Improving New Account Opening

Finovate in NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:57:00 +0000

I was hoping to take a visit to the Finovate event in NYC next week, to see some of the hot new innovative financial services products and software coming out of the industry.

Unfortunately my travel schedule seems to be as unreliable as the markets right now, meaning that I can't attend. So I'd like to wish the organizers and companies that are presentering the best of luck for the event and I look forward to seeing some feedback from some of the bloggers and media who'll be onsite.

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Processes in the cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 02:41:00 +0000

Amazon, in its new incarnation as cloud computing provider, has announced that its EC2 service will have the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or SQL Server before the end of the year. Why does this matter?

Companies are under pressure to deliver applications for a better total cost of ownership than ever. This isn't just a matter of cheaper software and less sys admins to support it. Already we see the importance of virtualization, helping reduce the cost and increase the flexibility of corporate server rooms, at least for the products that certify themselves to run under products such as VMWare. Side this with the new 'green' push of Intel, AMD, Sun, etc - to show a reduced cost of electricity powering and cooling the masses of servers that are still required, and the complexity of organizing server rooms to do so. According to Sun, 25% of IT budgets is consumed by energy costs.

So why not just save the valuable office space that server rooms have expanded to overtake, the power costs, complex network wiring, and the cost and risk of knowing how to, and actually doing this infrastructure stuff well? Just deploy your applications to the 'cloud', make sure you have a powerful and fault-tolerant Internet connection, and away you go.

Does this work for your critical business processes, perhaps run by a business process management (BPM), enterprise content management (ECM) or traditional imaging and workflow solution? AIIM talks about SaaS for ECM, and adds some nice commentary on the key tests for an organization selecting a SaaS solution: does SaaS meet the tests of speed, functionality, cost, flexibility and suitability?

Since BPM should be about running your differentiated processes, the cookie cutter approach to cost effective SaaS solutions may not be appealing. But when you have the ability to build exactly your solution and run it in the cloud on a common Windows operating system and database, BPM might become viable without complex infrastructure requirements (at least those that your boss can see).

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Thick or thin for heads-down workers

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 02:31:00 +0000

Thick or thin, that is the question. At least for 'heads-down' workers typically involved with processing large amounts of information on screen extremely rapidly, thick client applications have long been considered the only way to go.

Proponents of thick clients used to argue for the richness of UI that could be presented, but I feel that modern browser based apps on the web show that this doesn't have to be the way. I'm sure you have your favorites you use every day.

So it comes back to performance - speed of refreshing the screen and displaying information. Heads-down users need the applications to work fast, update dynamic data rapidly, display document images in sub-second times, so that their boss can benefit from an aggregate of 'per-click' savings. Thick client-server apps claim the gold standard here.

Can dynamic AJAX applications really keep up? After all, the limitation here becomes the latency of the network. Can browser applications compete with the thick client running on an over-inflated PC generating dynamic displays from data cached ahead of time? Unlikely, as the thick client probably wins every time, pulling data behind the scenes in large chunks.

So, can we really say that browser based UIs are suitable for heads down workers, or are they just more convenient for IT in not having to roll out complex installable applications? Or are browser based apps up to the task? After all modern networks are fast, clever data caching can be built in, and new Javascript engines are claiming to get orders of magnitude faster.

Silverlight and Flash are battling for the new rich Internet application space. I question whether they just provide a nice toolset for building highly dynamic application UIs that roll out easily, or can they really provide a higher performance operation? Don't get me wrong, anything that speeds the design and deployment of applications is a good thing, but when they are really a nice skin on Internet technology, can they offer the performance of a true thick app?

When the standard heads-down applications typically are plain, keyboard driven, frankly having little glitz or glamour, is there a place for rich Internet application technologies? Or will software vendors just adopt them as a sales tool, to out-pretty the other guys.

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Do you trust this blog?

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:23:00 +0000

As most educated users of the Web know, there is a lot of misinformation, speculation and lies out there. So who better to trust on the future approaches to help users identify trustworthy sources of information than the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Reported on the BBC News website, Sir Tim discussed a range of issues facing the Web, as he publicized the creation of the World Wide Web Foundation.

Interestingly, the issues faced by consumers outside the firewall should be concerns for organizations deploying web style collaborative and social tools inside the firewall. In a small organization, my job title and personal contacts are usually enough to generate trust that the information I post on a Sharepoint site or blog is authoritative and can be used appropriately. People know me, or at least know of me, and trust that my role in the organization can help answer a question they have accurately.

In a large organization, as with the Web, reputation is harder to ascertain. Toby Bell at Gartner talks about reputation from many angles, often with the view that reputation can only come from the aggregation of everything you write and link to, as well as your closest contacts. This doesn't give me a view of someone new at a glance though, which is one of the issues that Berners-Lee would like to see addressed, since how many of us have time to read enough to really assess a person's authority.

I'm sure that there is no easy answer to this issue. Much as Wikipedia tries hard to separate truth from fiction, organizations need to be sure that formally published policies, procedures and compliance documents are instantly recognizable and clearly segregated from more democratically published information, however authoritative the author may be. For CYA that seems to be a defensible approach.

I strongly believe in the value of collaborative technologies. I don't know that they will change the world, but certainly as more of us try to travel less, their use will grow, and the risks of 'wild wild web' need to be understood to ensure we all realize their value.

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SharePoint for Production Applications?

