As Jim Sinur and I wrote in the book Digital Transformation, A Brief Guide for Game Changers, “Similar to viewing an exceptional art mosaic, observing any of the environmental forces or enabling capabilities in isolation prevents one from recognizing the broader fundamentals in play. The entire picture does not emerge until the viewer steps back and embraces the ‘ah-ha’ moment of the overall mosaic, one in which the powerful message is revealed through the inter-related elements operating in concert.” For example, squint and peek through your eyelashes and see who the famous president is in this mosaic portrait by Salvador Dali.
The New Business MoSAIC
MoSAIC = Mobile, Social, Analytics, Intelligent and Cloud. We’ll take a high-level view of each of these forces, though each could be a standalone in-depth article.
One shared world. One shared computer.
The “Mo” in MoSAIC also relates to the computer science of “mobile processes.” Via the deep computer science of “mobile processes,” business processes can change their structures via communication channels in flight, in real-time. That’s what’s needed to seamlessly use real-time prescriptive analytics to respond to moments of truth with ever-demanding customers. For it’s not just what you can promise at the moment of customer interactions in the front office, it’s also what you can actually deliver — in the now.
S - Social
If you are a brand-name company and have a gorgeous and sophisticated Web site, your company’s Web site is the last place customers go to get informed and make purchasing decisions. BPM pioneer, Alan Trefler writes in his early manuscript for the book Customer Apocalypse, “Generation D [digital] does not want to be sold to. Being sold to is being controlled. No, the seamless experience they desire with your business, to which they would probably never admit, is based on wanting to discover you and your product or service. So, on top of all that connectivity, you have to figure out how to facilitate their discovery, proactively, but invisibly, to create the illusion that they are discovering all on their own.” Trefler goes on to describe the notion of “next-best-action,” “which goes on the premise of offering and promoting the right thing to the right person at the right time. It balances what your customer wants and needs, and what your customer’s interests might be, with our own business objectives, and then continuously reevaluates and rebalances to optimize the outcomes. The next-best-action is carefully and thoughtfully constructed based on contextual information and insight.”
Continuing with insights from Enterprise Cloud Computing, “Social Networks are also places where work gets done. It’s in the new digital communities in the Cloud where product innovation is customer-driven and value is ‘co-produced.’ Customers become prosumers: producers and consumers of value.
The “S” in MoSAIC also applies to social networks inside the enterprise.
“Social” is all the craze in enterprise-class software these days. Enterprise software providers are in a rush to provide social networking capabilities in their offerings: salesforce.com’s Chatter, Cisco’s Quad are but two examples. These are very cool upgrades to existing enterprise software. They allow workers to Tweet, to discover people with appropriate knowledge or skills, share knowledge, and control who can participate. Essentially, they are communication tools with “implicit collaboration.” They are, however, potentially noisy, distracting communications media.
Keith Swenson, lead author of Mastering the Unpredictable, elaborates on the need for goal orientation in enterprise social software, “In general, social software systems record what is happening now and, in the past, but for the most part, completely lack any representation of the future. Enterprise Social Software will succeed only if it has some representation of goals or other future activities. You need to be able to represent and track goals. You need to be able to talk about what you want to do, how this is broken down into finer detailed goals, and to track progress against those goals. You want to be able to ask others to do things, which when accepted form goals for those other people. This is the essence of planning, which is an important part of any work.”
A - Analytics
Analytics + Big Data: The use of massive volumes of stored data in conjunction with real-time analytics to make smart, fact-based decisions in real-time and at the atomic level of individual customer interactions— at moments of truth. In short, Analytics + Big Data are the most important things for business since the Internet.
Okay, let’s drill down a little on this term analytics.
The first stage of business analytics is descriptive analytics, which accounts for the majority of all business analytics today. Descriptive analytics answers the questions of what happened and why did it happen. Descriptive analytics looks at past performance and understands that performance by mining historical data to look for the reasons behind past success or failure. Almost all management reporting such as sales, marketing, operations, and finance, uses this type of post-mortem analysis.
The next phase is predictive analytics. Predictive analytics answers the question of what will happen. This is when historical performance data is combined with rules, algorithms, and occasionally external data to determine the probable future outcome of an event or a likelihood of a situation occurring. The final phase is prescriptive analytics, which goes beyond predicting future outcomes by also suggesting actions to benefit from the predictions and showing the implications of each decision option.
Prescriptive analytics not only anticipate what will happen and when it will happen, but also why it will happen. Further, prescriptive analytics suggests decision options on how to take advantage of a future opportunity or mitigate a future risk and shows the implication of each decision option. Prescriptive analytics can continually and automatically take in new data to improve prediction accuracy and provide better decision options. Prescriptive analytics ingests hybrid data, a combination of structured and unstructured data, and business rules to predict what lies ahead and to prescribe how to take advantage of this predicted future right here, right now at customer moments of truth!
All three phases of analytics can be performed through services in the Cloud. Prescriptive analytics technologies need to be adaptive to take into account big data, structured and unstructured, with the growing volume, velocity, and variety of data that most mission-critical processes and their environments will produce. Watch analytics guru, Tom Davenport explain in the video below.
I - Intelligent
To manage the inherent complexity in inter-enterprise or value-chain business processes, smart companies will demand ever “smarter processes.” But “smart” doesn’t mean some Orwellian thinking machine; it means intelligent agent technology.
