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The only constant is Change

Jun 12th, 2009
by Hicham.
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Busy, busy, busy. This is our reality, everyday. In the margin of BPM Exchange Social Network launch and expansion, we managed to advance the eZ Netflow project so that the community could benefit from it and start working on BPM projects using state-of-the-art collaboration engines.

In the meantime, we have elected a wonderful project as the basis for this. If you remember our previous post and what to expect for this summer, I have mentioned the possibility to use a framework similar to BaseCamp, and we are happy we found one, supported by an active community first from Chile, and now from all over the world. Please allow me to introduce OpenGoo, which is a continuation of ActiveCollab, before it went proprietary.

Prior to choosing OpenGoo, we evaluated very similar projects such as ProjectPier and Collabtive, both promising, but for now, far behind the community dynamics that drive OpenGoo.

Now, as our first implementation of eZ Netflow, Summer09 version, we will empower BPM Exchange members to use such a wonderful platform, in conjunction with other tools that make BPM practitioners life simpler, easier and more succesful. A special post on this will follow.

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Posted in: eZ Netflow.

eZ Netflow Part4: What to expect for Summer09

Apr 9th, 2009
by Hicham.
2 comments

What if you could combine the simplicity of project management a la BaseCamp, the power of a BPM platform like Intalio Community Edition and the flexibility of an online reporting and BAM platform like JasperServer Community Edition? That would be great and this is what we did.

eZ Netflow is about combining best in class project, process and reporting management software-as-a-service for the rest of us, people with small budgets yet big dreams. Best in class means: accessible, adaptive, manageable and anything not tagged as “Enterprise Level Software”.

So, in details, the Monster Within is composed of:

  • Best in class project management software: BaseCamp or equivalent. Forget about MS Project or Sharepoint!
  • Best in class process management software: Intalio Community Edition, free and open source. Maybe some additional stuff coming from their very active community.
  • Best in class reporting platform: JasperServer Community Edition, also free and open source. This is the most user open source BI tool, and has a bright future ahead.
  • Best in class software-as-a-service: hosted at Rackspace and managed by a global team of system and application developers.
  • Our Motto: “Less is more”. How many times did hear this one? How many times have you applied it? Frankly, not that much. Time for us now to stick to the principle. We should not spend a lot of time or money getting eZ Netflow on production. Credo1: reuse as much as possible. Credo2: leverage open source. Credo3: keep user actions to a minimum so they feel comfortable, almost no need to read any documentation.

Now, what to expect from our upcoming launch of eZ Netflow ? I have taken some screenshots from our lab to show you what you may see in the summer09 version.

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Posted in: BPM, BPO, eZ Netflow.

eZ Netflow Part3: The Monster Within

Feb 13th, 2009
by Hicham.
1 comment

This is my third article about what we are working on to get eZ Netflow up and running. As I explained earlier in Part1, there are many objectives attached to this project. Now, I would like to take this opportunity to get back to the basics and explain the real drivers for all this and explain a typical use case for what I want to achieve.

Few months ago, I came to know about a stunning sales methodology, called Select Selling. The little story of this methodology started with Siebel, the first company to introduce the “Opportunity” concept, in times where sales people were dealing with just accounts and contacts. There was no sales funnel at that time, whereas now every sales team is watching the funnel as the major key performance indicator (KPI). After Oracle acquired Siebel, the database software giant decided the get rid of something they did not master: methodology. Then a spin-off was formed and now it is named the TAS Group. The TAS Group have really evolved the Opportunity Management Process, while introducing other methodologies related to best practices in account management and channel partners for instance. You can find out more about Select Selling by visiting their website.

So, after reading the free book, courtesy of the TAS Group, I got excited by the concept of wearing the customer shoes, something very powerful. Steve Towers and Terry Schurter branded in “Customer Expectations Management”. So I wanted to put this methodology into action. What tools could I use? My first and natural step was to take a look at a piece of software provided by the TAS Group and called Dealmaker™. The software was targeted to sales people and you can only use it internally. This is completely in contradiction with what Select Selling is all about: being open to the customer expectations and embracing his buying perspective (outside-in view), instead of following our own sales cycle (inside-out view). Let’s get into some details to explain.

Select Selling consists of four (4) steps, which embrace the buyer’s perspective: requirements (R), evidence (E) and acquisition (A) and post-sale (P). During these phases, the sales representative will need to identify and involve six different buying influencer roles : the line of business manager (LOB Manager), the user buyer (User), the evaluator (Evaluator), the financial buyer (Financial), the legal buyer (Legal) and the internal champion (Champion). This is where a key tool called the “Power Gauge” gets into action to measure the depth of the buyer and the sales reps relationship. As a sales man (or woman), the more roles you know and involve at each phase, the better your chances to win the deal. So the more I was reading about Select Selling, the more obvious was my need to have a practical and open tool to manage communication and feed-back from the buyer. I couldn’t just use emails as it is too unstructured. Select selling is about structure and potential customer empowerment. So I decided to use a kind of extranet for such communication. I consider every opportunity as a project and when it comes to universal online project management tools, one service really stands above the crowd and it’s called BaseCamp (www.basecamphq.com) from 37signals. Recently, this tools has inspired active Open Source projects, which I decided to use. Why I used the open source project instead of the online service from 37signals is a long story and beyond the scope of this article, but in short, I needed flexibility and control.