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:17:00 +0000

First, imagine you run a claims department for a large insurance company, or the customer service center for a top-tier bank. Then imagine the many line of business and information systems your employees use every hour of every day to get their jobs done. Finally, consider how much better their productivity and job satisfaction could be if all of the information and resources they needed were presented within a single application environment. No more carpal tunnel syndrome inducing Alt-Tab maneuvers, mornings spent carefully arranging application windows in that early Windows style, or lengthy (dull) training on several very different applications.

I have spoken to many the leaders in many organizations, run by people that you are currently imagining you are, who have recognized the appeal of bringing together all the applications their people use into one place. The approaches that are taken vary, depending on the exact need, and which software industry analyst makes the most compelling pitch. Anything is possible, including enterprise portals, 'roll your own' SOA/EAI applications, consolidation to a single platform in the SAP R/3 style, and presentation with the line of custom applications built on document management and business process management suites. And without naming names, there are many examples of the different approaches becoming extremely successful, or becoming another annoying window on an already overcrowded screen.

SharePoint, accompanied by its enormous marketing budget can't fail to make it into the departments you are imagining you run. Its appeal of being cheap, easy and 'good enough' makes it an important option to be considered. So, ask yourself this:

Does SharePoint offer enough value as a pretty configurable presentation mechanism / portal to make up for the fact that (in my experience) its just painfully slow to use?
Does it provide the integrations you need with the many core systems and information systems you have in place to plug and play (how many BizTalk skills do you have in house)?
Do the Web 2.0 style, collaborative team space capabilities of SharePoint provide application components that truly benefit your workers?
Does your organization need another application layer of 'can do lots of stuff' that pays little attention to the value it offers to the business?

In some cases, the business leaders I have met could answer 'yes' to all of the above, and are starting to try out SharePoint in their environments. In other cases, other business leaders actually have a vision to address the root cause of the mosaic of applications their employees endure. They have asked themselves a different set of questions:

Is there a way to show users just the information they need within the context of a single business application, not a series of segregated application portlets or panels?
Is there a solution that can deliver work and guide users to complete the tasks I know need to be done, rather than having to train them to always remember what must be done next?
Can the skilled knowledge workers have the flexibility to do what they need to do, without being limited by a production line workflow?
Is there a solution that can provide the best of both worlds - a targeted business solution and a flexible platform which allows me to adapt to a changing business environment?

I personally don't think that there is any one answer. As the imagined business leader, you'll be balancing an operations/IT budget against a need to deliver business value in the shortest amount of time. Some organizations will make use of SharePoint where it fits their needs best. Others will try and force fit it into applications it doesn't do well.

As the business leader, I think you have an easy question to ask yourself. Does a software solution help you meet the objectives of the business (increase revenue, reduce expenditure, etc) with the better working practices that it offers, or alternatively just provide an attractive UI and collaboration functionality around your current working practices?

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Privacy or personal responsibility?

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:26:00 +0000

Privacy of your personal information seems to be almost as hot a topic in Europe as the price of gas is in the States. Much like tax on petrol in Europe seems to be the cost of doing business, anything less than identity theft seems to be acceptable here in the US.

The fact that there has been yet another lost PC, USB drive, backup tape, or whatever, with tens of thousands of records of personal information on it is worrying. Cloak and dagger stories aside, the fact that these are routinely linked to the security services or the company contracted to provide secure ID cards for every UK citizen, big brother is failing (or not, depending on who picks up that information, says the cynic in me).

I work with government agencies and financial services companies who routinely are subject to their own internal security audits and ethical hacker test scenarios. And like anything with a moving target, sometimes they miss. Fortunately I will say, I work for a company that takes this very seriously - in line maybe to preventing production data loss from a software 'glitch'.

The problem is that individuals aren't held equally responsible. Catching up on a few days of many weeks of missed blogs, I ran across this one, A true, global Big Brother case. The story here is how trackable you become when you use a Bluetooth headset, and you don't take the responsibility to understand that it being in range of some other device that can 'discover' it, means that you can effectively be tracked as you move from place to place.

Should you have to care? Probably not. But I'd hate to see another mandatory warning having to be put in the oversized headset box, when perhaps the software that helps you set this thing up could warn you of the risks that naming the device with your phone number or name makes you identifiable - your risk, choose to be stupid if you want to. Of course, the phone you are carrying with it, with the SIM card, GPS, and so on leave you pretty open anyway, just more anonymously.

Privacy, or having your movements tracked anonymously at least, could be nothing to be feared, as long as you don't put yourself in a position where the use of the tracked device could incriminate you. Being concerned about big brother is reasonable, but worrying about it may only be for those with a guilty concience.

Am I concerned about having big brother track my movements? Of course, but Google does so virtually with every online step. There is, it seems, no escape!

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Relaunch?!!

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:24:00 +0000

I've considered getting back into blogging more frequently. The last post was end of last year, so it shouldn't be hard to do just a little better. I considered starting a whole new blog, with a new name, new style and so on, though that represents a large barrier to (re)entry, so I'll just jump right in. The biggest change will be that I'm going to try and write short, sharp and maybe

Over the next few weeks, you can expect me to write about my opinions on the trends in technology, business solutions, social networking, ECM, BPM, SOA and maybe the occasional unrelated rant as well. As ever, the thoughts, expressions and opinions are mine and mine only, so no blame should be aimed at my employer. And if you work for competitor, you are welcome to read this blog, but don't expect to find any insight into the intellectual property of Global 360!

I'm looking forward to posting and hearing your comments too!

