other words, patterns and structures which have a meaning at a higher level of abstraction than at the lowest levels of detail. In a KM context, harvesting valuable insight from those high level perspectives may illustrate patterns or trends that constitute knowledge objects themselves
• Signals: RSS, email alerts, news feeds and other elements which can send signals to users that something of interest is taking part makes for highly contextual KM

So can enterprise social collaboration platforms help push KM? It depends on your definition of KM, and what models and concepts within the broad academic area of knowledge management and related studies you subscribe to. I believe “social” has a very important part to play in information capture and information sharing. Social collaboration platforms democratize content creation and information sharing, in smaller “bite size” chunks, which may in some situations constitute McInerney’s “knowledge objects.” I also firmly believe that you cannot enact a knowledge management enabled strategy without good information management, and that social collaboration platforms or social intranets have a role to play.

Has social resurrected KM from the dead? Not really! KM was, in the words of Miracle Max from the Princess Bride, only “mostly dead” — but it can certainly be invigorated by a dose or two of social.

 Title image by  James Loesch 

SOURCE: CMSWiRE

THE POTENTIAL OF DIGITAL DISRUPTION

Digital disruption across many industries

Digital disruption is the change that occurs when new digital technologies and business models affect the value proposition of existing goods and services.

The rapid increase in the use of of mobile devices for personal use and work has increased the potential for digital disruption across many industries. A powerful example is the way Amazon, Netflix, HBO, Spotify and Tidal have disrupted the media and entertainment industries by changing how content is accessed by customers.

Don’t underestimate the potential of digital disruption

In the strange new world of better and cheaper innovation, every industry could experience similar transformations. Yet many companies, underestimate the potential of digital disruption. In doing so, they systematically undervalue their own intangible assets.

Digital disruption can be seen as both a threat and an opportunity.

Infographic: Don’t underestimate the potential of digital disruption

Digital disruption requires rethinking the entire business – it requires first thinking and then behaving like a digital disruptor.

SOURCE: Torben Rick

business model innovation

The digital age has become an impetus for business model innovation, as technology has dramatically changed how companies operate and deliver services to customers. This digital disruption has shortened business model lifecycles and made innovation key to financial success. The global marketplace has further driven the need for business model innovations, as companies must react to stiffer international competition and the increased potential for systemic risk. These factors are forcing companies to turn to business model innovation to stay competitive and foster growth in the competitive global marketplace.

One example of successful business model innovation is changes made by Apple beginning in the early 2000s. Apple's introduction of products and services such as the iPod, iPhone and iTunes expanded the company's offerings beyond the desktop computer market. For example, the iPod and iTunes created ways to profit from downloadable music, while theiPhone was a breakthrough in the smartphone market. Netflix is another example of this type of business innovation: After upending the traditional video rental market, in recent years the company has leveraged new digital technology to gain a competitive advantage in the streaming media business.

Successful business model innovation in the digital age requires an alignment of IT and business objectives, with the ultimate goal being to improve processes throughout the organization. As a result, CIOs other top IT executives play a big role in identifying ways to use new and existing technology to maximize business model innovation success.

SOURCE: SearchCIO

What Is the Future for Processes?

To understand the future of processes, you must dig a little deeper than many people do.

Process thinking goes back well over a century, to the origin of modern iron and automobile production.  The raw materials and finished goods of such manufacturing and production processes are literally spatial — 3-dimensional.  What can you do to significantly improve productivity in a 3-dimensional world?  The answer these days is simple:  You build robots.  Robotization has literally changed the world during the past 30–40 years.

Rather than manufacturing and production processes, however, the world is now increasingly focused on white-collar and digital processes.  What 3-dimensional presence do the raw materials and finished goods of these processes have?

Well, exactly none.  The raw materials and finished goods of these processes aren't physical and simply have no spatial presence whatsoever (except maybe for paper artifacts).  Robots (at least physical ones) aren't an option.  That fact of life makes a huge difference in how you have to think about automation for such processes.

Instead, the raw materials and finished goods of such processes are all about your operational business knowledge — your intellectual capital — and your capacity to express and apply it.  That capability, in turn, depends directly on your business terminology and business language.  For white-collar processes you have no choice — the world is semantic.  So you must deal with the subject matter semantically.

