Business of BPM

USAir Process Failure

Sometimes it is hard to find an example of a broken process, but fortunately, USAir made it very easy for me.  Yesterday, I get an e-mail from them informing them that I had lost my 50,000+ miles due to inactivity.  Certainly, it is hard to fly USAir direct to many of the cities I fly out of St. Louis, but I would have used the miles for something (if I knew I was going to lose them). 

Usually, I use them to visit my wife's grandparents in Philly.  Since her grandmother was recently put in hospice care, I imagined we would be using them soon.  I could argue quite strongly about whether they should be able to simply take miles that I have earned, but I won't go down that path.

Where I see the failure is in their communication to me.  I am sure I got some message about the change in program status from 36 months of inactivity to 18 months of inactivity.  It was probably buried in some other communication (or maybe I never got it).  But, they clearly could have informed me 3 months before the miles expired or 30 days before the miles expired.  Now, they simply get to hold my feet to the fire and force me to pay money for my miles, fly them to get the miles, or get one of their credit cards.

So, what can I do?  I don't know.  Maybe, I can get the Cranky Flier blog or some other advocates to bang on USAir?  Maybe, their SVP of customer service (Anthony Mule) will respond to my nice e-mail about helping me?  I simply asked them to extend this 30 days so I could use the tickets (likely for a funeral).  Maybe, I need to try someone else like their VP of Marketing (Travis Christ) or another executive?  I tried the call center which was nice enough, but (supposedly) not empowered to override this. 

Anyways, just an example of a big company failing to care about their customers and ignoring common sense to proactively inform them when it benefits them.

MOM = MCM + PM + CEM + DAM

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:

• Marketing Operations Management (MOM)
• Multichannel Marketing (MCM)
• Permission Marketing (PM)
• Customer Experience Management (CEM) and
• Digital Asset Management

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."

Medical Devices and the 10 Faces of Innovation

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).

Natural BPMS

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?

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) 

http://www.bpmenterprise.com/content/c070212a.asp

BPI Example

I often get asked the question of what I mean by BPI or Business Process Innovation.  I often talk about how process can create a competitive differentiator for companies.  There is technical innovation, product innovation, cultural innovation, etc. 

Here is a quick example.  I am a die-hard Quicken user.  Every time I get gas, I print my receipt, carry it around for a day, and then enter it in the computer.  To Amoco, Mobil, BP, I am someone what "invisible" as a customer.  They don't have a relationship with me.

Why don't they think about their role in the process.  It wouldn't be too hard to get me to register my cards with them in return for them sending me an e-mail with a digital receipt.  They could even send me a file that I could launch which would place the transaction in Quicken for me. 

This benefits me (simpler, no risk of losing the receipt).  And, it benefits the gas companies because they now have a relationship with me.  They could include a coupon for goods inside the store or a car wash with the receipt.  Next time I go in, they can now cross-sell me.

This is what I mean by BPI.  Thinking about the process differently and looking at how you can impact the process in a novel way to capture more value and add value to the constituents. 

Asking a 90-year Old to Use E-mail

You can use business rules in many ways.  I think one of the most important areas is in customer segmentation.  There is initial segmentation around which customers to target with which offering (e.g., cross-selling, multi-variate analysis).  There is secondary segmentation around which message will compel them to act on an offering (e.g., campaign management).  Additionally, there is segmentation around which channel they are likely to respond to (i.e., e-mail, text message, letter, call, web, TV, radio).

My 90-year old grandmother who does Masters swimming called earlier this week because she had a letter asking her to send in some information to them via e-mail.  She can barely use a phone without silver dollar size numbers so asking her to respond using e-mail is ridiculous.

As you design processes that spawn communications or create messaging, thinking through the multiple levels of segmentation and the supporting rules is critical.  Ideally, some type of "artificial intelligence" by which the rules are automatically updated as the system learns is ideal.  Linking success (i.e., outcomes) to the logic used allows you to refine and improve your communications and marketing over time.   