-- Phil

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Loyalty for financial products

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:26:00 +0000

The festive season has given me a little time to start reading some blogs again and spend a little time thinking and writing. A couple of the interesting posts I came across relate closely to some of the research I have recently been doing around financial services and the value of financial products and their associated customer services.

To start with there were several discussions around something that many of us have contact with around this time of year - the loyalty program. Love 'em or hate 'em, the loyalty program has introduced itself into every type of company that depends on repeat business. One of the longest running types, the frequent flyer programs run by airlines (e.g. BA, United) and alliances (e.g. Airmiles, Star Alliance) have traditionally been placed to encourage frequent travelers to always fly with the same airline. In the past the benefit to the customer of this was twofold: firstly to collect enough 'miles' to redeem for a free flight for pleasure; second, to gain status to receive upgrades and enhanced customer service. The cost of these programs could be assessed by the airlines and shown to provide the return of constant repeat business from customers.

As the post The declining value of loyalty plans on The Bankwatch blog highlights, the loyalty program experienced by many travelers is being perceived as much lower value than in the past. In the post, Colin states:

So stepping up a level, loyalty points and plans are only of value if the customer feels value. Fewer are feeling that value nowadays, and those Banks who pay for those plans, should think about that. I think the loyalty plan model is broken.

The implication is that airline loyalty programs are failing to meet customer expectations and therefore may not lead to the repeat business that is built into the business model. The question is whether there are things that financial services institutions do for their customers that actually reduce repeat business.

Colin's post was actually in reaction to Customer Experience Matters More Than Points In Building Loyalty on Forrester's Marketing Blog, which relays the experience of Shar Van Boskirk in traveling recently:

Except! That I am really bothered by Linda's mantra "I don't care who you are or how much you travel." Now the idea of a loyalty program is that you DEFINITELY care how much I travel and I've found that my fundamental weakness as a traveler is that I really want people to care who I am.

The loyalty program has degenerated from the ability to build status as a traveler to achieve enhanced customer service and rewards, to the one thing that may get you home on the same day you started traveling when the overbooked airline starts prioritizing the handout of the last remaining seats on the only flight that hasn't been canceled. This means that use of frequent flier benefits only reinforces in my mind how poorly an airline is operating since I'm only using the benefits to negate a failure on the airline's part. This is more of an 'anti-loyalty' program...

Does this relate to banking and financial services in general? As banks and other institutions realize that customer service is core to retaining gaining more market share, understand customer loyalty and attracting new customers is key, while avoiding reinforcing negative perceptions should not be overlooked.

An oversimplification is that much of the whole model of retail banking is built on repeat business and that banks can just assume it will happen: a bank account ties you to doing business with the bank. If I want the bank to hold my cash, I have to pay for their transactions to make a transfer. At least with my bank there is no explicit loyalty program, beyond them offering a reasonably competitive online banking service that doesn't annoy me every time I use it (i.e. being marginally better than other banks). As a standard customer if I want the equivalent of premium service I basically have to pay for it through additional charges, and traditionally its been hard to move bank accounts, so I'll not do it too often.

To a bank this may appear to make a lot of sense. In everyday operation there is little to differentiate me as a customer from almost every other customer that maintains a relationship with the bank; my salary is deposited into the account and sits there until I pay some bills and maybe move a little cash to a savings account - pretty much the same as every other professional person. Attempting to segment me based on this limited information does not help the bank offer me better services or do something that will help stop me moving to a new bank.

The best many institutions do is offer a basic form of loyalty bonus such as offering better rates of interest on a new savings account to current customers. Brokerage accounts can offer a sliding scale for charges based on volume or offering cheaper trades to buy into their investment products also offers a loyalty incentive.

Customer service remains the new frontier of financial services as it becomes easier for customers to find and move their money to new institutions. For financial services loyalty and repeat business still have some major stumbling blocks:

No aggregated view of a customer is available that the bank can use for managing my relationship and offering reasonable customer service when I call a branch or call center
Information is not shared between business units, preventing me easily signing up for new products online
A single / complete view of me as a customer is not available so that the bank can see whether I am actually a great customer owning multiple of their products (and therefore worth working harder to retain) or just a mediocre customer with a savings account
Based on limited information, segmenting customers for marketing new services and products is impossible
Credit agencies are often seen as the primary source of aggregated information about me. Does a FICO score really offer appropriate metrics for offering me appropriate products and strong customer service?

Many of the issues relate back to opening a new account with an institution. Only with an accurate view of a customer from that point of 'on-boarding' through the customer lifecycle can a true relationship be effectively managed. In my opinion many financial services institutions have a lot of work to do to get an accurate and unified view of their customers, let alone measure and use the metrics that really identify the customers worth concentrating on.

What makes IT better: ITIL, COBIT, or people?

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:28:00 +0000

The last time I thought about IT 'governance' in-depth was a while back. Of course everyone claims its top of mind when thinking about SOA, since that same 'everyone' is trying to convince the business guy with the cash that the business and IT have converged, and he should spend his money on more tech stuff. And its true that if you really design meaningful services they can reflect the what the business does, which in turn enables a business leader to ensure he or she will meet the business objectives that demand a big fat bonus.

The last time I thought about IT 'governance' in-depth was prior to working on how SOA makes IT better, or beating business goals with process optimization. This was back when I concentrated on 'compliance'. In the good old days when SOX was new(-ish) and still hyped (although according to Google Trends, it never compared to the Red Sox or White Sox that dominated the sporting public's attention), I paid a lot of attention to the details of how organizations really became and remained compliant with the mass of legislation and regulation out there.