That takes us in a very different direction than most professionals currently foresee.  For one thing it takes us toward natural language and away from diagrams.  That's a huge shift in mindset.  Imagine having a business conversation with your smart phone about gaps and ambiguities in business policies and in the meanings of the vocabulary you use to talk about subject matter knowledge.  Don't think that's possible?  Have you watched your kids talking to their smart phones lately?

Sooner or later businesses will realize that operational business knowledge differentiates their product/services and enables their ever-more-automated processes to function.  Capturing, managing, and re-using that intellectual capital puts a premium on structured business vocabulary (concept models^[1]) and on business rules expressed in structured natural language.^[2]  Those business rules are the only way you have to ensure quality from white-collar and digital processes.

What about Case Management?

Many 'processes' people are looking to implement these days are clearly best viewed as case-oriented — e.g., patient care, mortgage applications, etc.  Individual cases must be orchestrated through various states, often with undesirable or wayward transitions.  There is significant variation in the paths that various cases take.  Things just don't always move along as predictably as on a production line.

For such problems you'll want a more case-oriented style of modeling.  (For business practitioners that technique may or may not prove to be CMMN.^[3])  You might not use traditional process modeling at all.  Whatever your approach you'll definitely want to be very clear about what milestones are relevant, and which business rules apply for each.  That puts a premium on business rules.

What about Cognitive Computing?

People are also starting to ask why current processes are so dumb.  For example, why can't they:

• learn from experience? 
• be more goal-driven?
• dynamically balance between conflicting goals? 
• self-adapt? 

Some people suggest use of cognitive computing to help make processes smarter.  I doubt anybody today really knows how far this idea can be taken.  I can, however, say two things with certainty:

• If you don't know what your business rules are (i.e., what rules guided previous executions), can you really expect a machine to figure them out?  A machine can undoubtedly identify patterns, but that's a far cry from demonstrating compliance, guaranteeing consistent results, or customizing appropriately case-by-case.
  
• Suppose self-adapting processes do become reality.  The question I have is what will keep such processes from going out of bounds?  How do you avoid them doing things that are undesirable, self-defeating, or even illegal?  These are critical questions that will always bring you right back to business rules.

For further information, please visit BRSolutions.com      

References

[1]  Refer to "What Is a Concept Model?" by Ronald G. Ross,  Business Rules Journal, Vol. 15, No. 10 (Oct. 2014), URL:  http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2014/b779.html  

[2]  E.g., in RuleSpeak®.  Refer to http://www.rulespeak.com/en/  

[3]  Case Management Model and Notation  

SOURCE: BRCommunity

As Forces Collide, IT Disruption (and Content) Will Soar

Forces are colliding to make 2016 an interesting year for those trying to manage information with technology that touches end users. The traditional IT role, as we know it, is undergoing disruption. As I survey the macro trends impacting Enterprise ContentManagement (ECM) and cloud, I am ready to bet that radical change will be the IT norm next year and in the foreseeable future. Based on my years in enterprise IT and my on-going customer interactions, I thought I’d share my own thoughts about the coming year ahead and the sea of change that will be fast upon us, at least the way I see it.

My first prediction?

Power to the People

We are experiencing a major shift in who has control over application choice, and that control will readily land with end users, placing the heaviest pressure yet on internal IT departments. We are seeing a rapid wave of change that won’t stop anytime soon, arming end users with even more choices in tools they can procure—and procure them they will.

With the advent of IoT and exponential growth of practically everything internet-related, end users are becoming more and more empowered. They curate their own content, self-publish in multiple content formats including unstructured data (e.g. images and videos), and consume from their device of choice (or multiple devices simultaneously).

Shadow IT already has savvy end users self-selecting the IT tools and apps they want, even in the workplace. Further abandonment of sanctioned in-house tools will leave IT seriously rethinking how to change their ways and live up to the new user expectations.

In the ECM space, success will be measured by how many end users are productive and empowered, not by “go-live” milestones. The need for content management will continue to soar, just like content volume itself and the number of individuals creating it.