Then, thinking of Select Selling as a process, I decided to give it a shot to the best open source BPMS out there, Intalio|BPMS. Intalio leadership also made me realize that in order to have a complete BPMS, I needed to add a business activity monitor (BAM) and a business rules engine (BRE). I will talk about this in another article, but let’s keep the essential stuff here: BAM would help me monitor how my new sales process is doing, while the BRE will allow me to quickly customize my process, without necessarily having to redesign my whole process in Intalio|Designer. Now that I have decided what my software stack (The Monster Within) will be, I started working on the process modeling, design, execution and monitoring, the same PDCA four steps I described in my previous article. The results are so fantastic that I would like to share with you the project in the near future. Right now, my team is assembling the last pieces of the puzzle and once they are done, I will write a tutorial about how to implement Select Selling, using eZ Netflow.

… To be continued …

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Posted in: BPO, Use Cases, eZ Netflow.

eZ Netflow Part2: The Process Improvement Cycle

Jan 23rd, 2009
by Hicham.
1 comment

At the time of this writing, Toyota is the largest car manufacturer in the world. Experts will tell you there are multiple reasons behind this success, including new methods of managing total quality and improving on processes every 10 minutes or so. For my part, I keep this explanation by a Toyota senior executive and it goes like this:

Brilliant process management is our strategy. We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes. We observe that our competitors get average (or worse) results from brilliant people managing broken processes

So if the Japanese car maker has become such an outstanding model for thousands of companies worldwide, it is because they came to the conclusion (not so easily though) that the first step towards sustainable success is to recognize that if your people make your company unique, it is the way you organize your processes that distinguish you from your competitors and help you stay in the business. Entrepreneurs, executives, managers and eomplyees must shift to a new way of thinking the business as a portfolio of processes – some of which are critically important and need constant improvement. They should develop a process maturity cycle that fits their business goals. Improvement opportunities will pop everywhere and you may not have the right tools to seize these opportunities one by one.

The easiest process maturity model known today is portrayed in the figure below, a.k.a. the Deming or Shewhart Cycle or PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act).

Figure 1: Continuous Process Improvement

The parallel with figure 1 is simple:

  • P: Assess or reassess your current processes.
  • D: Plan and design improved processes
  • C: Implement the improved processes
  • A: Evaluate how new processes are helping you reach your goals

This article is not about PDCA especially, although I encourage the reader to get informed about it. But my point is that this is a cornerstone in eZ Netflow project and we should all bear in mind that if we are doing all this, it is for making things easier, simpler and more successful. Process improvement is not just about effectiveness (doing things better), it is about efficiency (doing the right things). We want to reach the point of doing the right things better!

So, in practice, I want eZ Netflow to match for all kinds of teams and groups interested in launching and maintaining process improvement cycles quickly, with the help of technology. Businesses and processes may vary, still the goal remains the same: to allow you and your colleagues to easily start and organize all aspects of your process improvement project, on a collective effort in just one place, while keeping things visible and transparent.

Eventually, I like to think eZ Netflow is especially for everyone who is involved in business process outsourcing (BPO). It could be marketing and communication agencies, independent or internal sales teams, web designers, lawyers, architects, accountants, financial brokers, associations, head hunters and so on. In fact, in a typical siloed organization, everyone in doing outsourcing, between departments managed as independent organizations within one enterprise. Thank you Taylor!

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Posted in: BPM, CRM, eZ Netflow.

eZ Netflow Part1: Project Pre-Launch Subscription

Jan 7th, 2009
by Hicham.
1 comment

This is an introduction article about my vision of the soon to be published eZ Netflow project and how this vision may come true while working to get this online service up and running in the shortest time possible. You may want to skip to the end to see an overview of the polished product. I started thinking about this project when I was interested by the new business process management systems (BPMS), while trying to figure out how I could make packaged software (ERP, CRM, SCM…etc.) customizable in two dimensions: data and process. Data customization was relatively easy, add a field here and there, for such a user screen and you were done. Things were much more complex when I had to work on custom user scenarios, with different rules or additional steps, not to mention the need to integrate all this with a couple of existing applications here and databases there. Process customization is where legacy packaged software fails in general.

As I further deepened my knowledge of BPMS nice features, I managed to realize that with such technology, you can have both types of customization: process and data. Then, I imagined what would be a “seamless” customization of existing applications. Why just existing applications instead of a new one (a.k.a. composite application)? The answer is simple: change management burden. You don’t want people to radically change their applications, which have been stabilized after a very long time of debugging, maintenance and custom people training. In fact, all you want is to allow them to quickly ad new features, without disrupting what they already take for granted.

