Business Process

Self-Service Predictive Modeling: Vendors Still Have Far to Go

James Kobielus — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:59:16 +0000

Self-service analytics is one of my core coverage focus areas. It applies not just to business intelligence (BI) but also to advanced analytics.

When, a few months ago, I uttered the immortal phrase “roll over rocket scientists,” I was referring more specifically to the need for pervasive self-service tools for predictive analytics and data mining (PA/DM). Considering that my recently published Forrester Wave on PA/DM Solutions primarily addressed the traditional requirements of “rocket scientist” experts in statistical analysis, I did not put a huge emphasis on data mining features geared to business analysts, subject matter experts, and other “non-technical” information workers.

As I’ve stated in that blogpost and the follow-on podcast, the core problem with today’s PA/DM offerings is that many of them are power tools, not solutions that have been designed for the mass business market. Vendors such as SAS Institute, IBM/SPSS, KXEN, Oracle, Portrait Software, Angoss, FICO, and TIBCO Spotfire provide data mining specialists with feature-rich algorithm-powered solutions for modeling, scoring, regression, and other core PA/DM functions. Their core, traditional user base consists of statisticians, mathematicians, and other highly educated analytics professionals.

Social, Spatial, & Temporal: The Coordinates of Community in the Cloud

James Kobielus — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:00:39 +0000

Social networks have their foundations in the space-time continuum—you know, the funky coordinate system that Einstein was so keen about.

Social network analysis is all about looking for patterns of “proximity” among people, considered in their cultural capacities as influencers and followers, innovators and imitators, first-movers and late adopters. Down deep, I consider social network analysis an important new branch of decision support systems as a discipline. The core question is: What unique situational chemistry causes various people, individually or collectively, to make various decisions at various places and times?

That’s where space and time enter the social network analysis equation. It’s not enough that I look up to your shining example and take my lead from what you say and do. It’s just as important that we be in the same city, neighborhood, or room. More than that, it’s important that you and I actually cross paths in order for you to actively influence me to buy that latte, or for you to calm me down and thereby stop me from storming out the door and severing my relationship with a retailer who has ignored my complaints one time too many.

Social CRM Thrives on Powerful Dashboards and Process Analytics

James Kobielus — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:22:01 +0000

What the business world needs now is a bigger, badder, more powerful social media dashboard for customer relationship management (CRM). It almost goes without saying that TweetDeck just won’t cut it.

Ideally, the social media dashboard would provide a CRM-integrated interface for monitoring what customers are saying about you in Twitter, Facebook, and other communities. It would also allow you to aggregate high-level customer satisfaction metrics; to flag smouldering issues surrounding defective products and poor customer service; to respond inline through these channels; and to escalate issues internally to the appropriate parties. In other words, it would be, per my colleagues Bill Band and Natalie Petouhoff, a true “customer business intelligence (BI)” dashboard.

As you develop your company’s social CRM strategy, you must provide social media dashboards to all roles that participate in the customer lifecycle. Whether you’re a brand manager who simply wants to listen into social networks to track awareness, sentiment, and propensities, or a sales person who is interested in identifying and qualifying leads, or a customer service rep who wants to interact closely with established customers, a social media dashboard will soon become a core productivity tool.

Developing The Discipline of BPM

Derek Miers — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:51:45 +0000

As some of you may already be aware, I joined Forrester Research a little over a month ago. Some will wonder why, after many years of plowing the independent field, I decided to join the competition. Well, I don’t feel I have joined the competition.

I know it sounds a little sickly, but I feel like I have finally come home. I got so used to working by myself, I forgot what it was like to have colleagues. I really came here to help build a business that caters for the needs of Business Process Professionals. I have known Connie Moore for about 17 years and we have been erstwhile collaborators throughout that time. Clay and I had been exploring partnership opportunities before he joined Forrester.

My first experience inside Forrester was to attend “Starting Blocks” - a 3-day program where the Executive Team come in one at a time, to meet with all new employees that had joined the organization since the last program. What a fantastic eye-opener that was. Here we had the thinkers and strategists sitting down and engaging in a dialogue - exploring what they were doing and listening to feedback - quite an unusual behavior, and a reflection of the culture of the organization.

