When you set off on a process transformation initiative, it is intrinsically about where you want to go and how you want to be, how differently you want to do things – it is about to-be, the target state.
It is about the Future.
Browsing Category Business
A Strategy between the Gap and the Result
In a recent short commentary on Strategy in the McKinsey Quarterly aptly titled “Synthesis, capabilities, and overlooked insights: Next frontiers for strategists”, Fred Gluck (who was also the founder of McKinsey’s Strategy Practice way back in 1988, as I learned) says strategies always come from one of three sources – strategic planning, strategic thinking, and opportunistic decision making. In this article, Gluck delves a bit into how these three work, touching upon some interesting insights. I recommend you read it…
PegaWorld 2014 – Getting really serious about business technology
When you are an enterprise spending top dollar on software products, you like to be assured that you are betting on products that satisfy a fairly logical and predictable check-list that assess the vendors products on maturity, stability, cost effectiveness, ability to deliver to the need and so on. For decades these have really been at the core of buyer expectations that software vendors have tried to talk to. And in a sense, most vendors have traditionally also built and…
Buckle-up. The BPM ride is about to begin…
I’ve just returned from a rather adventurous and eventful trip involving two important dots on Gartner’s magic quadrant for BPM. One is a tech behemoth interested in almost everything related to IT, and the other, a vendor that has a laser focus on BPM. The first dot is of course IBM and the other dot, allegedly the ‘best one’ on the quadrant, Appian. I am talking, of course, about IBM IMPACT at Las Vegas and AppianWorld at Washington D.C. Although…
…and it’s only the Second Year into the Teens…
You might find this funny, and maybe even somewhat disjointed in logic, but the IT industry after all these years, is now going through its teen years and it appears to have all the makings of ‘teenage’ as we know it. Even if 2014 is only its second year, the anxiety, the tension is all very visible. Cloud, Mobile, Social, internet-of-things, – look at it anyway you like, there is a writing on the wall that the extent of change…
Challenging the Status Quo….
Updated and republished. Craig Reid posted a great write-up about customer on-boarding this week that I think is a good read covering some of the usual issues plaguing the old customer on-boarding process. I am repeatedly surprised when I learn about how badly organizations – fairly large ones at that – handle customer on-boarding. If on-boarding is as important as it might seem, judging from the vehemence with which they agree it is, how come it turned out such a mess?…
Challenging the Status Quo.
Craig Reid posted a great write-up about customer on-boarding this week that I think is a good read covering some of the usual issues plaguing the old customer on-boarding process. I am repeatedly surprised when I learn about how badly organizations – fairly large ones at that – handle customer on-boarding. If on-boarding is as important as it might seem, judging from the vehemence with which they agree it is, how come it turned out such a mess? Craig lists…
BPM Case Studies – The good, the bad and the good in the bad…
When, during a vendor presentation, the PowerPoint section separator mentions ‘Key Case Studies’ or something like that, you do one of the following – Lean forward in your chair and listen intently to see parallels to your own situation Yawn involuntarily. Or voluntarily, depending on who is running the slides. Interrupt at the 23rd second after the title of the next slide has been read, to ask – “did you use agile or waterfall?” and then drift into a rewarding…
The Case For A Jack Of All Trades, Master Of One. (Or More)
When a good friend and I exchanged a few tweets back and forth the other day, it began like the usual exchange of views over news items that the #bpm timeline throws up once in a frequent while. But the ‘twonversation’ with my twitter counterpart – a venerable thinker in technology, particularly BPM – got me thinking and reinforced what I have always thought about the skills that really make a real good BPM Consultant. My friend had created…
I am a weirdo. I don’t belong here.
…that’s right. I don’t belong here. In fact, what the hell am I doing here? Before you jump to the wrong conclusions, those aren’t my words. You’ll know whose words they are in just a minute. But before that, I want to spend a moment to talk about something that seems to be (but probably is not) a new problem. A problem that is giving more and more program managers and project managers sudden attacks of sleeplessness and acute cases…
How Can you Design Intelligent Processes?
Earlier today, I read something that made me snort on my afternoon coffee. Not just because it was funny, but because, to me it had some additional insight that I thought was worth sharing with you, especially when you think about Intelligent Processes and how they can be crafted for a BPM initiative. Here it is: Two men walk into a bar. The first man says I’ll have some H2O. The second man says I’ll have H2O too. The…
Prospects don’t care about your sales process. Maybe you shouldn’t either…
One of my friends thinks ‘Sales’ is about talking. Another friend I follow on Twitter thinks it is about ‘convincing’ the customer. I wince every time I hear someone characterize an engaging, fluent, fast talking, bloke as ‘sales material’. Sales, as you might agree, is really not any of that. Definitely not. Unless you sell snake oil or some hair cream that promises magical appearance of hair overnight on sprawling bald patches on the head. Glib talk, ‘convincing’, pushiness…none…
Great Customer Service: Sometimes it is YOU
Last week work beamed me to Chennai in Southern India, a city where I was born and had also spent a large part of my childhood. Work has taken me to Chennai often and I am usually booked at a hotel that is not far from where I lived as a kid. The hotel has a lot of nostalgia value for me, for, among other things, it has a swimming pool where I spent a few hours every evening through my…
Process comes before a smile in customer service
When we are at the receiving end of poor customer service, it unfailingly ticks us off. Being champions of process only makes it a little more painful because even while we go through a first-hand experience of poor customer service –- be it over the phone or a counter –- we are also immediately able to see beneath the surface and understand why things are likely going wrong. Now, on a theoretical plane, you might think that this ability…
Infuse, not garnish: Mobility is no longer a peripheral add-on.
It must have been around a decade ago when I first received a ‘text alert’ from a bank on my mobile phone. My bank had let me register my mobile phone number with them for this and once they activated it, I started receiving text alerts after every credit card transaction I made. Today, I still receive these alerts, but I also have an ‘app’ the bank has additionally given me, from which I can do a lot of…