What’s an agent? Backing away from technology for a moment, the everyday term, agent, provides a starting definition: “one who acts for, or in the place of, another.” Then, as explained in the book, Business Process Management: The Next Wave, “A software agent is a software package that carries out tasks for others autonomously without being controlled by its master once the tasks have been delegated. The ‘others’ may be human users, business processes, workflows, or applications.”
A basic software agent stands on three pillars, three essential properties: autonomy, reactivity, and communication ability. The notion of autonomy means that an agent exercises exclusive control over its own actions and state. Reactivity means sensing or perceiving change in their environment and responding. And, even the most basic software agents have the ability to communicate with other entities – human users, other software agents, or objects.
Add to this definition the ability to plan and set goals, to maintain belief models (their own and other agents’ beliefs), to reason about the actions of itself and other agents (including humans), and the ability to improve its knowledge and performance through learning, and you then have the core ingredients of an “intelligent agent.” An intelligent agent represents a distinct category of software that incorporates local knowledge about its own and other agents’ tasks and resources, allowing it to operate autonomously or as a part of a community of co-operative problem solvers (including human users), each agent having its own roles and responsibilities.
Agents can be integrated into BPM frameworks that contain, in one package, specific problem-solving functions, data, and control. Intelligent agents support a natural merging of BPM and knowledge-based technologies. Intelligent agents can facilitate the incorporation of reasoning capabilities (e.g., encapsulation of business rules within agents). They permit the inclusion of learning and self-improvement capabilities at both infrastructure (adaptive routing) and application (adaptive user interfaces) levels. Intelligent user interfaces (supporting task-centered user interfaces and intelligent assistance to end-users) can be a boon to productivity in a complex world of multi-company business processes.
If we consider intelligent agents as fractals in a multidimensional business ecosystem, some of the key components of multi-agent problem-solving are essential. To achieve common goals, agents need coordination. Effective coordination requires cooperation, which in turn can be achieved through communication and organization. That’s where the agent-oriented BPMS comes in to provide the needed choreography for the Cognitive Internet of Everything.
C - Cloud
With the emergence of Cloud-based, long-lived, loosely-coupled, stateless architectures, the existing Enterprise Architecture approaches and many of today’s BPM systems will quickly demonstrate their lack of flexibility and inability to choreograph participants in complex business ecosystems made up of large numbers of actors spread across the globe.
The “C” in MoSAIC also relates to what’s happening in real-time in the Cloud: Complex Event Processing.
All modern information systems are event-driven, where an event can be as simple as clicking a mouse button. According to Gartner research, event-driven business applications can be sorted into four categories: 1. Simple event-driven (or message-driven) applications where application programs explicitly send and receive messages directly to and from each other. 2. Event-driven applications that are mediated by integration brokers, which transform and route simple event messages according to logical rules. 3. Event-driven applications that are directed by business process management (BPM) engines that manage the end-to-end flow of a multistep process using special, BPM-oriented types of events. 4. Complex event processing (CEP) applications, where a sophisticated event manager logically evaluates multiple events to enable decoupled, parallel, asynchronous processing or business activity monitoring (BAM). Complex event processing is most effective when event messages carry information relating to individual events with other events and causal information on how an event came about.
As companies extend BPM outside their walls and on to the complex business ecosystem across the value chain, the value of CEP becomes an obvious lynchpin for business activity monitoring and real-time process analytics. Businesses must design their processes to make the fastest use of actionable knowledge when it arrives. Event processing is about taking immediate action right now — in real-time.
The New BPM Challenge: Choreography in the Large
The difference between active, central control and adaptive coordination can be compared to an Orchestra versus Ballet. In orchestration, the conductor tells everybody in the orchestra what to do in real-time and makes sure they all play in synchronization. The conductor is an active leader, corrects for anomalies in real-time, and can introduce new information only he or she has. Orchestration in information systems also has an equivalent, the orchestration engine.
In choreography, the choreographer coordinates the plan but is not part of the execution. Each participant is responsible for its own adaptive behavior. Orchestration defines a procedure and Choreography defines a protocol.
Military-style “command and control” management is giving way to “connect and collaborate,” and the reason is clear. In today’s world of total global competition, no one company is in control of its end-to-end value ecosystem. Typically, over 20 companies are involved in a given value-chain instance. Thus, orchestration of the entire business ecosystem by a single conductor is of days gone by. Orchestration still applies to some internal enterprise processes, but choreography rules when we reach across the enterprise or outside to the entire value-chain network where participants have their own dance moves — and their own BPMSs.
Choreography is the future via the foundation of peer-to-peer multi-agent systems, with autonomous mobile agents sharing common goals. Of course, no sane person would hand over control of enterprise transactions to an unsupervised network of software agents. To investigate, negotiate, design, implement, monitor and maintain complex, long-running enterprise partnerships you need a system that not only supports cross-boundary processes natively but has the right model. Such a model isn’t based on the flow of work through a diagram, but on a framework including object types and distributed policy management (Role, Person, Interaction, Entity, Activity, Rule, and so on).
Indeed, there’s something new going on in business, as BPM methodologist Martyn Ould elaborates in his book, Business Process Management: A Rigorous Approach, “Do your toes curl when someone uses the phrase ‘paradigm shift?’ Did they curl just then? Terms like that get debased so quickly, we just as quickly learn to treat them as noise. So when a real paradigm shift comes along, it needs a lot of volume to say ‘This Really Is A Big Change, Folks.’” BPM, amplified by the new business MoSAIC, is one such paradigm shift.
Welcome to agent-oriented BPM as the great choreographer of business. Unleash the true power of the BPMS. Plug the new business MoSAIC amplifier into your BPMS and turn up the volume!
