June 26th – Webinar on Delivering Effective Customer Experiences

On June 26th, 2012 ISIS Papyrus proudly presents a free webinar on how to achieve tangible business outcomes by creating effective customer experiences. Under the title ‘Standing Out From The Crowd – Engaging The Business To Deliver Compelling Customer Experiences’ two top experts will discuss the application of Adaptive Case Management (ACM), which promises to be an an outstanding experience in itself.

Max J. Pucher, CTO of ISIS Papyrus and co-author of what can be called the ‘Bible of ACM’, will be joined by internationally renowned BPM expert Derek Miers from Forrester to discuss a range of interesting topics that show how business users can create mission critical processes that link people, information, and applications across geographically distributed, organizational functions and how empowered process owners can fulfill strategic business goals.

The key lies in a Business Architecture (BA), whose main goal – as a subset of Enterprise Architecture – it is to enable the business to improve customer service quality through better transparency, flexibility and adaptability of business operations. Papyrus Adaptive Case Management delivers the necessary flexibility and adaptability. It allows organizations to model their core capabilities, to define goals, targets and strategic objectives and gives management the tools to measure and assess outcomes in real time.

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.

ACM Benefits – The User Perspective

Every technology is just as good as it helps us to do away with confusion and complication while we pursue complex activities in a complex world. While thoughtfulness of concept, sophistication of design and general public appeal all play an important role, the final judgment of this accomplishment lies with the users of technology and the benefits they get from it. Therefore this article is dedicated to the users of the ISIS Papyrus ACM Platform and their unique perspective.

Andrew M., Senior Project Manager, international financial institution:
“A process needs no longer to be designed but it can be captured immediately during execution. Thus we avoid a lengthy analysis phase, the problems with a lack of subject-matter expertise and the bureaucratic overhead of deploying, maintaining and changing the underlying model. The whole concept took some time to go down with the ‘old guard’ but now that we are seeing the first results in terms of business and customer value the initial resistance has completely crumbled and we couldn’t be happier with our choice.”

Paul S., Director of Services, large retail bank:
“You simply can’t compare it to any other word processor or document management system we had before. The ease-of-use for creating and changing a template with simple building blocks is amazing. After that you can add data with forms by mere drag&drop from the library. Everything gets just where you want it to have and it remains there. Users can then make any additional changes they prefer but they cannot meddle with the original design, which saves a lot of time compared to what we were used to. And a lot of nerves, too!”

George A., Senior QA Manager, direct-marketing company:
“Using the widgets is so easy that it costs a laugh to build a complete document from scratch.”

Vicky H., Claims Processor, specialized insurance firm:
“When I work through a claim it is rarely straightforward because each customer has its own way of submitting documents and files through various channels. There are however similar patterns that you recognize over time. Therefore it is so great that I can add tasks to the process whenever I need to without asking an admin, which saves a lot of time both for me and the customer. Better still, when a certain pattern reoccurs I’m presented with previous changes I made and don’t have to do it all over again. Sometimes it just seems too good to be true!”

Mary P., Director of Marketing, international insurance firm:
“Our customer reps now feel empowered to engage in interactive communications with customers that deliver tangible outcomes. The adaptive approach has energized each one of them.”

Learn more about the benefits customers gained from ISIS Papyrus Solutions and the value of customer outcomes.

ACM Benefits – The Technology

In a loose series about advanced solutions for high-value business processes and innovation-driven markets we present the Adaptive Case Management Framework from ISIS Papyrus. The need for adaptive capabilities for the modern user-interactive enterprise has been repeatedly confirmed by research into how companies organize themselves and by the limitations and shortcomings observed in conventional approaches and tools to manage the business ecosystem. They can be summarized as follows: Business Process Management (BPM) is focused on repetitive processes with strict workflows. The necessary abstractions, however, make it impossible to handle more complex tasks. Pure case management, on the other hand, offers much higher flexibility but fails to give guidance to business users and makes it difficult to enforce compliance with policies and regulations. The inherent simplification of case management solutions will furthermore lead to inaccuracies in the underlying model.

In contrast, Adaptive Case Management provides both flexibility and guidance. It focuses on case information, not on the process. A case gathers all the necessary information required to handle it: These are performers (users/roles participating in the case), data/content, rules and of course processes and tasks. Adaptive Case Management is designed to empower knowledge workers by giving them the power to make autonomous decisions within the constraints of the overall business strategy. The management defines achievable business and process goals and communicates them transparently while business users themselves add tasks to achieve these goals. This leads to a “design-by-doing” approach enabling users to create, modify, and analyze processes on the fly. Adaptive processes, despite lacking a predictable and repeatable progression, nevertheless go from a less ordered to a more ordered state through user action. Decisions taken by business users are furthermore shared by storing them in templates and making them available to other actors within the company as suggested actions.

Adaptive Case Management is well suited for arbitrary document content, collaborative decision-making and a high level of customer interaction. It can be used in every service-oriented and customer-focused operation of a company dealing with complex, event-driven activities from customer claims management and contract management to new accounts, purchase-to-pay, fraud investigations,  and many other applications across a broad range of domains.