Now, remember that what motivated the existing applications was the need to solve a specific problem in a specific context or period of time. Business evolves and the only constant is change. Change in culture, habits, regulation, market pressures and opportunities….etc. If you analyze the nature of change, it is not about the base concepts or objects you need to deal with. A contract or a sale opportunity is such a concept or object. In practice, this means that existing applications are still very usable in that sense. The only thing you need is to allow for progressive extension depending on the “user context”.

The user context is very centric to what I want to achieve. On the one hand, as knowledge workers, our brain is trained to act or react following a certain pattern depending on our context. On the other hand, the software applications we use should be the natural extension to our brain and let things get done the way we like at runtime, in contrast with design time. Runtime is the time we execute our business processes. Design time means the time we should all take to decide what is the best and appropriate process to fulfill our duty while making our life easier, simpler and more successful.

So, in short, what I wanted with eZ Netflow is something that will:
1)    Provide a space where you can get a feeling about what a BPMS is and what it can help you achieve
2)    Be easy to setup and run in a couple of hours or minutes
3)    Forge a wide community of process experts to provide valuable advice on the business and technical levels
4)    Invite all kind of people and give them the necessary means to rethink their processes
5)    Allow for quick deployment of new business processes in an existing application
6)    Seamlessly integrate and complement existing applications

In a future article, I will set a use case to illustrate these objectives and why they are so important. There is much to come in the next weeks and you may be surprised how fast we can move. So stay tuned!

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Posted in: BPM, BPO, eZ Netflow.

BPO is expanding, so does compliance!

Dec 2nd, 2008
by Hicham.
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Poised to register an impressive CAGR of more than 12% over the years 2008-2012, the world business process outsourcing (BPO) market is projected to reach about US$975 billion by 2012. The US, with a market share estimated at 53% in 2008, represents the largest BPO market worldwide, while Asia-Pacific, primed to maintain a CAGR of 20% over 2008-2012, constitutes the fastest growing market.

A month ago, my friend Ismael Ghalimi wrote a (long) article on BPO and BPM 2.0.  What Ismael mentions makes you quickly realize that BPO will need modern business process management systems (BPMS), as a requirement for more flexibility, agility and over all for compliance. As you may know, one of the big challenges of outsourcing activities is keeping control over the process. The service buyer needs to keep an eye on the end-to-end process, and not consider the outsourcer (service provider) as a black box anymore.

Furthermore, with the current financial industry turmoil, visibility, transparency and control will be on the top of every executive agenda. When you just think that failing to ensure a high level of compliance could cost you more than dealing narcotics, you’d better think again and consider this seriously: don’t let your BPO provider alone, keep a close eye on his activities and the way he performs them. Challenge his processes against your own regulation (SOX, HIPAA to name a few) to see how all this would stand against the SEC.

Now, in reaction to Ismael’s post, I agree with most of what he said, except with these few points that need further discussions:

  1. Quoting “Moving forward, most financial institutions will come to the same realization, and will focus on the only process they can master: Customer Relationship Management” : this may be considered true depending on the meaning of CRM. For me, CRM starts the minute you recruit your customers with torough screening of their compatibility with your business values and capabilities. Yet, most of financial institutions (FSI) actually outsource this part of their CRM strategy. They all rely on a network of independant brokers that take care of targeting and qualifying potential customers and then selling to them the products they feel the best for themselves first (Commissions). This is one part of the root causes of the current financial crisis: the dislocation between the end customer and the financial institution, deepened by the broker, will benefit first the latter. This is why websites like http://www.smarthippo.com/ come to rescue and make real sense. So Ismael should not use “can master”, rather “must master” instead. An important difference here.
  2. I don’t believe financial institutions would let go a lot of internal processes, because they will always suffer from the “not invented here” syndrom. People very often believe that they can do better than the neighbor, even if his grass is always greener !
  3. The few FSI that will accept to outsource a great deal of their internal processes may never find the right BPO provider that will act as per their strict requirements. As far as I know, today, few BPO buyers ask their provider to adapt his procedures or processes to specific rules or requirements. BPO providers like to enforce their “black box” privileges so they can master all their internal processes and this is where I’m pretty sure there will be a major clash in the near future.
  4. FSI are service companies after all. Business performance experts continue to prove that, unlike manufacturing companies, service companies are far below optimal performance. Some experts claim that these companies never surpass a 50% effectiveness ratio. So there is room for improvement!

One fact remains true, weather the financial institutions turn to more BPO or not: the human factor and his central role in process improvement. As one analyst said: in the 20th century, we managed to increase materials effectiveness 50 times. Now the challenge of the 21st century will be to increase human effciency by the same order of magnitude. So Ismael, we have more than 20 years left for that!

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Posted in: BPM, BPO.

My turn now!

Nov 9th, 2008
by Hicham.
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In this Blog, I will talk about everything around business process outsourcing (BPO), business process management (BPM), customer relationship management (CRM) and anything related to it. Step by step, I will also reveal our motivation in this project and the kind of behind-the-scenes stuff you may be interested to know about. Until our online service is launched, I will bring to you some details if you subscribe to the relevant blog posts.

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Posted in: BPM, BPO, CRM, eZ Netflow.