BPM in the trenches

The problem was that the company's strategy of offering a highly diversified product line had created a raft of specialized systems that weren't necessarily linked together, preventing call center reps from providing quick answers to customers' questions. ANICO sold so many products, including property and casualty, health, and life insurance and annuities, that agents were left to "dive-bomb" into multiple systems and use their own judgment to try to find the right steps to come up with answers.

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ANICO's solution was to create product-specific customer service processes, workflows, and interfaces for its agents using software from Pegasystems, called PegaWorks. The software integrates with the company's seven "systems of record" -- a mix of imaging systems, group policy systems, individual policy systems -- to pull up everything an agent needs to answer a customer's question without transferring the call.

The PegaWorks software consists of the core BPM functionality running on an NT server, a middleware module also running on NT, and a mainframe module on z/OS. The PegaConnect middleware module has links back to all seven systems of record, capturing data fields from those systems for use by the agents at the appropriate point in the workflow.

"If someone's on the phone asking about their latest hospital visit, on the bottom of the screen will be a button [that allows you] to get a definition of any medical term," Kirkham explains. "On another part you'll see the actual image of the policy and coverage, and an image of the invoice that was sent to the client. From a system standpoint, you can see what has and hasn't been paid, what's pending, and why ... all from different systems of record."

ANICO currently has more than 100 different business processes defined across four product divisions, Kirkham says. Some are linked to detailed business rules that enable compliance with federal and state regulations. "If you're not the primary insured, there are certain things the rep can't reveal, and the business rules fire up to give [the agent] only the information you should have in that role," Kirkham explains.

Although Kirkham claims the BPM system has improved all the company's service metrics by huge margins, he is concerned at how much intellectual capital and process documentation is tied up in the current system.

"It's going to be a challenge to not lose the richness we've developed in this current product," Kirkham says, acknowledging the need to eventually upgrade to a more current, Java-based version, which would make rules management easier.

Kirkham also has strong opinions about where the value lies in BPM. "I think the modeling tools are way overrated; the whole idea of modeling is overplayed," he says. "What people really need to do is get a really good handle on what they're doing today and then take the very best people they have and refine that process. It's not re-engineering because the processes they have today were never engineered in the first place."

Looking forward

Where will BPM go from here? As these four examples illustrate, BPM means different things to different companies and is so tightly tied to business needs that it has spawned a host of variants.

Jim Sinur, vice president at Gartner, notes that today there are more than 130 pure-play BPM vendors, which fall into categories such as modeling-centric (analytics plus repository); human-to-human BPM (workflow engines); system-to-system BPM (integration engines); policy/rules-centric; and dashboard-driven (centering on Business Activity Monitoring readouts). He sees this field consolidating and facing increasing competition from big app vendors such as Oracle and SAP.

Sinur also notes that soft issues, such as training, incentives, and methodologies, are increasingly what make or break BPM projects. "There are no public methodologies or best practices for BPM," he notes. "Change management processes need to be oiled in so organizations can become more process-centric."

Then there's the issue of who's driving the BPM train and how IT and the business units can best collaborate on these new systems. Mike Barnett, director of professional services at BPM vendor Gensym, sees BPM as "a near revolution of management against IT to get more control over the rules that control the enterprise."

"Management control of the business logic is distinctly different than what we'd seen before," Barnett says. "Previously it was, Let's capture the knowledge of our best people and put it into an automation solution. Now there's a requirement that those rules and that knowledge be accessible by management."