From a business standpoint it was easy - COSO was recommended by the SEC as a fine framework for documenting and testing your internal controls to ensure compliance, even though any sort of framework for defining how effectively you did business was considered radical and expensive.

IT, probably because it was always a left-brain discipline, had many frameworks that were favored and used extensively. Especially when IT was expensive and often owned only by governments or the military, minimal risk of failure (or at least the bureaucracy around CYA) was considered essential and led to the use of frameworks such as ITIL. This was intended to ensure that every phase of telecoms and technology usage, from acquisition to deployment, to eventual failure and fix was defined (if not by the framework itself, by the poor team attempting to implement and run a system).

COBIT on the other hand offered an apparently focused approach to IT governance, since it limited its scope to IT controls - the automated bits of business worried about maintaining systems to perform consistent decisions. The problem with all this was that most organizations already had some form of adopted framework. SOX compliance for IT often became a 600 page bound work of photocopies from other frameworks, printed screenshots, and a little summary of the true processes that the IT organization followed in putting new systems into production.

In reality, what IT framework do most organizations use? And how well does this tie back to the emerging governance requirements of SOA? What does the outside world do? And how does this vary between financial services organizations, government, software or others? People are core and their consistent and effective communication is as important as any framework. Without good people, most frameworks will fail.

Jim Sinur - blogging at last

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 21:00:00 +0000

A very quick post to introduce readers interested in BPM, business problems and technology, to Jim Sinur's new blog. Up until earlier this year Jim was the lead BPM analyst for Gartner (and had some extremely fancy title to go with it), so he has huge insight into the BPM industry, its customers and its technology.

Jim now is Chief Strategy Officer for Global 360, but as you'll see from his blog he still retains strong independent views on everything related to business process, which should make for some interesting reading. Let me encourage you to subscribe to Jim's blog now.

BPM or ERP - Stand out from the crowd

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 01:38:00 +0000

There are many times I've heard about BPM being described as the panacea to almost every type of business problem. Much in the same way that SAP (or Oracle) would describe ERP as being the true way of implementing solutions to your organization's specific problems. Unfortunately to me this seems like an "all or everything" situation. All business problems that SAP has ever bothered to consider valuable are covered in its ERP. Everything that ever needed process automation that you couldn't justify using SAP for can be implemented using BPM.

It seems to me that there is a whole lot of business problems that are best solved by ERP just because everyone else does. Any business process that requires industry best-practices to be replicated across the board, or application that offer your organization little differentiation are just these. ERP has these coded straight out of the box, so why bother reworking them using BPM for your organization? If these represent good learning processes to achieving BPM excellence, or you have BPM expertise and technology in house already, perfect! Otherwise, BPM is far better for processes you want to differentiate.

Now imagine that you run a business unit of an insurance company. Does your claims process really differentiate from the competition, or is it really the speed in which you pay, or the customer services that support the process that are really different? This is where BPM wins, even though ERP or boxed software could run the same process. Process optimization provided by the best BPM suites provides the analysis of process information and opportunity to improve performance based on real-time business metrics that a restrictive ERP concentrated purely on business data can not. Case management based BPM provides the contextual view of data across many systems that can make customer services really differentiate your service.

ERP and BPM both offer good solutions, often for the same problems. Pick the right solution for the right application - and when it matters, stand out from the crowd and do something different using a BPM based enterprise application platform.

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology New Account Opening BPM ERP

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Facilitate or Automate?

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:05:00 +0000

Keith Swenson has been writing some great posts on the differences in modeling what he calls "Automator" and "Facilitator" processes. Automators aim to model and control every interaction between systems and potentially also human users. Facilitators on the other hand model at a much higher level, showing the key participants in a process, and the overall flow, but do not need to delve down much beyond this, relying on the underlying system's abilities to assist users.

Keith's post from a week or two back, Human "Facilitator" Processes really lays this concept out well. He shows how a Facilitator process models the interactions between a writer and an editor in the process of preparing an article for publication. Its a two step process that I don't even need a graphical modeling tool to represent:

O ----> Writer: Write Article ----> Editor: Review Article ----> X

All in a single line we have represented the key participants and interaction between the writer and editor. According to Keith:

In order to explain this process to a person who was to participate in this, the two nodes would be enough: Betty will write the document, and when completed, George with review the document. Both Betty and George understand their role in the process, and can go about their work.

This only makes sense because most of us (especially Betty and George) understand the process this model is trying to represent. At this level, we don't upset the knowledge workers in the process by limiting their creativity with unnecessary administrative tasks or presuming that we know how to do their jobs better than them. This is the classic 'paving the cowpath' approach to process improvement that really centers on the delivery of work between users (remember the document management workflow world?).

The Automator that Keith talks about focuses on the 'server' and what it does. It deals with the automate-able pieces of the process and just presents work to Betty and George when it can no longer automate. It basically represents the system as an execution / delivery model that saves a developer writing automation code, and relies little on the capabilities of the executing system. If you BPM tool wants to execute at this granular a level, great, but don't expect to benefit from new features it may release in version 6.x without explicitly building them into a process. Do expect to be so restrictive that your users reject the system.

In his most recent post BPMN & Methodology Agnosticism Keith talks about how a modeling standard like BPMN, which is supposed to provide common understanding of process models still implicitly represents much of the underlying capabilities of the system that executes it. This is something that is encoded by the underlying and potentially unwritten methodology of the analysts that designed the process, a methodology that is rightly (I believe) biased towards the available capabilities of the target system.