Software in Slivers

This leads to my second prediction – a shift in how software is designed, both to speed up functionality to these empowered end users, and to provide more technical flexibility. Business requirements from technology will continue to ebb and tide as companies keep up with the rapidly changing dynamics and stay one step ahead. Agility and flexibility will be pushed ahead of other requirements.

These business demands will force IT to rethink their standards on application development and how they leverage software to deliver specific solutions for groups of users. A “Lego” approach will become that standard, allowing for even more rapid development on top of existing software development frameworks currently in place. The list of approaches is also growing — agile, waterfall, iterative, scrum, etc.. Slivers of software functionality, widget-like, coupled with discrete services will be snapped together to deliver specific solutions for groups of users.

These purpose-built blocks in the ECM world will deliver individual capabilities, such as “capture” or “esignatures”. Snapped together, these blocks will quickly deliver a full, rich solution like claims processing, for example. Less and less will vendors design monolithic code sets packed with comprehensive functionality, but instead offer a plethora of blocks that IT organizations can pick and choose from, resulting in a well-tailored solution.

The open source movement originally ushered in the building block model for software development. Moving forward, more of the industry will turn to the speed and nimbleness that these use case-driven development models can offer. It won’t be overnight – there is too much investment in existing IT infrastructure. But just as the IT role will look vastly different in the future, so too will the software IT needs to service end users.

Hybrid Cloud Front and Center

What will happen quickly and take off is the shift to cloud, and more specifically, hybrid cloud in the ECM space. That’s my third and last prediction (at least for this blog!).

IDC already predicts that half of IT spend will go to cloud infrastructure and cloud-based solutions in just a few years. The appeal of hybrid will fill the mix and match approach many businesses need. For example, highly regulated industries may place certain functionality in a private cloud on premise, while other functionalities sourced from a public cloud, and still, other functionalities may continue to reside in traditional on premise environments.

In my experience, every customer has a unique situation, set of users, and specific use case. There is no right or wrong cloud answer — they need cloud options to suit their IT requirements placed on them by quick changing business demands. Hybrid cloud will deliver the flexibility to create environments that fit and meet their needs. Companies will master their cloud formulas and hybrid cloud will become front and center.

It’s obvious the IT world has started to change dramatically. More upheaval is still yet to come, but those who foresee the shift will move quickly to develop new skills and innovate, to deliver to new demands.

SOURCE: EMC SPARK

Overcoming Legacy Processes to Achieve Big Data Success

For large companies with legacy infrastructure, changing to a Big Data focus isn’t easy — but AMEX proves it’s possible.

For large companies saddled with complex legacy environments that were developed over many decades, finding the opportunity for disruption can
be a daunting challenge.

Unlike new economy firms, which have had the benefit of being able to
build their businesses and infrastructure from scratch in a “green-field” environment, most large corporations are saddled with disparate and
fragmented operational and analytical environments and processes,
characterized by business and data silos that limit the ability to operate
with agility, flexibility, and insight across customers and lines of business.

While institutional reputation, customer reach, and operational scale
provide many advantages to large corporations, these larger firms cansometimes be challenged when it comes to innovation and
responsiveness. Yet it’s still these large corporations that continue to be
the bulwark of the economy, accounting for the bulk of business and
consumer transactional activity. Now, Big Data approaches that were
developed by the new economy firms, which enabled the flexibility and
rapid growth of these firms, are being adopted by mainstream
corporations to overcome legacy challenges and introduce greater
corporate agility and speed.

A 2014 survey conducted by NewVantage Partners of 125 senior
corporate executives, representing 59 Fortune 1000 companies, showed
that more than two-thirds of executives reported that their organization
had a Big Data initiative in production. These same executives reported
that investments in Big Data are projected to grow dramatically in the
coming years — with 75% of executives reporting investments greater
than $10 million, and 28% reporting investments exceeding $50 million
by 2017.

For these corporate giants, operational process optimization can have
a huge business impact.