Now I work in Connie’s team, bringing my own perspectives and capabilities - complementing the skills already here. My research focus could be summarized as follows:

“I am specializing in the methods, approaches, frameworks, tools, techniques and technologies of Business Process Management (BPM), Business Process Improvement, Business Transformation and Organisational Change; with a special emphasis on an outcome-based, customer-focused approaches.”

Predictive Processes Demand Unified BAM and BSM Stack

James Kobielus — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:58:21 +0000

Business processes don’t execute only at the application layer. Just as thought processes aren’t entirely divorced from the synaptic firings of the underlying neurons.

Most business activity monitoring (BAM) tools I’ve come across only operate at the business level. In other words, they are geared to monitoring, tracking, correlating, visualizing, and analyzing those metrics that come from business process management (BPM) platforms, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and other application platforms. That’s essential, but it’s only half the battle of process optimization. To deliver the promised service levels, BAM dashboards should integrate closely with business service management (BSM) dashboards, thereby mapping application services to the underlying server, storage, network, and other infrastructure components. In this way, IT can provide full-stack visibility, provisioning, and control over every component that affects every step of every business process. If you need a deep drilldown on BSM, check out the excellent research by my colleague Peter O’Neill, who specializes in this area.

Tech Dots And Process Connectors

Alexander Peters, Ph.D. — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:40:58 +0000

I recently completed an interview with the VP of patient management for a large healthcare organization. When introducing herself, she said that her responsiblity is “connecting the dots”. I asked her what kind of dots, and she said “We have a software application for everything we do -- I must get them talking to each other and this is a challenge.” I asked her what the role of IT. Her answer was “they do a good job of maintaining the applications, but not so much on cross-functional processes”.

Is this an unusual situation? Obviously not. A recent Forrester survey of 141 organizations shows that in 78% of organizations business executives -- not IT -- drive process improvement initiatives. I assume that most of these initiatives are about “connecting the dots”.

I think that IT decision-makers can do a lot more to improve business processes, in particular cross-functional processes. Acting as agents of process improvement, they need to re-focus their teams from supporting tech platforms to optimizing cross-functional processes. As one of these change-agents pointed out in a recent interview “ No single functional department owns end-to-end order-to-cash. IT can help a company see something that is hard to see”. (see this report)

Working with several IT decision-makers, I developed a few recommendations for change-agents who aim to increase the business orientation and efficiency of their organizations:

Interested in how well SAP is addressing your data management and BI requirements?

Rob Karel — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:57:47 +0000

It would be an understatement to say that data management is a hot topic today. Master data management, data quality management, metadata management, data integration and data governance have all emerged as high priorities for many global IT organizations. Often times, these data management efforts are paired with investments in business intelligence and facilitated by data warehousing strategies.

Once the strategy, business case, and supporting architectures and organizations are defined (no easy task in and of itself), the next inevitable question is then, which vendors should IT leaders partner with to enable these strategies? There are pure play and best of breed MDM, data quality, BI and DW vendors that offer unbiased, agnostic approaches, eliminating any vendor lock-in or reliance on database platform or enterprise applications. On the other hand, a single platform vendor can offer better ease of integration with existing IT infrastructure than the best of breed alternatives.

These considerations lead us to a major platform vendor, like SAP. Similar to its mega-platform competitors, IBM and Oracle, SAP offers a deep and wide set of data management, BI and data warehousing solutions that promise not only integration within these products, but more notably - across its broader product portfolio of enterprise applications.

Social BPM and Case Management

Craig Le Clair — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:10:09 +0000

BPM has always provided fertile ground for new ideas but often results in confusing business process and application professionals. Recently Dynamic Case Management and Social BPM are being spoken of as important directions for BPM. But how do they relate to one another? And since social media is an important part of both, what value does social really add to process improvement and Line of Business professionals if any? No doubt social improves collaboration in process design, and more important is the ability -with analytics to add a new form of input to process improvement -input that may go directly to the CEO. This is part of the BPM advantage but the area of Case Management may have more dramatic value as you collaborate during a critical incident like an adverse drug reaction, or create a stronger community to deliver a more personalized service event -or to gather "voice of the customer" data to improve case handling. But in both BPM and Case -social is an enabler and takes a seat along side important advancements such as analytics, convergence of BPM and ECM, and a stronger domain focus.