I like this. It feels like there is a place for me and 'my BPM'. It feels like I don't need to have two steps or 50 steps to represent a business process. If 'my BPM' handles assignments, deadlining, escalation and event handling in a meaningful and flexible way, I don't have to draw this stuff on a model. If some things actually don't fit well in a process but are better represented by other capabilities of my system, even better. As I talked about yesterday in Don't forget the real end-users of BPM, process models shouldn't have to be the center of the world.

With a mixture of Facilitator and Automator plus a whole lot more, my process model really represents the valuable work my people and my systems actually do. A process model drawn in a modeling tool at this level would be understandable to someone outside the organization (think of all the SOX documentation you have describing processes in your organization that an auditor must examine). At the same time I can ensure it is not restricting the knowledge worker but 'facilitating' his or her everyday tasks, while automating the dull meaningless stuff. I suppose that 'my BPM' is an Automacilitator...

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology New Account Opening BPM

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Don't forget about the real end-users of BPM

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 01:13:00 +0000

BPM is obviously very much about process, but I feel that obsessive focus on the process model reinforces an abstract view of the business that misses a large part of the story. BPM software vendors are guilty of producing BPM suites that reinforce this view. They present their systems from how pretty and easy to use their process modeling tools are, and how multiple process analysts can work on a process simultaneously - treating the analyst as the primary end-user.

The reality is that the handful of process analysts are not the most important end-users of BPM software - the primary end-user is the business user that participates in the process to do his or her job and contributes to the success of the organization's critical operations day in, day out. Why do BPM vendors rarely focus on the hundreds of 'true' end-users?

BPM software often sells exclusively to business analysts. Analysts rightly need tools that facilitate the design of effective processes. And building pretty design tools is a sure way of selling software. After all, just like buying a car, most business analysts should be expected to go for tools that appear powerful and have a nice shine.

A true business application design platform concentrates on the business end-users first: what will they see, what documents do they use and create, what other sources of information do they access and what tasks do they perform? Process is obviously core, and often represents an orderly structure that many of these other things hang off of. With a platform that only focuses on process, rather than providing a framework for actually running all components of critical business applications (including business process) an organization is left to build a whole lot of technical infrastructure from scratch. This leaves the business users depending on applications that are limited by the skill of an organization's masses of software developers.

Now don't get me wrong, clean and accurate process design is an essential component of effective business applications. But failing to provide the equivalent focus on the sharp end, the actual execution of the newly perfected processes inside a meaningful business application can leave an organization trusting its critical operations to software that is more worried about 10 process analysts than 1000 concurrent users.

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology BPM

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You can't manage what you can't measure

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:05:00 +0000

Last week was fun and informative with a great Global 360 customer conference. With so many new releases timed for announcement, some would believe that the organization was just putting out new versions to conveniently appeal to the customers at the event. I know from being part of the release planning process that this was not the case - the new releases for BPM and process intelligence are incredibly strong and compelling and offer a level of integration with the business on one side, and the users desktops on the other, that is unrivaled.

My colleague and relatively new blogger, Mike Letulle, talks about the importance of process intelligence in his post You can't manage what you can't measure. His discussion lays out a little of why the new Insight360 release is so important.

I'm going to let you enjoy his discussion, while I get back to work on planning some more product releases to help organizations deliver valuable solutions that differentiate their offerings with improved accuracy, faster response and having customer information at their fingertips: the type of customer service that is more compelling than a smile and a 'have a nice day'.

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology New Account Opening

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Online security - fix the source of the problem

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 01:50:00 +0000

Randy Janinda responded to my post from a while back, Citibank Hardware Tokens Defeated... at the exact time that Bank Systems & Technology talks about how Bank of America is attacking the weakest link in online security - user's desktops:

Recognizing that defenses are only as strong as the weakest link, Bank of America has moved to shore up an area that largely is beyond its control: customers' desktops. In a move experts say is a step in the right direction toward improving online banking security, the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank announced a partnership with Symantec (Cupertino, Calif.) in which the bank will offer the security solutions provider's software to online banking customers.

This is certainly a step forward, although it cynically just looks like a great marketing ploy by Symantec at this point (just another channel for promoting a 90-day free trial). And to Randy's point it does not address the hardest point to protect against - phishing - and fooling people into handing over their authentication. How can banks help customers protect themselves so that they don't have to jump through hoops to detect scamming websites? In an environment where software can be installed on a customer's PC, like BoA is trying to do with Norton, there must be software that can reinforce the browser against phishing attacks. This may have to be the next thing that BoA offers.

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology phishing

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Component stack - a simplified architecture for applications

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 01:42:00 +0000

Its been too long, with lots of work, travel and vacation, apparently leaving me with no time to blog. I'm back, but a little rusty and jetlagged, so bear with me!

James Taylor posted today on Enterprise Decision Management Blog about a post by Roeland Loggen on his blog - BPM Suite as a component in a logical architecture. Roeland proposes a BPM-centric architecture that plugs into a range of other components to handle administrative type processes.

James suggests some enhancements to the architecture, largely to ensure that the Decision Platform can interact with the Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) components. I agree with his rationale, and would even take it a step further - every component in an architecture (that isn't pure technology) should be able to interact with every other, ensuring that really advanced business requirements can be considered, offering more and more business value.

As ever we should avoid point to point integration of every component in the architecture, instead components should offer services that can be consumed by one other, both for rigid (generic) use cases and to meet application specific requirements. Having SOA technology and a strong integration platform underlying the architecture seems like an essential requirement. SOA technology also provides the ability to host the final application as business services that can be reused in other applications across an organization or by business partners.

