ISIS Open House Vienna 2012: A Brief Review

The eve of the Open House was dedicated to the traditional gala show and the famed white stallions of the Spanish Riding School formed a fine contrast for the splendid display of innovative performance at equally high levels that was to follow during the next two days.

Among the cherished guests at the ISIS Headquarters was Toronto-based Sandy Kemsley, who tweeted live from the multitude of workshops, labs and real-world showcases that demonstrated the versatility and uniqueness of ISIS Papyrus solutions. Sandy is an independent analyst and systems architect, specializing in business process management, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise architecture and business intelligence. She is an internationally renowned speaker, trainer, and blogger on those topics. Here are some quotes from her coverage of #isisopenhouse:

“They’ve created the critical round trip between strategy and execution by connecting strategic objectives (in a strategy map) to business architecture (in a capability map) to process goals (balanced scorecard and other KPIs): not only is this top-down, where strategy defines capabilities, which in turn are used to define KPIs, but also feeding back so that the actual performance during execution is compared back to the architecture and strategy.”
(On ISIS Papyrus Adaptive Case Management)

“They provide a mobile app that acts as a portal to any application developed on their platform; … This provides access to the same application on iOS, Android, PC desktop and in the browser through their UI widgets. … We saw a demo of an iPad-based vehicle claim app built on this platform, and how the menus and features on the app are driven by the case definition in the desktop environment. Because it’s driven by the Papyrus platform, the app has access to the same data and documents as a desktop application, although rendered in a mobile form factor.”
(On Mobile Integration with the Papyrus Platform)

“Rather than having multiple systems that deal with content – ingestion, analysis, processing and generation, multiplied by the number of interaction channels – a single platform can reduce the internal efforts to develop content-centric processes, while presenting a more seamless customer experience across multiple channels. … it’s something that comes up in many of the BPM implementations that I’m involved in, and typically isn’t handled all that well (if at all) by those systems. In many cases, it’s a poorly implemented afterthought, performed in a non-integrated fashion in another system, or becomes one of those things that the users ask for but just never receive. “
(On the ISIS Papyrus Business Communication Platform and Correspondence Generation)

The complete posts can be found on Sandy’s blog called Column 2:

Keynote of ISIS CTO Max J. Pucher

ISIS Papyrus Business Communication Platform for Correspondence Generation

ISIS Papyrus Integrated Inbound and Outbound Correspondence

Personalized Electronic Statements at China Trust Commercial Bank

Mobile, Social And Integration With The Papyrus Platform

ISIS Papyrus Adaptive Case Management

Document Capture to Process

As a reminder for those who missed the opportunity to attend the event in Vienna: the US Open House and User Conference at Southlake, TX, takes place from May 20-22 and brings similar insights in the technological breakthroughs from ISIS Papyrus.

All the details of this event are again brought to your mobile device through the ISIS Papyrus Event Planning app that can be downloaded for free:

For iOS:

http://itunes.apple.com/at/app/isis-papyrus/id522141912?mt=8

For Android:

http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.isis_papyrus.eyegen

ISIS Papyrus Event Planning App for iOS and Android

By utilizing the Mobile features of the Papyrus Platform, ISIS Papyrus has released a mobile app created through an application definition stored in Papyrus WebRepository. The app connects users with corporate information and data through a Papyrus EYE server that uses the REST protocol. The app is intuitive and easy-to-use and allows to view event lists, schedules, and details stored in a database. It currently provides social and bookmarking enhancements, with voting (scores and comments) and more multimedia capabilities soon to come.

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While online, users get up-to-date information from the system and can bookmark and filter the available events they want to participate in. Social messaging is enabled through Twitter with the ability to optionally add photo snapshots. For offline mode the most recent data are kept locally on the device.

The app is a great way to engage internal and external users and to build and strengthen trust and relationships beyond the randomness of social media interaction. It could, for example, be used to provide a user interaction for trade shows or similar events or to help the prospect to configure a product or request service interactions. It can be linked with the Papyrus ACM Adaptive Case Management functions without additional programming and provide full access to corporate CRM data and information. All Papyrus ACM features can be made available and the functionality is specific to particular user roles if users are given the ability to register and login into the service.

The app serves therefore as sample application for a variety of corporate use cases and can easily be configured through WebRepository to an organization’s specific requirements. The event planner is available for both the iPhone and Android devices and can be downloaded here:

For iOS:

http://itunes.apple.com/at/app/isis-papyrus/id522141912?mt=8

For Android:

http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.isis_papyrus.eyegenda

Use the app with the ISIS Papyrus Open House hash tag #isisopenhouse.

ISIS Papyrus Open House and User Conference 2012

ISIS Papyrus is again excited to invite to this year’s open house and user conferences taking place at the ISIS headquarters in Vienna, Austria, from May 6-8, and Southlake, Texas, from May 20-22, respectively.

Registration for these extraordinary events is now open. Other venues include Kingsclere in the UK and Ivrea in Italy. Details will be presented as they evolve.

What we see currently in enterprise IT is no more and no less than a fundamental change of how businesses interact with customers and the barriers between front and back offices is dwindling. Customer experience comes strongly to the fore and requires a consolidation of all touchpoints.

The Papyrus Communication and Process Platform with its unique concept and powerful feature-set provides the ideal launch-pad for future-proof innovative solutions. The ISIS Papyrus Open House with its special flavor again is the perfect backdrop to gain profound insights in the latest technological advancements that have become a hallmark of ISIS Papyrus since its inception.