The Appliance Wars Drag On and On

James Kobielus — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:22:45 +0000

It was my pleasure to participate in the latest DM Radio podcast panel yesterday. Eric Kavanaugh and Jim Ericson always do a fine job of organizing these events, and, with their stellar industry panels and fun “morning drive-time crew” on-air patter, they keep it lively. And these guys actually know a thing or two about information management.

The latest DM Radio panel was right in my core coverage area. They called it their “Third Annual Appliance Showdown.” That got to me to thinking: early 2008 (when they held their first) was also when Forrester began our coverage of data warehousing (DW) appliances, starting with publication of my report “Appliance Power: Crunching Data Warehousing Workloads Faster And Cheaper Than Ever.” When I published that report, DW appliances were still not quite in the enterprise mainstream, because they were still regarded by enterprise IT as, in the words of Kavanaugh, an “adjunct” to the enterprise DW (EDW) for fast table scans and query processing, rather than as platform that could scale to support all EDW functions.

Podcast: The Top Six Ways to Get Value From Your CRM Deployment

William Band — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:50:51 +0000

I’ve just published a new podcast for Business Process & Applications professionals: “The Top Six Ways to Get Value From Your CRM Deployment”.

In my podcast, I highlight the top six ways that organizations can get extra value from their CRM deployments, and spotlight four pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Please share your questions or comments

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Podcast: The State of PLM: A Tale Of Two Markets

Roy Wildeman — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Our latest featured podcast is Roy Wildeman's "The State of PLM: A Tale of Two Markets ".

In this podcast, BP&A Senior Analyst Roy Wildeman discusses the current state of the PLM application market in wake of the recession. He also reveals options that long-term PLM customers have to maximize the value of their apps.

We look forward to your questions and comments.

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Who are the BI Personas?

Boris Evelson — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:13:54 +0000

The world is changing. The traditional lines of demarcation between IT and business, developers and end users, producers and consumers of info no longer work. But every time I attempted to create a matrix of BI personas in the new world, I ended up with so many dimensions (business vs. IT, consumers vs producers, strategic vs tactical vs operational decisions, departmental vs. line of business vs enterprise cross functional roles, running canned reports vs. ad-hoc queries, and many others, i ended up with something quite unreadable. But there still has to be something that on the one hand shows the realities of the new BI world, yet something that fits onto a single PPT. Here's my first attempt at it (click on the small image to see the full one).

In this diagram I attempt to show

The State Of PLM 2010

Roy Wildeman — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

After I conduct a user research interview or field a vendor briefing, I usually like to offer the chance to answer any questions that folks may have for me as an industry analyst (time permitting, of course). Recently, it seems like 9 out of every 10 questions has been a close-variant on the theme, “given our tough economy, what do you see happening in the PLM space right now?” And while it’s easy to provide anecdotes or relay what I hear others saying about the state of PLM spending, I’ve candidly found it a bit hard to provide a really sound, fact-based answer.

Podcast: Business Process Pros Hold the Key To Business Transformation (Parts 1 and 2)

Alexander Peters, Ph.D. — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Our latest featured podcasts are Alex Peters' and Connie Moore's "Business Process Pros Hold the Key To Business Transformation".

In this two part podcast, BP&A Principal Analyst Alex Peters and BP&A Research Director Connie Moore discuss what Business Technology transformation is, who drives it inside the organization, and the role of the process pro in Business Technology transformations.

We look forward to your questions and comments.

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Podcast: Succession Planning, What It Is And Why It's Important

Claire Schooley — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Our latest featured podcast is Claire Schooley's "Succession Planning, What It Is And Why It's Important".

In this podcast, BP&A Senior Analyst Claire Schooley discusses the flow of activities that need to surround effective succession planning. She also talks about the key benefits of having a sound succession strategy. The podcast finishes with 5 key recommendations.

We look forward to your questions and comments.

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