One such firm that’s benefiting from new Big Data approaches is
the financial services giant American Express (AMEX), which is
harnessing the power of its data to innovate and to streamline complex
operational processes. AMEX has opened its own new technology hub
in Palo Alto, led by former Google and PayPal executive Nik Sathe.
The new tech center “will focus on innovations in Big Data, cloud
computing, and mobile infrastructure,” according to AMEX CIO Marc
Gordon.

AMEX has taken steps to optimize and streamline its operational and
data processes end-to-end by migrating many traditional processes
from legacy mainframe environments to Big Data processing
environments, resulting in dramatic improvements in speed and
performance, significant reductions in cost, and notable increases in
responsiveness to customer needs.

Ash Gupta, chief risk officer and president for Risk and Information
Management for AMEX, comments, “Fact-based analytics have always
been in our company’s DNA, yet I have never seen such an analytical
leap as the one we have made with Big Data.” He cites several areas
where AMEX is focusing its Big Data efforts, notably in addressing
service excellence, generating billings and receivables growth, and risk management. A few examples:

- Using Big Data platforms, AMEX has been able to dramatically reduce
the time it takes to process the thousands of variables and billions of calculations needed to match customer card offers to card member
interests. It previously took years of processing time just to sift through
these massive volumes of data, but now it can be done in hours.

- AMEX has made similar strides in connecting merchants to card
members on personalized offers, taking a 3-day process and reducing
it to 20 minutes on their Big Data platform.

- American Express uses Big Data analytics to detect and prevent fraud
in milliseconds and with greater precision, using machine-learning
models that leverage billions of historical transactions across millions
of card members, resulting in instant fraud alerts for customer protection.

Leading companies can learn from the example of AMEX and other
mainstream corporations that are adopting Big Data solutions and
approaches with success. Here are a few suggestions:

- Assess opportunities to migrate operational business processes from
mainframe environments to faster and cheaper Big Data approaches.

- Create a Big Data Center of Excellence or Analytical Sandbox as a
testing ground to identify suitable applications for Big Data.

- Adopt a “data first” approach that focuses on rapid identification of
data insights, rather than investing in large data warehouse initiatives.

- Develop a “culture of data” staffed by a next-generation of analytics
professional, whom are conversant in new Big Data approaches and
analytics techniques.

Mainstream companies will drive the future of Big Data investment. But
they must demonstrate a willingness and flexibility to tackle their
complex legacy environments and data infrastructure. For those firms
that make the commitment, as evidenced by the example of American
Express, the payback is likely to be high. Their ability to compete for
customer success in the coming years may depend on it.

SOURCE: MIT Sloan Management Review

How to Increase Customer Loyalty

Increasing the base of loyal customers is the most important and difficult question that is faced by businesses these days. Even the biggest of brands which claim to have highest recall value amongst its customers find it difficult to retain the customer loyalty and increase their base of loyal customers.

More often than not, companies especially the ones which are in the service industry where customer interface with the business is very high, tend to carry out numerous customer feedback surveys, without actually introspecting whether their processes and policies are customer friendly or not. Whether the employees are being groomed keeping in mind the need to provide the customers with the best and the most enthralling experience. Generally, there is a lack of focus towards getting into the nitty gritty’s of providing the customers an exceptional experience and providing the end users a ‘wow’ experience just remains a topic of discussion in meeting and training rooms. When it comes to actual implementation of all these things, all this talk of customer service goes out of the window.

The business houses need to realize that in today’s times, there are various alternatives which are available to a prospective customer, and with the advent of technology and innovation shifting of loyalties from one brand to the other can happen with a simple few clicks of the mouse. Keeping an existing customer happy is relatively easier and cheaper as compared to procuring or winning a new and loyal customer. In order to keep a check on the situation and ensure that there is minimum loss of existing and loyal customer base, exhaustive introspection of each and every minute detail must be carried out. Right from devising customer focused and friendly processes and policies to hiring the employees with a friendly and customer centric attitude and mindset, each and every aspect should be looked at with an eagle’s eye and an intention to correct the situation.

