News, Views & Reviews on Digital Process Automation, BPM, Performance Management & IT industry trends
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…
One of the pet peeves for the fanatical BPM believers among us has been the gap between what outcomes of BPM initiatives could be if done right, versus what it seems to be on the ground. We (the fanatics, that is) have been looking at that gap and discussing and debating why BPM benefits seem so elusive, why customers find it so challenging to do all the right things in order to ensure great benefits and so on. But…
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…
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…
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…
I am not the type that regularly keeps up with discussions on LinkedIn groups. I want to be that type, though. Unfortunately a rather erratic work schedule, frequent travel, waves of intense 12-14 hour workdays for weeks make it rather tough to be that type. I manage to drop by some groups whenever I get a chance though. Lately I have been following a few new groups and discussions and while there is a lot of noise there, I was quite…
It has been a boring pattern for all of Mankind’s history that was ever recorded. Or, for that matter, not recorded. And you’d surely have noticed it yourself if you are from a big family and/or have a large circle of friends from different age-groups. For as far back as I can remember, proud new parents have made it their core mission to make me believe how particularly smart their kid, that little joy-bundle was and how he displayed…
Last week, while I was in London on work, I had to stand around for over an hour outside a client’s office building, in the cursed cold weather, waiting for my colleague to show up. I could only enter the office with him as he was the one with access to the building and authority to sign me in. This kind of a situation isn’t always a very pleasant experience. Especially if it was a first-thing-in-the-morning meeting, and more…
One of the recurring themes in product demos in the recent past is that all too familiar spiel about being “technology for business”. To be sure, this T for B angle is a really good thing and all that. But it’s a problem when vendors lay that out freely and happily without having a product that genuinely lives up to that spiel. And what’s worse, when they notice that you don’t display any skepticism and that your eyebrows didn’t…
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…
To me it seems that with the onset of ‘Social Media’, the bigger theme of a ‘Social Paradigm’, and the associated chatter these have generated, has driven all of us into some kind of a ‘me-too’ mode. Almost everyone in the industry – you and me included – has a point of view. Almost every enterprise software worth its salt has released, is releasing, talking or thinking about ‘social’ features. The BPMS market has not been spared either has…
All this Business Process Management talk is getting boring. And clichéd. Blogs. Forums. Communities. White papers. Analyst calls. Product vendor presentations. Webinars. Analyst events. One-on-one meetings. Gardens. Roof tops. That’s an indicative list of all the places where it has been said time and again that BPM is first a (management) concept THEN a technology. Not one, not two, but hundreds of bloggers, analysts and thought leaders, including the self-proclaimed (the tribe is ever increasing) have said that enough….
Very thought provoking question on the ebizQ forum today: “What is the biggest barrier to companies starting a BPM project?” Quite a few interesting responses. My post, was this, IMHO: “ The biggest barrier is really not technology, vendor, product, SI or that consultant or anything else outside the firm. They could become barriers, yes and they well might. But that’s really not your biggest problem. The biggest barrier is not acknowledging the fact that the biggest barrier could be something…
When you are obsessed with something, you start seeing it in everything you do. If you are someone with a tendency to always be happy, you will find happiness and joy in just about anything you encounter : the creak of the wooden floor, a blade of grass – or many blades of grass for that matter, fragrances, sun-rays, you name it. A recent analyst report claims that 76.34% of non-millennial, male respondents from this psychobablographic category actually enjoyed conversations…
I think there is a need for this thing called Agility in your organization. You agree? You do? OK. I had a feeling you would. It is a burning need, no? Third degree, even. Now let me ask you this. Of all those people in your organization – CXOs, Business users, process owners, compliance managers, IT, you name it – who do you think has the biggest need for that agility? [sound of clock ticking] Ok, let me pose that…