Dedicated BPGroup discussions – apply via the links!

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Certified Process Practitioner® – for those qualified to CPP Level 1
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=2929539

Certified Process Professional® – for those qualified to CPP Level 3
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=2515784

Certified Process Master® – for those qualified to CPP Level 5
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=2741121

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EA Connections – interested in Enterprise Architecture & BPM?
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=3180325

Outside-In Process – Advanced & Enterprise BPM takes centre stage
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=2057992

Advanced BPM – it says what it does on the tin
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=2056169

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BPGroup Sweden – led by Martina Beck-Friis
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=2678614

BPGroup Germany – Led by Paul Bailey
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=2669692

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The quest for the Triple Crown – Four ways to transform process for success forever

The quest for the Triple Crown – Four ways to transform process for success forever
There’s been much discussion about the Successful Customer Outcome across several LinkedIn threads recently
(see http://linkd.in/DanielaProcess, http://linkd.in/ProcessDick, http://linkd.in/ProcessGeoff, and http://linkd.in/ProcessNic)
however that isn’t the only way to move processes Outside-In. In fact there are FOUR tried, tested and proven approaches to simultaneously reduce costs, improve revenues and enhance customer service (winning the Triple Crown).
You can explore this territory by visiting the following mini articles. Next week we’ll feature several recent webcasts.
Articles:
Part 1: Understand and apply process diagnostics
| http://bit.ly/ProcessDiagnostics |
Part 2: Successful Customer Outcomes
| http://bit.ly/SuccessfulCustomer |
Part 3: Reframing process for an Outside-In world
| http://bit.ly/ReframingProcess |
Part 4: Rethinking the business you are in
| http://bit.ly/WhatBusinessRUin |
 
If you are already qualified as a Certified Process Professional you should already have completed the Outside-In Strategic Matrix® (OI-SM) which complements the articles. Try it out for yourself and see how Outside-In you actually are.
Next week THREE webcasts to as we travel deeper into Outside-In.

Best Buy is a poster boy of Outside-In, Are they done yet?

Although Best Buy gets its fair share of customer complaints online, it responds to them in a different way due to its Outside-In philosophy. Take Twelpforce. This system lets Best Buy employees see and respond to Best Buy-related issues that Twitter uses express, and over 2,500 people are taking part. The Twelpforce system brings together several groups: customer service representatives, in-store salespeople (called blueshirts), and the Geek Squad, technicians that visit homes to render technical assistance.

To see Twelpforce in action, consider this: Earlier in the year, Josh Korin purchased an iPhone and insurance plan from a Chicago Best Buy. His iPhone stopped working one day, and the store’s staff gave him a loaner BlackBerry to replace it. He didn’t want this — especially since he bought insurance — so he tweeted his disapproval. He did this on the weekend, but even so, customer service representative Coral Biegler tweeted back at him. The very next day, she had managed to find a replacement iPhone for him. From then on, Korin tweeted about how impressed he was with the service he received from Best Buy. His wife did too — and she has over 3,000 people following her on Twitter. Twelpforce grew out of Best Buy’s commitment to technological innovation from employees.

The idea was the brainchild of Gary Koelling, a member of Best Buy’s marketing group and a social-media guru. Ben Hendrington, a technology staffer in the e-commerce division, spent a week thinking about how he could harness the Google cloud computing platform to create a Twitter app to serve many employees at once. Marketing manager John Bernier was in charge of the project and successfully managed legal challenges like labor laws. The leaders at Best Buy support innovation, no matter where it originates inside the organization. CMO Barry Judge places a strong emphasis on innovations such as Twelpforce. We are nearly constantly in a half-baked mode, as for ideas, Judge states. Half-baked ideas let individuals [on the inside as well as the outside] offer you feedback. There is always an education going on in Judges department of marketing. If you’re not inquisitive, you will not last for very long in marketing, he stated. You must have some that aren’t successful to notice that.

The results of this mindset are easy to see in Best Buys marketing. One way Judge does this is posting television commercials on his blog prior to airing them. In one instance, commenters beyond the company expressed displeasure claiming a lack of sensitivity in a commercial that tells how a Blue Shirt assisted a customer in the armed forces. There was no airing of the commercial. Another innovation from Best Buy is opening the programming interfaces on its site, www.bestbuy.com, which lets other sites know about things like changes in price. The staffers in marketing made up all of these activities.
They were all risky. And they all proceeded.

Sources of Information for Advanced BPM aka Outside-In

If you wish to read and listen more on these themes the following references are useful.
Join the community discussing these issues, challenges and opportunities.