Next Generation E-Statements: Reduce Costs, Increase Loyalty

People are literally getting flooded with printed mail like statements, bills, marketing messages etc. All the while the stream is increasing the attention is fading while the printing, postage, equipment and personnel costs for providers are soaring. There are only small opportunities to break through information fatigue surrounding quelling letter boxes. One such opportunity consists of e-statements but not of the dull kind of yesteryear that’s just the electronic version of its paper counterpart.

What’s required to call customer’s attention is a totally new kind of personalized electronic document that goes way beyond dreary numbers and the occasional lackluster messaging insert as part of an uninspired mass marketing campaign. This kind of document gives a whole new customer experience by involving personalized interactive communications, transactional promotions, structured ad-hoc documents, and tentative calls to action based on a single transparent customer view, real-time data and closed-loop communication consolidating inbound and outbound documents in the context of adaptive business processes.

The Papyrus Platform effectively and efficiently leverages the delivery of smart electronic documents  with consistent appearance across all media and devices and thus helps to increase sales opportunities and brand loyalty while substantially saving production costs and supporting green initiatives.  By giving business and marketing users more power and abilities to create their own documents it also helps to offset the dependency on IT for fairly simple tasks for faster time-to-market and shorter life cycles.

Process Mining with Papyrus

Process mining is an IT concept that has gained some momentum and attention recently though it lacks a generally-agreed definition and is open to what any vendor claims it to be. Therefore it is useful to look under the hood of such concepts and to ask what is the real value it can bring to a business.

While the idea of analyzing people interaction is a valuable concept in itself, process mining often only tries to improve the shortcomings of conventional BPM (rigid processes, lack of user empowerment and agility, absence of goal orientation and focus on outcome etc.). Using the same flow-charted paradigm like the underlying system these efforts are similarly doomed to fail and aren’t capable of reaping the potential benefits in a real-world business setting. Therefore most process mining initiatives are nothing more than a declaration of intentions and good will without adequate technology and tangible results.

By contrast, the ISIS Papyrus Platform has made patented technology readily available for a couple of years now. For the purpose of process mining based on the principles of human decision-making and social business collaboration the Papyrus User-Trained Agent (UTA) performs pattern recognition on the data objects and their relationships across the complete state space of a business case each time an action is performed by an actor role. The UTA analyzes what elements of the pattern are relevant for its subsequent repeated actions. This includes information about previously executed steps and their results. The UTA thus provides the business user with the power to train the progression of a workflow, which dramatically reduces the time and effort to analyze and encode workflows and rules and yields the related benefits immediately.

Mobile and Social Impacts on Enterprise IT

As mobile devices and social interactions become more and more ubiquitous businesses are slowly starting to see the impact. Companies must respond by making it easy for people–employees and customers–to stay in touch on any device and from any location while ensuring access to the same enterprise tools and customer communications. This requires a major shift in the perception of enterprise IT.

Until recently enterprises understood business transformation as implementing packaged applications such as ERP, CRM, and the like, to tackle certain business problems. But instead of mitigating problems the resulting information silos aggravated them because software has been regarded more like a commodity to run the business than a truly differentiating factor. In this quagmire BPM is viewed as a way out of the silo issues but in its conventional flow-charted flavor it only adds additional bureaucratic overhead and nothing to improve the customer experience and totally fails in connecting all the business communications with the relevant data in a transparent way for internal collaboration and to bridge the customer interaction gap.

The driver for business transformation will have to be a business process perspective that uses capabilities, value streams and their customer outcomes as target definitions. The resulting Business Architecture will have to cater for all social and mobile touchpoints and empower business stakeholders as well as performers to create, execute, evaluate, and adapt processes at their own discretion, while driving towards defined outcomes, process goals and business targets.

The underlying problem of social media interactions is that they lack business context and goals. Therefore the Papyrus Platform from ISIS Papyrus handles social interactions device-independent as elements of a case to provide a consolidated view of all customer-related data and content. While at the same time doing away with artificially created fragmentation the Papyrus Platform offers a holistic approach to integrated business communication and collaborative capabilities and enables business users to create their own processes for an enhanced customer experience and for creating tangible outcomes.

Focus on Customer Outcomes for Long-term Profitability

Firms competing in mature markets usually apply two broad strategies to secure growth and profitability. The first strategy centers around aggressive pricing. This strategy is particularly tempting in downturns or to force competitors out of the market. But overall, it is a shortsighted strategy and hurts long-term profitability despite apparent initial success in terms of growth. The cut in margins is usually the start of a downward spiral followed soon by some cost cutting in its various forms, which is the ultimate goal of most Business Process Management (BPM) projects and the only justification for oversimplifying customer-facing processes with flowcharts. The result is poorer service and product quality, the outsourcing or even complete elimination of services with all its dire consequences but without bringing back margins to sound levels.

The other strategy is about focusing on customer outcomes. This requires a shift from the notion of products and services as a commodity to that of shaping the perception of the customer in terms of value received. In this setting the customer judges about the successful outcome of a business process instead of a bureaucratic system. In most cases this is a substantial differentiator from the competition. However easy it sounds this shift is not something that can be achieved overnight and it is certainly no one-off procedure.

Starting with the focus on customer outcomes requires goal-orientation, transparency and empowerment in process planning and execution. It considers knowledge and an organization’s adaptive capabilities to put it into action for accommodating different customer preferences. Giving participants the means to create a value perception interactively instead of mere exception handling along a sequence of predefined steps builds the cornerstones of long-term customer relationships which result in increased loyalty and revenue.