COMMUNITIES

Features

Insurance Industry Outlook - The Top 10 Issues in Insurance in 2009
The competition? Business performance? Customer service? As 2008 draws to a close, what business issues are top of mind for insurance companies moving into 2009? Pegasystems conducted a survey of insurance industry leaders and asked them to share their views on the "Top Ten Issues in Insurance" for 2009. View this industry brief to learn what business challenges leaders from all segments of the industry are working to address in 2009.

Customer Experience Drives Top Line Revenue for Large Banks
In these turbulent and uncertain economic times, banks are striving to maintain and expand their relationships with customers. According to a Forrester survey, The Business Impact of Customer Experience, customer experience quality can cause an annual revenue swing of $242 million for large banks. Pegasystems provides an agile BPM-based servicing platform that is used by the largest financial institutions in the world to deliver high quality customer experiences. Click here for complimentary copy of the Forrester Report.

Are Today's Economic Changes Impacting Your Business?
Pega is committed to ensuring that our customer and partner communities become certified PegaRULES Process Commander® (PRPC) experts. By signing up for one of Pega's training courses you will learn how PRPC enables your organization to build solutions that automate work and enable you to quickly and easily change your business processes.

A new year means new beginnings! In 2009 we will be expanding our certification program to ensure your staff has the knowledge they need to harness the power of PRPC. Don't hesitate to get certified! Take Fast Track to PegaRULES Process Commander® and PegaRULES Process Commander® Bootcamp in January, February, or March and receive one complimentary System Architect Certification exam voucher that is good through June'09.

To register for a course or to find out more about our training curriculum visit us on the Web at: http://pdn.pega.com/education

PegaWORLD 2008 Videos Now Available
If you were unable to attend PegaWORLD 2008, Pegasystems recently made a number of the keynote presentations available on the Pegasystems Website. PegaWORLD has established itself as the industry's premier BPM event. These keynote presentations demonstrate the impact that BPM is having on today's businesses, and how an effective BPM strategy can drive greater overall efficiency and customer service. To view the videos, please visit the video page of the Pegasystems Website.

Podcast: Pegasystems Customers Recognized for Customer Service Excellence
Elizabeth Hart, Senior Director for Healthcare Solutions talks about two Pega customers, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island, who received prestigious customer service excellence awards last week at the annual Service Quality Measurement awards.

Listen to this podcast here

Podcast: Pegasystems Introduces Federated Business Frameworks
Pegasystems recently introduced our new Federated Business Frameworks at PegaWORLD 2008. These frameworks enable enterprise re-use and provide a single view of distributed work to help bridge operational silos. This podcast will discuss how the Federated Business Frameworks promote BPM best practices.

Listen to the podcast here

PegaWORLD 2009 Dates Announced
PegaWORLD 2009 will be taking place October 18 – 21, 2009 in Boston Massachusetts at the Westin Boston Waterfront. The Pegasystems team is already hard at work to make PegaWORLD 2009 even better than this year's event. Save the date to see why PegaWORLD has become the industry's leading BPM event. We will make more details available in the coming months. Stay tuned!

Community Content Top 5 Downloads

• Yphise Assessment Of Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite
  The independent analyst firm YPHISE has certified that Pegasystems' SmartBPM Suite is the best-ranked solution for an Agile Business Application Platform. Competitive vendors surveyed include Appian, Lombardi, and Savvion.
• The Business Impact Of Customer Experience
  Executives know that customer experience is important, but they can't always tie it directly to business results. So Forrester examined the correlation between the customer experiences delivered by 112 US firms (as defined by Forrester's Customer Experience Index) and the loyalty of their customers. Forrester's analysis shows that good customer experience correlates highly to loyalty — especially when it comes to consumers' plans for making additional purchases.
• The Forrester Wave: Business Rules Platforms, Q2 2008
  Forrester evaluated 13 platforms from 11 vendors using 175 different criteria that organizations typically review when selecting a Business Rules Management System. The report found Pegasystems to have the highest scores for Current Offering and one of three "resounding Leaders as general-purpose business rules platforms."
• Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites, 2007
  Pegasystems is understandably very pleased to be placed in the leader's quadrant in the 2007 release of the Gartner BPMS MQ. Pegasystems' unique capabilities allow it to offer organizations unprecedented agility especially when addressing frequently changing local contexts and circumstances that must be managed globally.
• SmartBPM vs. Eclipse IDE: A study to compare the productivity of SmartBPM and Eclipse Java IDE
  In a head-to-head comparison of integrated development environment (IDE) features and performances, Kanbay (a Capgemini Group company) measured both Pegasystems SmartBPM and Eclipse, Kanbay found that application development using SmartBPM is 550% faster than with Eclipse IDE. This figure rises to more than 600% faster if analysis and design activities are excluded.