A benefit of taking a services approach is that generic architectures like Roeland's are simplified - they are effectively flattened; every component can benefit from every other and the architecture doesn't need a hundred lines showing the explicit connections between all of them since the connections are handled by the SOA / integration backbone. This backbone may utilize a range of technologies, and may be effectively hidden from view. Without fancy drawings, the generic architecture becomes a simple list of available components that have been plugged into the backbone, for example:

Business Process Management (BPM) - incorporating BAM and process analytics
Decision Management
Case Management
Content Management
Customer Database / Information System
Document Capture
E-Forms Management
All plugged into a SOA/integration backbone

Taking this stack approach allows business analysts to concentrate on using the components providing higher level business value in the most effective way - not the forced integration of monolithic products. Any particular business application can reuse the same architecture and technical backbone, and will benefit from platforms that are more interconnected out of the box. Specific connections (drawn on an 'architecture' diagram) now represent business use scenarios, and the value of each interaction can be easily seen, especially where new integrations may need to be built. Here is a simple example:

The application here is a fairly generic application processing solution, which shows an architecture that highlights the interactions between the components, already relying on the implicit (and invisible) technology backbone and any available services that are already in place. A different application could show very different connections, allowing the 'architecture' diagram and implementation to closely reflect the business value of the application. The technical architecture would be no different from before - a plain old stack implemented once and used over and over.

Picking a stack that can handle the high level business requirements, while being architecturally strong enough to hide much of the technology complexity, and still allowing the flexibility to meet specific application requirements across many different applications is hard work. Organizations looking to get the best value from their technology investments should look beyond simplistic 'drag and drop' and developer toolkits to ensure that new technology really can deliver complex applications fast, while allowing constant enhancement and new applications to be based on a common platform that can perform as needs grow.

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology solutions-architecture BPM EDM

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Decoupled services need BPM

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 15:41:00 +0000

One of the key advantages touted by using SOA is the way that integrated systems are 'decoupled'. When I was chatting with a colleague last week about this I realized that the meaning of 'decoupled systems' is less obvious than I originally thought.

When I was reading Roeland Loggen's Process transformation - perspectives on "BPM" blog this morning something he says around the use of process really helped me put my thoughts about 'decoupled systems' into some sort of order.

The post was From interface spaghetti to process coordination layer. Roeland gives a little of the history we are used to hearing around integration: in the olden-days we thought about integration purely as a technical and data-driven problem; technically how do we connect to each system and then join the operations and data elements of this system, to get another system to store, retrieve, update, delete or whatever some related but otherwise completely separate entity in its world? Through proprietary technical protocols and translating the requirements of one system and coding them directly to the data requirements of another. It works, but do this enough times and you have point to point spaghetti.

Its not a new story. What comes next though clearly pushes back on the enterprise application integration (EAI) and enterprise service bus (ESB) approaches to integration. Again, suggests Roeland, these approaches lead to integration spaghetti, just now this spaghetti is standards based (guaranteed pure Durham wheat, made in Italy). Although I would suggest the ESB approach does remove point to point hassles, by at least handling the technical integration layer with each system once only. So rather than needing all the technical integration between each system, the problem is reduced to requiring a transformation of data to be handled for each system to system connection. Doing this we swapped the proprietary protocols with web services (unless you live in the real world of web service interoperability) and made integration more an effort of converting one format of XML document to another.

What Roeland argues nicely is that it is BPM and the management of a process in general, not pure EAI/ESB technology alone, that solves much of the integration problem, especially decoupling systems.

So, what is 'decoupling'? We use SOA principles to access information systems through meaningful business services, rather than system specific APIs; which hides the complexities of the systems themselves. But rather than connecting the output of one service or system directly to the next service request, we decouple them, only making requests to services in the context of the business process - the business process becomes the orchestrator of all activity.

What are the advantages of doing this?

Process that was originally embedded inside the coding of business systems and services is extracted to a BPM and therefore becomes more manageable and can be updated as needed.
Integration code does not need to concentrate on a specific process or activity context, since the new business services only rely on the state of the business process to ensure correct operation, not on the hard to maintain state information held inside another proprietary application being in-sync with itself.
Complex dependencies between applications are broken, making maintenance easier, and the ability to reused services (and their underlying systems) far more likely.
Process that was previously embedded, that mixed coding specific requirements, integration activities and true business process can focus on the specifics of each in the most appropriate tool: the business process in BPM; integration in code or an ESB; application specific state in the application code.

So I think I can finally communicate what 'decoupling' is, and why its so important...

Business level interactions with other services should not be coded within the systems themselves, since this makes it impossible to use them in a different context or even variation of the same process. Decoupling of systems is about removing representation of business process state or cross service interactions from underlying applications, so they generally only interact as part of the business process managed by BPM.

Maybe someone out there has an even better description of decoupling. Let me know.

So after all that, we come back to the convergence of BPM and SOA. It seems that you can not in fact decouple systems and services without BPM - true SOA can not really truly exist without some form of business process orchestration. So why not use the strongest business process management technology, which enables the use and hosting of services straight out of the box? SOA and BPM need each other, and decoupling is just one example of this.

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology SOA BPM decoupling

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Optimizing New Account Opening - Thanks for listening

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 19:51:00 +0000

I just presented a really enjoyable web seminar about Optimizing New Account Opening, with Dennis Backer from Zarion, and talked about how jointly Global 360 and Zarion can help financial services organizations improve their new account opening processes.