Community and social networking
Networking

http://bit.ly/I0tvw


Customer Capitalization – Roger Martin, Dean of Faculty, Rottman Business School
Article

HBReview, Feb 2010

Don’t give customers what they think they want
Steve Towers
Article

http://bit.ly/3xUIn4

Evolution of Approaches
BP Group
Research

http://bit.ly/Fw5Kv

Outside-In
Interview with Blog Radio

Podcast

Outside-In (15 mins)

The Best Performing companies
Millward Optimoor
Research

http://bit.ly/uAyVW

Outside-In monthly newsletter – September reaps a big harvest

The monthly newsletter “Outside-In” contains 4 Videos, 3 Webinars, 2 Sundowners, 1 Whitepaper plus new articles, links, resources and nice pictures of people from around the world becoming Certified Process Masters 🙂
http://www.towersassociates.com/Process_Performance_September_2010.html

And do not forget the groundswell towards the 18th Annual Conference also: http://www.bpm-summit.com

All the Very Best,
hopefully catch-up with you soon

Steve

The convergence of BPM, Enterprise Architecture and Customer alignment

If you are new to this debate you might want to join EA Connections, chaired by Steve Melville who penned the following words….

Your value proposition sets expectations with potential customers. The more compelling your value proposition, the larger the pool of potentially interested customers and the fewer competitors that can match it. So, the goal is to create product and service offerings that set expectations that more customers find compelling and few competitors can match. In so doing, you have re-set the bar for customer expectations within your market and created the foundation for your organization’s success.

But here’s the catch… you have to deliver against those expectations. One failure and you begin to lose your customer’s trust. You lower their expectations with your actions, regardless of your lofty initial promises of value. And, with the explosion of social networking, blogs, 24 hour news channels, online reviews, etc., any failure to deliver against expectations, gets broadcast pretty quickly. Ask BP or Toyota what happens when you fail to meet customer expectations of safety.

So… to match the high expectations of your value proposition, the delivery processes of your organization need to consistently meet those expectations. And it is in the design and deployment of those delivery processes that the critical dependency on EA surfaces. For, in the 21st Century, such processes are heavily dependent on technology:

eCommerce and online support sites, mobile applications, ERP systems, RDBMS, SOA, SANs, etc. And not just some delivery processes, Outside-In companies recognize that the entire enterprise needs to be focused on delivering successful customer outcomes.

So the challenge becomes to align all of the process, application, information and technology resources across the entire enterprise to deliver successful customer outcomes in order to support higher and higher customer expectations. And alignment is the sweet spot of enterprise architecture. EA is the right fit because both its sweep (across the entireenterprise) and its scope (processes, information, application, and the technology that supports them) match the demands of the Operational Framework Layer of the Outside-In enterprise.

Come on down to the Linkedin discussions:
Join the BP Group http://bit.ly/joinbpgroup | EA Connections http://bit.ly/EAConnections | Outside-In Resources http://oibpm.com

Part 4 of 4: There are four distinctly Outside-In ways that you can rethink process and in doing so achieve Triple Crown benefits.

The previous three articles in this four part theme we reviewed ‘Understand and applying Process diagnostics‘, the ‘Successful Customer Outcome‘ and ‘Reframing Process for an Outside-In world‘. Now finally we move our attention to the fourth way we can rethink process forever.

Rethinking the Business you are in.

In the Southwest airlines example reviewed earlier we referred to the different viewpoints of the ‘business’ you are in. The two views – one the organisations, regarded as inside-out reflect the activities and functions undertaken. So British Airways see themselves in the business of flying airplanes and approach the customer with that product/service in mind. They set about marketing and selling the flights and hope to pull the customers to the product through pricing, availability and placement. In a slowly changing world where customers have little choice this strategy can provide a route to success.

As we have already seen the tables have turned and the enlightened customer demands so much more.
Southwest and other Outside-In companies understand this challenge and take a customer viewpoint.
What business would you say these six companies are in: Hallmark Cards, Disney, Zara, AOL, OTIS elevators, China Mobile?  Try it from the customers perspective and you’ll arrive at a very different answer – try these, expression, joy, style and comfort, community, moving people, connectivity. Yes they are very different and will reframe the way you think of the service and products you provide. Go further and look inside your existing company.

Are you still separated into functional specialist areas providing specific outputs to other departments in the so called ‘value chain’? Do you have internal ‘service level agreements’ that specify what you’ll deliver and when? How much of our internal interaction adds ultimate value for the customer? This way of organising work imposes limitations on our ability to truly deliver successful customer outcomes. The Inside-out viewpoint is inefficient, prone to red tape, is extremely risk adverse (checkers checking checkers) and slow in delivering product and service.

Many inside-out organisations actually regard customers as an inconvenience rather than the reason why they exist.

What business are you in? Past, present, future?

Join us on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=1062077
Visit additional resources www.oibpm.com
Become a Certified Process Professional www.certifiedprocessprofessional.com