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I just thought I would post the fact that Talisen (my current employer) has decided to merge with Mycroft. Mycroft brings a very strong brand in the financial services industry and around identity management. Here is the official announcement...
MYCROFT AND TALISEN MERGE TO FORM PREMIER PROVIDER OF IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT, IT SECURITY SERVICES
SAN FRANCISCO
I read an article this morning by Chris Graham on Multichannel Marketing which I thought was a great framework for several marketing related items I have been thinking about. He talks about the following:
If you don't know what all these mean, it doesn't surprise me, but I think MOM is the key. Chris describes it as MCM in a box. I think it is the key of how direct marketing processes operate. You need to understand the customer. You have to know what channel they respond to. You have to know how to effect their behavior. You need to have proven messaging (DAM) that you can pull from. And, this needs to be part of a process so that it is not simply a one-time ping of that customer.
From Chris' article..."So let's look at an MCM scenario: The customer makes an enquiry through his digital satellite TV remote in response to an advertisement; immediately an email is sent back to them, a personalized MMS confirms the dispatch of a personalized printed document specific to their geographical area, a call center flags a "to do" for seven days time, from which a personalized micro Web site is automatically generated with the latest product literature specifically for the products they want to look at."
Today, I unsuccessfully searched for a smart consumer device that would link process and medical monitoring. I am sure it is out there, but I couldn't find it. The opportunities are numerous.
Imagine having a device that monitored your blood sugar levels and sent off messages based on your current levels. The messages could be to home to make something different for dinner. It could be a note to yourself to remember to snack earlier in the day. It could be a note to your physician keeping them aware of your situation. I think that the opportunities for consumer centric medical devices that have embedded intelligence and plug into some type of BPM or process centric model are great.
This made me think of one of my favorite companies - IDEO. If you don't know them, you should. They have been involved in all types of innovation and product design. The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley is a great book about their process. You should also read the article about the different types of innovators in Fast Company.
This article categorizes them into Learning, Organizing, and Building personas. Which are you? I am either a Cross-Pollinator or a Collaborator (in my mind anyways).
It is probably too early to make any decisions here around Consumer Driven Healthcare (CDHC), but I enjoyed an entry on Matt Winn's blog Punctuative about this (see entry). A quote I especially like is:
If I were a product manager in any other industry and saw scores this low in customer satisfaction and understanding, I’d be thinking of pulling that product from the shelves or retooling it,” says David Guilmette, managing director of Towers Perrin’s health-care consulting practice.
I believe a big issue here is communications. Patients suffer from too many healthcare communications and too much healthcare information which is delivered to them in ineffective mediums (e.g., letters that happen two weeks (or more) after the event) using confusing language and ask them to jump through hoops. CDHC (and healthcare in general) will be much more successful when companies embrace a CPG (consumer packaged goods) approach to driving behavior. I am working with a client right now that has had some great successes in this area and which has some great idea. It is worth your time to look at them if you operate in this space as an HR director, a managed care company, a pharmacy benefit manager, or even a healthcare provider. The company is Silverlink.
Last year, I had a chance to do some consulting for my previous employer (Express Scripts). One of the areas that I helped them with was CDHC (consumer driven healthcare). I worked on competitive intelligence, framing the opportunity, and creating the strategy pitch including evaluating a technology investment. Recently, I have ended up in a few conversations about this topic so I thought I would spend a minute on it.
Incenting people to get serious about health and wellness is an interesting challenge. You have a handful of questions to answer:
There are some interesting players out there. I was always fascinated when I saw that Humana (who is progressive in many things) was working with Virgin to offer airline points for working out at a gym (for example).
Now, there are several companies focusing specifically on creating wellness incentives (IncentiveLogic, Hallmark Insights, Healthpoints). There is even a Wellness Council of America. I found an article on their site that provides a good overview - click here.
Some related information:
I could go on. It is an interesting topic. As the focus grows, you will see your consumer experts begin to focus on this problem. It is not unlike the move from defined retirement to 401K. With CDHC and other programs, the consumer is becoming more important in making healthcare decisions. With that, an understanding of the health consumer is important. This is not done well at most companies today especially with any of the typical marketing rigor that you would expect - segmentation models, campaign management, database analytics, etc.