If you were listening (and watching), thanks for spending the time and I hope you found it useful. You'll receive a confirmation from Shared Insights about where this webex recording is archived so you can play it again (Sam).

If you didn't get to join us, but would like to check out the discussion, follow this link to Shared Insights and sign up and they will also provide you information about the recording.

I'll also post a link here when its live

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology New Account Opening

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Optimizing new account opening

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:35:00 +0000

Tomorrow I have the pleasure of jointly presenting a web conference titled Optimizing New Account Opening: Next Generation Solutions for Enrollment.

The highlight of the show will be Dennis Backer from Zarion, talking about Zarion's best practices for new account opening and customer enrollment, based on many years experience work with European financial leaders. Since some people would argue that the European banks and financial institutions are ahead of North America in terms of providing customer-centric services, this should be an extremely insightful discussion.

Global 360 is sponsoring the event, which gives me the opportunity to talk a little about how the Global 360 technology can facilitate many of the best practices that Dennis talks about and how our business and technology focus complement one another.

If you would like to attend the event, please sign up on the Shared Insights website.

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology New Account Opening

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Managing business processes outside the box

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 20:57:00 +0000

Finally I've had a bit of time to catch up again on some news and blog feeds. As I'm reading I'm noting some of the key areas that could benefit from BPM, ECM and associated analytics that I don't think are well addressed. Treat this as a little brainstorm from me that hopefully will lead to some comments, perhaps from vendors telling me how wrong I am and how they do all this stuff already. So to get going:

1. Basel II - using BPMS to measure the accumulated risk in business processes

Nancy Feig writes in Bank Systems and Technology a nice review of Basel II and its gradual adoption in North America. The spend on Basel II focused analytics software is big, with a large amount of attention being paid to cleansing and importing the data in enormous data warehouses.

I wonder if any thought has been placed on the dynamic side of the business, the capital and risk floating in business processes like loan origination and new business accounts and large transactions, which the data warehouse is weeks away from incorporating into an institution's new credit and risk calculations. This takes true end-to-end process management and analytics that can deliver business metrics rather than the typical business activity monitoring (BAM) tools can - something closer to business intelligence for process, than counting the number of workitems in a process and drawing a bar chart.

2. Project Management - using a BPMS to track progress and provide visibility

Admittedly there are more powerful tools than Microsoft Project out there for complex project planning and tracking, and there are many business processes that are repetitively performed that use Project or Excel for definition and tracking that don't need this level of functionality. These 'process projects' often fall into the bucket that are implemented through combining a number of disparate applications through a written or Excel driven manual process.

Tracking, rather than delivery is something that is often overlooked by BPM. A BPMS can act as an incredibly versatile tracking and status monitoring engine, with the ability to truly manage the monitoring of exceptions, 'illegal' or fraudulent activity, and with analytics provide a true view of the activity and performance of these projects compared to historical data. And when paired with more powerful modeling and simulation capabilities, Lean Six Sigma style process improvement can be easily applied to these under-represented processes.

3. Service oriented architecture (SOA) - for services that aren't automated

A great focus has been put into truly automating the business processes in an organization that can truly be automated: handling B2B transactions; automated decisioning with rules engines; responding to online requests and orders with machine generated information. This is valuable, since these 'process fragments' are often the most repetitive and erroneous when handled by human beings, who generally add little value to them.

Focusing on the human components of processes alongside the truly automated requires some powerful services, integration, content management, modeling and process execution capabilities, if the whole end-to-end process is going to be managed effectively. As many integration vendors wait for BPEL-4-people before really being able to work out how to model the human element of business processes (most treat humans as just another 'system'), and many human centric process tools put an SOA tag on their current poorly performing web services, there is a need for systems that can cater to both.

In doing so 'super-solutions' that blend the requirements of pure automation, human workflow and collaboration alongside services technology enable more seamless systems to be delivered faster. And they can also deliver far better business metrics around what is going on across the whole system, not just the limited portion they manage.

So I've written about three ideas that offer food for thought around the underutilization of BPM. Many organizations have a need for handling of these types of requirements and could benefit from BPM to do it. The issues is that most need a visionary leader to work this out for themselves, since it falls outside the standard pattern of an HR onboarding process, accounts payable or one of the other typical business processes that BPM vendors choose to market to.

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology BPM Basel II project management soa

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Web service interoperability distracts from business problems

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 03:14:00 +0000

Oh the joys of SOA, web services and technology standards! They don't yet live up to their promise and probably distract businesses from the great improvements that they could make to their operations by having software systems that work together easily.

I've spent the last few days (and nights) brushing up on my understanding of the deepest darkest technology around web services, and the technical underpinnings of Service Oriented Architectures. And at first look, if I ever thought that technology was made complex by self serving vendors wanting to protect their patch, this is one of those times. Web services, and their promise of interoperable systems and simplified integration has led business IT people to believe that software has reached a great nirvana. In fact web services standards just give people another excuse to deeply delve into murky technology weeds and fight battles over often intractable problems that are largely meaningless to the performance of a non-technology business.

I had a great in depth meeting today with the enterprise architects of a large and well known insurance company. It was challenging, since I've had to bring my knowledge of web service standards, XML, SOAP and so on to a level where I can actually understand why the technology works at all. These architects, and many like them are actually translating the vision of XML for representing complex business data into reality. They are pushing XML applied to real business problems; the fact that an insurer represents a person in one way during underwriting and a different way during a claim; the fact that many businesses have different ways of representing identical entities based on the systems they use and the acquisitions of other companies they have made. The fact is that XML can provide a powerful mechanism for unambiguously representing these type of entities, not just for the sake of storage, but to really start to enforce deep rules around the accurate usage and interchange of people's information.