From Standardization to Value Perception

Standardization and uniformity have long been hailed as hallmark in business operations and process management. But all standardization and uniformity gets to a point where every organization is doing basically the same and none has a competitive edge. Moreover, standardization is the counterpoint to innovation and agility and creates a risk-averse bureaucratic machinery where every disturbance of the routine is sought to be evaded at all cost. Decision-making and planning are by and large delegated to an anonymous system fed with all kinds of data of limited validity and doubtful relevance. The output doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t interfere with the dullness of general affairs. This situation is known as innovation gridlock, where an exceedingly complex system finds its justification in cumbersome maintenance and binding resources that are painfully missing elsewhere

However, good business decisions are always taken by experienced people who use intuition to combine relevant data in business context. These are the Leverage Points where people skill has a relevant effect on a customer outcome. What is therefore necessary is to identify technology that is apt for new requirements apart from standardization and uniformity, lends itself to the increasing speed of change and considers the fact that people and organizations working through human interactions and emergent processes cannot be modeled to factory floor concepts where lots of unskilled or semi-skilled workers are expected to do the same repetitive tasks over and over again.

With the help of a Business Architecture including strategy, capabilities, relationships, business entities, and processes such technology should enable the business to improve customer service quality through transparency, flexibility and adaptability of business operations. This in turn requires that the interaction is driven by users and not by some predefined process. The process must only provide guidance, collaborative information sharing and free-flow execution between many possible service and resolution tasks. This cannot be performed even by the most dynamic and ad-hoc BPM solutions but only by an adaptive process environment that empowers the actor to take any action and includes any resource (man or machine) to resolve a given problem in terms of providing value perceived by the customer.

Sequel to Groundbreaking ACM Book

When almost a year ago “Mastering the Unpredictable” came out it was the first comprehensive work dealing with the foundations of Adaptive Case Management. To this day it is unrivaled and still the most authoritative source on the topic.

Now there is a sequel to this book presenting real-world applications of adaptive approaches to business process management, called “Taming the Unpredictable”. ISIS Papyrus Founder and Chief Architect Max J. Pucher features again as co-author and has contributed his insightful “Considerations for Implementing Adaptive Case Management”. In this highly informative article Mr. Pucher discusses the scientific findings that show the obsolescence of flowcharted business process models. At the same time he reveals how businesses can use technology to drive innovation and create effective customer outcomes.

Mr. Pucher emphasizes again his firm commitment for placing human aspects over simplified cost optimization in process management and strongly advocates empowerment and intrinsic motivation for the improvement of cost/quality ratios. These principles are also reflected in his practical achievements as Chief Architect and mastermind behind the innovative Papyrus Platform.  He designed the core technology with a business architecture repository, distributed object-oriented transaction engine, and embedded object-relational database. He holds several software patents in the area of artificial intelligence for the so-called user-trained agent, a machine learning component for auto-discovery of process knowledge.

Study Confirms: Knowledge Workers Need More Adequate Support

Real-world business experience as well as research-backed evidence show that traditional IT concepts fail when it comes to improve the performance of knowledge workers. Yet it is this segment of high-value decision makers growing both in numbers and importance throughout mature market economies. One thing that’s puzzling is why organizations don’t invest in the proper infrastructure to provide them with appropriate software and tools while they seem to be perfectly clear about the importance of such an investment and the impact on strategic business objectives. This, at least, is one of the conclusions from a study conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of ISIS Papyrus among 150 process professionals.

Other findings from this study show the following issues prevailing in many organizations:

• Substantial lack of coordination of data, content, workflow and rules between information systems
• Rapidly changing business processes
• Annual costs of process change are twice the cost of initial installation
• Internal obstacles slow down process changes
• IT support remains crucial for process changes
• Overwhelming majority wants knowledge worker empowerment to create new processes

All these problems that cannot be solved by mere process automation and increased governance is a clear call to action for executives because there is a disconnect of process management and business objectives. To keep their companies competitive they have to understand what IT can do to support innovation and creativity and why flowcharted process maps will ultimately fail to do so.

An adaptive approach that defines outcomes rather then predefined process steps is a major step in this direction. It relies on top-down transparency as to business objectives and management targets and bottom-up transparency as to individual goals of the process owners as well as on a balance of value proposition and perceived value for the customer. A technology that enables such empowerment of knowledge workers must provide the necessary authority, means, and relevant information for effective execution. Flowcharts and half-hearted approaches that try to loosen the harness of rigidity just a little bit and leave no room for individual decision-making are definitely not enabling any creativity. On the contrary, it’s at the leverage points of processes where individual skills and experience determine a positive customer outcome and subsequently a business’ success and growth.

Adaptive Paradigm Unleashed at ISIS Open House 2011

ISIS Papyrus is pleased to announce this year’s open house and user conferences to start at the ISIS headquarters in Vienna, Austria, from May 1-3, and Southlake, Texas, from May 15-17, respectively.

Registration for these exciting events is now open. Other venues include Kingsclere in the UK and Ivrea in Italy. We will present all the details as they evolve.

In 2010, process management has been amended with the aspects and needs of social networks extended with mobile access. That alone is a departure from the usual control-mindset of BPM. But social and mobile communication improvements alone do not improve governance. Beyond the market hype there is acceptance that content, process and customer relationship management are not only related but must be consolidated to provide a completely customer-focused solution.

ISIS Papyrus sees the empowerment of knowledge workers crucial for most functional content or process needs. Therefore there is an embedded approach to long-term governing processes.

The ADAPTIVE paradigm is about a globally encompassing process technology approach linked to business architecture and strategy. That architectural structure enables the focus on individual goals and outcomes as an embedded functionality of the empowerment technology, while being guided by the business strategy. The ADAPTIVE paradigm needs technology empowerment similar to SOCIAL and MOBILE, but in contrast provides top-down and bottom-up transparency.