People leading these service organizations should realize that 8 out of 10 people would not take the hassle of complaining or pointing out a particular service issue to the management or people responsible for running the show. They would simply stop utilizing the services and shift their loyalties to another service provider. If one tends to come across feedback which points out that the service levels and product offerings are fine, then there seems to be trouble brewing behind the curtains. Since most of the people would not walk up to a service provider and point of their shortcomings or what he expects and where they have felt let down, they would simply try and divert or finish the matter with ‘fine’ remark.

This would mean that more often than not, the customer will not come back. Therefore, in an effort to increase customer loyalty; organizations should design their business plans and performance parameters by being in the customer shoes and try and analyze the customer’s needs and want and what are their expectations from them. Honest and an appropriate introspection would help in highlighting deficiencies which should be rectified in order to keep the existing base of loyal customers by providing them with an immaculate and ‘wow’ experience and alternatively also continuously strive to increase their base of loyal and satisfied customers.

SOURCE: businesslightsideas

How to Build a Collaborative Culture

There are plenty of enterprise collaboration tools to get work done better and faster. But are we optimizing the use of those tools to make collaboration the best it can possibly be?

“A little bit of culture change can go a very long way — and you don't have to tackle the entire organizational culture or its myriad of potential sub-cultures,” Jed Cawthorne told us this month. “You should not shy away from small, incremental changes that can potentially make a big difference.”

So what should you do?

The Question

How do you build a collaborative workplace culture?

The Answers

Michael Fitzpatrick, CEO, ConnectSolutions

Fitzpatrick is CEO and founder of ConnectSolutions, a private-cloud solutions provider for Microsoft Skype for Business and Adobe Connect. With more than 13 years of experience in software and technology development, Fitzpatrick has built a track record in enterprise and government solutions. Tweet to Michael Fitzpatrick.

At CoSo, we believe high-quality experiences with collaboration, communication and learning solutions can dramatically improve the worker’s ability to support the goals of the organization.

But a truly collaborative culture can’t be achieved without carefully tuning your technology, people and processes so that they’re in perfect alignment with each other.

You can tell your people to work together, but you can’t create a truly collaborative workplace culture if you don’t provide them with the tools they need to work together — especially with the growing reliance on dispersed workforces and teleworking.

For a time, this was a tough task as the enterprise was flooded with personal tech that served the user’s needs but tended to fragment collaboration within the team at large. But unified communications has since evolved from the deployment of disparate tools to platforms designed to serve all in a seamless and standardized way.

Now, we can support more collaborative work environments by embedding UC into the organization’s business process workflows, creating frictionless communication that threads email, instant messaging, voice over internet protocol and video collaboration through the very apps and documents that people work with every day.

The work environment becomes more flexible.

Collaboration for workers becomes, once again, a human task that isn't disrupted by the very technology that's supposed to enable it.

Of course, the workforce must also be primed to support collaboration in the enterprise. This means ensuring everyone from on-site workers to mobile teams and freelancers is participating and that the desired collaborative behavior is being exemplified at the C-level.

It means working with HR to create best practices, prioritizing cooperation in the hiring process and creating clearly defined roles. Once your technology, people and process are in sync, a truly collaborative environment will take hold.

Sameer Patel, GM and SVP, SAP

Patel is GM and senior vice president of product management and go-to-market at SAP Cloud/SuccessFactors. Before SAP, he lead enterprise technology teams in the consulting and systems integrator business, where he focused on designing and executing customer, employee and partner networks and associated applications. Customers have included Intel, Nike, CA, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, XO Communications, Symex, McKesson, Wrigley and others.Tweet to Sameer Patel.

You start by throwing out all the nebulous metrics such as sharing and productivity that don’t matter to most executives or aren’t easily measurable by employees.

What does matter to executives and most employees is executing their individual and team mission and charter. And if you can channel the benefits of collaboration to executing those objectives better and faster, the basis for a collaborative culture emerges in a much more organic and natural way.

To start, identify two to three functional areas where the cost of not collaborating on a given business activity is terribly obvious.

Examples are selling or supporting customers, on-boarding new employees, developing product or coordinating hundreds of vendors across your supply chain. Such tasks have established key performance indicators that everyone is already swimming toward and innately require collective output.

It becomes readily apparent to everyone that a collaborative culture around tangible functional processes can be an indispensible enabler to meeting core performance goals.