News

• Pegasystems Announces Cloud-Enabled Business Process Management Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
  Pegasystems recently launched an industry-first BPM Platform-as-a-Service™ (PaaS) offering that gives enterprises the benefits of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) without the limitations, risk, or performance concerns of traditional SaaS technology.  The new PaaS solution enables organizations to get multiple BPM instances up and running quickly. 
• Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Montana Redefines Customer Service Excellence with Pegasystems' SmartBPM® Solutions
  Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Montana (BCBSMT) has selected Pegasystems' Customer Process Manager™ for Healthcare to optimize its customer service, sales, and process efficiencies. The new state-of-the-art software system will provide BCBSMT with technology resulting in "one-and-done" calls, which means more customer inquiries will be resolved on the first call.
• Pega opens new R&D facility in Hyderabad, India
  Pegasystems Inc. recently opened a major research and development facility in Hyderabad, India. This office will provide Pegasystems with a global research, development, and training footprint, and will bring greater technology innovation in the BPM sector.
• Pegasystems Receives Two Prestigious "Leaders in Innovation" Awards from Financial-i
  Pegasystems was just recently announced as a recipient of two Financial-i Leaders in Innovation awards.  The Awards recognize excellence in global transaction banking, and Pegasystems has been named the winner of both the BPM category within Network Services and the Exceptions and Investigation category within Risk Management.
• How BPM Helps You Around the House
  This article details on real-life business process management (BPM) case study from American Home Shield that was heard at PegaWorld.
• Pegasystems Recognized by Yphise as a Leader in Agile Business Applications
  The independent analyst firm YPHISE has certified that Pegasystems' SmartBPM Suite is the best-ranked solution for an Agile Business Application Platform. Competitive vendors surveyed include Appian, Lombardi, and Savvion.  To access the report, please visit http://www.pega.com/content/summary.asp?ci=337

Blogosphere

This month's installment will be a bit of a journey, so enjoy the ride! I start out reflecting on the generally good news in many BPM vendors' recent announcements, also reflected in some blog posts.  For example, we have Kas Thomas at Intelligent Enterprise proclaiming his "Guarded Optimism on IT Spending." Kas says "'We've seen deals take longer to close,' one vendor told me, ‘but they do eventually close. They don't just evaporate. At least, not yet." In the slightly older "The outlook for SOA, SaaS, BPM, etc in a slowing global economy" by Darren Wesemann of SunGard, he says "If a technology offers an advantage it will be invested in regardless of the times."

But why should technology initiatives and BPM projects specifically be immune to the general downturn? One reason given in Darren Wesemann's and many other blogs is alignment. In Wesemann's words, "businesses recognize they need alignment with business needs and technology solutions and they need greater efficiency in doing so." But Patrick Joseph Gauthier at WorkflowIQ says BPM Must Align with the Business Model, warning that "Failure to fully integrate and demonstrate inherent value in the business model is the surest path to obsolescence."

Certainly, if you look at Pega's (or any other BPM vendor's) Web site and collateral, you will find discussions of IT/business alignment and efficiency improvements, but this is not looking deep enough.  Chris Lawrence presents an article on "thinking makes it so" about Business process architecture and business change in which he says: "Business process architecture and change methodology are two sides of the same coin. Organisations which know this and know what to do with it will beat the competition." So it is change or transformation that is the real value in BPM.

Change comes not only to the business itself, but to how the business uses software to react to business change. Nick Malik quotes a "law of software" on his MSDN blog: Software Reflects The Process That Creates It. "If you want to improve the quality of the software you produce (regardless of how you measure quality), you can change tools, and you can change information, and you can change training, to your heart's content… but the big effects will come from changing the process."

So if we swim up the value chain from technology advantage to alignment to change, will that guarantee people will understand the value of BPM, and, more important, will that mean we are building a successful project? Not quite! We still need to think about who the champions and participants are, and how we will run the program and Build for Change®, to use Pega's catchphrase.

Keith Swenson of Fujitsu blogs that "BPM is not Software Engineering," and uses the analogy of spreadsheets in the ‘80s to say that "a spreadsheet  represents things in a way that is useful and meaningful to the business person" and so does a process diagram, so business people will be running the BPM show. Ismael Ghalimi of Intalio rightly points out in response that BPM is Process Engineering, and that BPM is "not ‘just' for business people." Business people "do not want to take on the responsibility of building and maintaining transactional systems, or transactional processes integrated with transactional systems." Keith actually agrees in his post, saying "For some processes, integration to other systems is important, and so there must be the possibility to call to programs or systems which are developed by traditional Software Engineering techniques. These ‘extensions' of the BPM system are developed by Software Engineers, but the development of these extensions must not be confused with the development of the business process diagram."

How do we reconcile these ideas? BPM Projects will succeed where a team understands the tools (Model-driven architecture, integrated BPMS/BRE, web-based development, iterative process) brings together the right people (IT, process experts, and business users), and is focused on the process as a core principle. As Ismael says, "while BPM reduces the need for traditional software engineering, it actually increases the need for a new kind of engineering, which I would refer to as Process Engineering, or Business Process Engineering." Dennis Byron talks about How BPM Helps You Around the House on ebizq, discussing American Home Shield in a case study from PegaWORLD 08. AHS said a successful BPM implementation will "get the business group to own the project, not IT, get partners and even customers involved in changing business processes, and upgrade the business activity from workflow to true business processing." This is, indeed, a formula for success, even in a recession.