Web services build on the powers of XML for complex data representation, offering mechanisms for effectively transferring it from one system to another, sometimes cleanly, sometime not so cleanly. The problem is that since the beginning of the web service revolution the rules around the application of XML to the problem have been far too lax, and the flexibility of XML to represent almost anything has enhanced this. Open standards frameworks like Apache and even Java have built on their own selected translation, now outdated, so they don't work with Microsoft or IBM's approaches pushed by these superpowers. The outdated approach was not necessarily wrong, but since not widely adopted outside its own space, web services are not interoperable today, and software with a lifespan (and customer base) that doesn't allow completely rearchitecting every 18 months (i.e. virtually every enterprise application) has struggled to keep up. Which means that many of these applications that promise web services are no more interoperable than those that just offer a Microsoft COM interface.

I am starting to believe, based on the discussions I have been having, and the obvious buzz around SOA, that we are reaching a point where the basics are set and everyone is starting to agree. Now the enterprise technology guys will find deeper and more complex problems to pray on in the constant equivalent of the Betamax v VHS wars of yesteryear, and the HD-DVD v BluRay wars of today. Web services are just starting to show promise as enterprise applications catch up - but you can guarantee some extremely smart guys are currently creating some more technology problems that in five years we just manage to resolve.

By the way, my employer, Global 360 is not likely any time soon to have a vested interest in pushing any particular web service standard. Instead it is an adopter of the most broadly used and valuable standards and supporting technology, so I hope this didn't just sound like a rant from a guilty party! Just the rant of a tired supporter of getting technology standards defined and adopted accurately up front so the business knows it works and can benefit from it!

Technorati tags: web services XML enterprise applications

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Metrics for improving insurance

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 21:38:00 +0000

James Taylor has a nice post about the metrics he would consider would offer measurable improvement for insurance companies when deploying a business process management suite (BPMS) alongside a business rules management system (BRMS). I think that his metrics or benefits to the business extend across underwriting as well as claims, which is no bad thing - we know from experience that these technologies work well, so why not target them across the whole lifecycle of the customer?

The business benefits in James' post come after the technology benefits, which I think actually devalues them, but in summary the business should see measurable improvement in the following metrics:

* Fines
* Cost per transaction
* Straight Through Processing rate
* Consistency across Agents
* Appeals
* Reports ordered
* Mail, fax and shipping costs
* Cross-sell/Up-sell rates

James explain his thoughts around each of these in more detail, so take a look at his post for more information.

Now, imagine being able to demonstrate to the business leaders the probable outcome of introducing new BPMS/BRMS technology before the fact. Pre- and post-simulation alongside business metric (not just time and activity metrics, but real dollar values) are core to this and my colleagues at Global 360 are working on providing analytics to help business understand the impact of investments before they make them, as well as measuring their success and potential for improvement after the fact.

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology analytics insurance business improvement

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New account opening: as good as it gets?

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Ayres) — Thu, 31 May 2007 13:45:00 +0000

I've been talking with many coworkers and customers recently about the new account opening problem. It seems that people outside the financial services industry rarely identify a big problem with this phase of a customer relationship, until something goes wrong. After all, what could be so difficult about the process of opening a new brokerage account, buying an annuity, or getting life insurance?

Inside the industry, and depending on who you speak to, the view varies, fitting one of several categories:

Help!!! I'm drowning in paper and my competitors seem like they are a million miles ahead of me.
We've squeezed every last penny out of the process, centralizing our application processing, offshoring the data entry and outsourcing the credit and risk checking
We've made a giant leap to online application forms, which spool out the back of a printer in the backoffice for keying into our current systems
We're better than the others. Electronic forms are actually captured directly into a business application and delivered to a group of people in the back office for processing. We still need to handle paper for signatures and ID, but we think we're fairly electronic

So, if you're at the final stage, everything is great, right?! This has been the view of many US banks and financial institutions for a while - the nirvana of the electronic form and automated process. And other places outside the States are still striving to get to this point as well.

The fact is that Europe is leading a new wave in optimizing new account opening. They've already cut the waste in the process to a level that, in the leading organizations there is little left to save. They've reduced the processing time to a level that customers are comfortable with. What's left?

As we've all seen, there has been a backlash against offshore customer service - we want to hear a voice on the phone line that has a familiar accent and is not distorted by ten thousand miles of cheap copper cable. In fact, many people have shown a desire to pay for personalized service, even face to face. Unfortunately lean, centralized, outsourced processes don't allow that type of familiarity or human interation with the customer. Rarely in fact do they allow visibility into where a customer's new account application actually is in the world.

The optimization of new account opening for the European leaders, and the leading US banks are hot on their heals, is around customer service, personalized attention, and having the customer's information and application to hand instantly on request. This may be why we see a new Citi branch opening on every street corner in major US cities. But without the ability for agents in these branches to get involved in the business processes around their new and most impressionable customers, they'll just be another layer of annoyance between the customer and their new account getting opened correctly.

There is always more to do, so don't sit back on past successes. The rest of the world is getting ready to leapfrog the old-time US customer service reputation.

[UPDATE: By the way, I meant to say that these thoughts are often reflected by The Bankwatch Blog, a constant observer and commentator of banking and financial services globally. For more evidence of what the leaders are doing, take a look]

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology New Account Opening process improvement customer service

A post from the Improving New Account Opening blog