Deidre Paknad, CEO, Workboard

Paknad shapes Workboard’s product strategy, customer engagement model and thought leadership efforts. She said she is passionate about providing tools and insights that help leaders engage their teams in great achievement. At IBM, she was vice president of a global business and worked to improve information economics for enterprise customers. She has been recognized by the Smithsonian for innovation twice and has more than a dozen patents. Tweet to Deidre Paknad.

How team leaders and executives listen and engage has a huge impact. People hear what we say and may miss what we mean, so leaders’ words invite or crush engagement.

Start with "yes" to get ideas and information to flow. Show people you’re open to their ideas, facts and input. You shut things down when your first answer is no — “no, we can’t do that” or “no, we don’t have the budget.”

While there are instances where there is no budget, the instant “no” can be more habit than fact. When people anticipate a “no”, they avoid bringing forward information or ideas altogether. As Tina Fey says, “start with yes and see where that takes you.”

Secondly, assume AND rather than OR to improve collaborative decisions. Sometimes in conversations people assume each new idea supersedes or displaces those expressed before it — my idea or yours, one option or the other when in fact it’s my idea and yours, one option and another.

Without realizing it, we pit ideas against each other and shut down consideration of additive ideas. This wastes time on false debates. Growth requires more than one idea, market segment, revenue source, and initiative so the false competition undermines collaboration, culture and profit.

Finally, Ask "why" to signal and ensure you heard. It signals authentic engagement and provides people with an opportunity to share logic so you genuinely understand. It also gives you pause to consider the idea’s merits before moving on, to frame your “yes and” response, add another “why” or provide a well-considered “no.”

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t take more management time to be an authentic listener than it does to resolve false debates, dig for facts that people don’t want to share or recover from decisions that were ill informed.

Guy Nirpaz, CEO, Totango

Nirpaz is the CEO and co-founder at Totango, a customer success and user engagement management platform. Before starting Totango, he focused on real time big data as EVP of engineering at GigaSpaces and was chief architect at Mercury. Nirpaz said he's driven by the possibilities technology offers to improve the way people do business. Tweet to Guy Nirpaz.

Culture is about people, motivations, successes and frustrations. The first rule of collaborative culture is making sure the company acts as a team and that the mission and goals are all collaborative. We succeed and fail together as a team.

It starts with hiring people that are not only excellent at what they do, but people that are comfortable to work as a team. Sometimes very talented people are not hired due to massive ego.

A good smelling sign to recognize it is when they are being asked about their previous company, you get the sense that they were the stars while everyone else was completely useless.

The second part is to foster collaboration. This is first and foremost the role of the executive team. As a start the executive team needs to demonstrate characteristics of collaboration. You know that you're not there when fingers are started to be pointed out when stakes are high.

Beyond that the executive team should continuously figure out ways to communicate the joint goals, and actively take part at conflict resolution by always pointing out the joint goals and missions and how those should be interpreted in this case.

Anthony Smith, CEO, Insightly

Smith is CEO of Insightly, a San Francisco-based SaaS CRM application. Before Insightly, he was a consultant for IBM and a software engineer for global-mining consultancy Snowden. Tweet to Anthony Smith.

Building a collaborative culture starts with identifying your company’s core values, like clear and frequent communication, and then establishing those right off the bat. At Insightly, we want our employees to have a healthy balance between work and their personal lives so we offer flexible hours and work locations.

Everyone still works at least 40 hours a week, but many employees are remote or choose hours outside the typical working day. One big challenge that comes with implementing a remote-workforce program is making sure that employees are collaborating just as much as they would if they sat next to each other.

To maintain constant communication and collaboration between team members, provide remote employees with extra services that help to ensure that they are clued in on everything that’s going on in the company.

Beyond the day-to-day tasks, fly in remote employees every quarter to encourage team bonding. And when we first hire a new employee, we have them spend a week at company headquarters so they can become acquainted with co-workers, attend in-person training meetings and familiarize themselves with business processes. This helps to ease them in and move them toward the end goal of becoming completely ingrained in the team.

Title image by Asa Aarons Smith/all rights reserved.

SOURCE: CMSWiRE