Marketing Process

Interestingly, yesterday, I heard from five different companies about using BPM for marketing. So, I have spent the day (and will continue to spend time) flushing out the marketing processes and the value proposition associated with improving marketing processes and managing them using BPM.

For example:
* Reducing the cycle time of product development
* Easing version control of public relations
* Minimizing pricing errors
* Using data triggers to initiate processes (e.g., competitive intelligence initiates change to promotional materials)

Pricing struck me as a good one since yesterday my wife was looking at a golf club (Taylor Made R7 driver). At the store we buy from, it was $300. Online and in the paper at the store down the street, it was $190. Our golf pro called the Taylor Made rep and found out that the other store had jumped the gun. The discount wasn't supposed to begin until this weekend.

Now, both the store and Taylor Made are going to sacrifice several days of higher prices all because the pricing coordination didn't happen right. Coordination of releasing information across channels and partners is a big deal but something that a basic rules engine could manage.

I put together a high lever pricing process (see below) that I am going to work up into a demo. Overall, I am going to try to put together the story for automating the entire marketing value chain. I think it has a great story leveraging DFSS (Design for Six Sigma) and Stage-Gate and a few other best practices that are out there. More to come...

Runner's BPM - BAM and BRE

I was out for my morning run and realized that my Garmin Forerunner is a good example of automating a process. I use the Garmin 201 to track my distance and speed primarily. It gives me my splits, elevation, total run time, etc. It is an amazing tool, and I have convinced dozens of running friends to buy it.

So, why blog about this. First, because I love it. Second, because I believe anecdotes are what help people think outside the box. The Garmin took a simple process like running and addressed the work around it.

For serious runners, we track miles, days we run, splits, total distance, and many other things as you prepare for races. The Forerunner captures all that data (like a BPMS).
It allows you to report on that data (for geeky people like me who love data analysis)...known as BAM or Business Activity Monitoring in the BPM world. It also has embedded rules in it...like a BRE or Business Rule Engine.

Some of the business rules are process level rules such as the one that stops calculating your average pace if you standstill for x seconds. Some are customizable rules that say whether to calculate your spilts based on each mile or half-mile or whether to beep at you when you go outside acceptable bands (i.e., too slow or too fast).

BPM and Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is one of those terms that means different things to different people. In the 90s at Ernst & Young, I remember leading several efforts internally to create our knowledge management infrastructure. Our focus was on collecting lessons learned, key working papers, proposals, and deliverables. We would sanitize them (i.e., remove client specifics), review them with SMEs, and store them in Lotus Notes databases based on a taxonomy we had developed.

A few years ago, I led an effort at Express Scripts to select a document management tool to do much of the same. The idea was to get information off of people's desktops and from their file cabinets. We were going to load documents and scan documents. They would be approved by a central resource and categorized according to a metadata schema based on a taxonomy we developed. They then had role based security around the documents with a Google like search functionality.

But, knowledge management (at least in these forms) is difficult to embed into the daily processes. We ramp up efforts and get some initial push, but without continued focus, the databases become old and all you have done is spent money and effort to create a quickly outdated resource. That can be managed (of course). At E&Y, one of our performance metrics was what we had submitted for the shared repositories.

I haven't heard it explored much, but I see this institutionalization of knowledge management as a big value add for BPM. By capturing unstructured data (e.g., comments) along with documents in a process, you can create a shared repository for knowledge management. Additionally, you can begin to link outcomes data with those documents. Image at some point being able to analyze and say that project managers would used fishbone diagrams for analysis were 20% more successful than those that didn't. Imagine having the process prompt you based on previous experiences to say that if going down this exception path you should look at the following scenarios to understand what will be needed. Imagine that if you are working with a particular client that the technology could push information about that client to you at the right time of the process.

By simplifying and automating the knowledge, I think BPM could be a great enabler of knowledge management.