Now here is a name written by either an academic or someone from finance - "value based insurance design". Try selling this to the masses. But, regardless of the name, the concept is very interesting. At the core, most of what I have seen revolves around companies (e.g., Marriott) reducing the copayments on certain drugs for patients that are compliant with other actions (i.e., taking other medications, participating in disease management programs). I had provided clients with some advice on these programs 2-3 years ago before it had a name. Now, we even have an Center for Value Based Insurance Design at my alma mater - University of Michigan.
The key challenge here is plan design and how to create incentives that motivate people to take the right actions. Here are some of the questions that I remember struggling with a few years back:
A lot of these questions play into the broader field of CDHC (consumer driven healthcare).
If you are interested in this topic, you should visit the Center and Activehealth. Activehealth was acquired by Aetna and is clearly the leader in this space.
So...linking this back to BPM is pretty easy. VBID takes a process (which is the patient's healthcare) and establishes a series of rules (e.g., if they do X, lower their copayments on Y). They systems need to connect a series of companies / databases to share information (think SOA). Subsequently, the company investing in this type of solution needs a dashboard and reporting to understand their results and how their investment is paying off. Finally (and ideally), the company needs to have some ability to do simulation and understand how changes to the rules might impact future results.
I ended up being out of commission most of this week after my 3-year old kicked me in the eye and scratched my cornea. Yes - it hurt pretty bad. Although the hardest part was being a type-A personality and having to sit around temporarily blind. For the first 24-hours, I couldn't open either eye.
I was reflecting back on the week (now that I can actually read) and realized there was one interesting example for BPM. There were little things that impressed me around the healthcare process...for example, the eye doctor had my chart at 8am on Wednesday when I had just left the emergency room at 1am.
But, the most interesting piece to me was the fact that neither eye would open the day after the incident. I asked the doctor about this and he said it was (essentially) my body's defense mechanism. This made me think about business rules which I thought of as an interesting analogy. Our bodies are probably the perfect BPM systems. They serve to process a series of rules that control our responses to things. They learn to improve the responses over time. And, with genomics and other areas of medicine, we can begin to map these processes.
Now, getting BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) or dashboards of our bodies actions is a little harder (unless you are sitting in a hospital bed), but I think the general concept has some applicability.
Anyways, I won't stretch too far, but there is something there.
Is marketing a process or really a bunch of sub-processes that are part of other end-to-end processes? I was looking at how to automate the different marketing functions (new product development, product management, pricing, research, marketing communications, and voice of the customer) and realized that most of these are simply part of a bigger process.
The process that consumes most of these is the lifecycle from idea through sales through billing.
Here is a quick picture I came up with to describe the marketing function from a subprocess view.
Perhaps you wonder why this matters? Architecturally, it matters if you are building a system and want to connect processes.
Technology-wise, it matters if you want to focus on a SOA (service oriented architecture) approach where you can re-use components.
Organizationally, it matters to understand how data and tasks flow and how to optimize your investment.
Process-wise, it matters to understand best practices.
As I have talked about several times, the fear with any improvement is sub-optimization which often happens when you focus on a subsection of the entire process.
Here is a article to read on sub-processes (a little technical for some of you)
I found it interesting that the WSJ ran an article about the Strategic Execution Officer (SEO) and described it like I would describe a Chief Process Officer (CPO). Below are a few quotes, but I think it does a great job of explaining the role. It is difficult. It blends technology and business. Execution is critical. You become a change agent. You have to understand process and what is important. In other words, it is a difficult spot to fill.
"The SEO is an executive put in charge of building, and managing, a platform of digitized processes and data that serve key companywide purposes."
"Not only must they be well-versed in IT, but they also must have the authority to redefine roles and incentives for relevant managers and workers. SEOs and their staff have a personal stake in the outcome of such systems, and can move people out of the way if they are resistant to change.
CIOs frequently bring to this role not only technological expertise but an awareness of how companywide business processes make new kinds of employee behaviors possible, and how the processes require greater coordination across units."
Source: Ross, Jeanne and Weill, Peter, All Roads Lead to the SEO, WSJ, 6/16/07, pg. R9
I am a big believer in the Lean approach to continuous improvement. The first of a two part article on Lean Tools for BPM was posted on BPMEnterprise. It is worth a read.
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