(Again, these are my own thoughts and reflections and do not necessarily reflect those of the company I work for).

“All the new thinking is about loss. In this, it resembles all the old thinking” (Robert Hass).

Cisco came out with some very simple, deceptively simple, thoughts on what CEBP is and what their concept of Communications Enabled Business Transformation is. In short CEBP is about taking latencies out of business processes and increasing the process and business velocity. At VoiceSage we have been calling this “removing the lags and drags”.  CEBT has a wider frame and includes more “Collaboration frameworks”.

“Integrating communications and collaboration with business processes offers opportunities for hard and soft benefits, savings and business improvements. The methods for modeling and developing these applications have matured along with unified-communications solutions”.
—Bob Hafner, Gartner, “Driving Communications Efficiency Into Your Business and Processes,” October 2010

Cisco say that they are looking to extend the Cisco CEBT cloud with other Cloud Service Providers through Cisco’s Secure Network Interconnections, essentially forming an extended service delivery hub. At the moment Cisco extends the business processes with Collaboration solutions such as Webex, and soon with it’s next generation enterprise architecture Quad. But the key phrase above is “Service Delivery Hub”, a place where you can combine Cisco and non Cisco systems and processes “to get something done”.

This Service Hub theme was really brought home yesterday when Cisco announced the availability of AppHQ, where all Cisco partners will be able to publish applications that can be used through the new Cisco tablet the Cius (as in “see us” one would presume). I haven’t been a big fan of the very idea of the Cius because I have a bias against hardware solutions to software problems, and trying to solve problems outside the browser. Cisco want’s to offer a totally secure, policy driven, regulatory compliant solution set from server to screen. They want to be Apple for the Enterprise. To achieve this they want to control the device and presentation layer. In fairness, it is an Android Operating System which means it may end up being very useful for Google Enterprise Apps an can co-opt the growing Android ecosystem. If they make that ‘easy to use”, I could be interested.

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Now, this is where a different theme emerges. Writing over the last few weeks JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com is putting some thoughts together on what the role of “Chatter”, an “enterprise conversation platform”  might be in creating more context for people’s decision making through unstructured, informal communications. I think there is something fundamental going on here and it involves how we communicate in order to get things done.

We all operate in organizational environments where formal processes “proscribe” how things should be decided upon, and completed. But very often “the real” decisions are made informally, maybe even emotionally, and are then encoded as “formal decisions”. How we come to understand what information, what situations, what changes are important to us is a refining process that often boils down to “that’s how we do things around here” and “it’s common sense”. But it is also down to an enterprise version of the “personal internet bubble”, i.e. we only experience the news through our personalized content access, and who we interact with.

The simple implication of this understanding is that there are many “formal sign offs” and “informal touch points” that go into getting a process completed in reality. Even in the formal sign off process, getting a simple document emailed to the next person in line in order to get “sign off’ can suffer significant delays as your email gets stuck in folders, stuck in spam, or just buried in the flow of what has to be done.  Thus the growing popularity of such systems as Sharepoint from Microsoft, and Google Docs. You don’t share the object, you share the conversation around the object.

Document Management Systems, Content Management Systems, Corporate Intranets all struggle to understand how better to manage the flow between People, Processes, and Things (things being real physical objects & social objects). But really we often only need to know what’s changed from their previous state.  We need to understand when the system that connects people, processes and things changes its state in a way that is meaningful to us, and to the job to be done (JTBD). Let’s be honest here, how much of our day is dictated to us by what comes through our email tray? It is the interruptions, and the interruptions in our interruptions, that create havoc with our planning and our scheduling. It effects what we all actually get done during the day. This is not an insignificant point. No matter how good your task planning is, the pattern of interruptions is significant dark matter.

How Do We Know The Change State of a Process?

I may be varying slightly from the intention’s behind the model quoted by Cisco, but this is how I see these issues “showing up” in everyday business.

Data Latency : do you capture data, the right data, and is the data real time, accurate, and relevant? Can you “get at this data” or is it trapped in other enterprise systems, or worse, in a partners enterprise systems?

Insight Latency: can you see the connections between various factors that influence “the jobs to be done”; do you have the people, skills, and tools on hand to generate these insights?

Decision Latency: do you know who the right people to connect with are in order to get a decision made and can you connect them effectively; as an organization can you literally “decide on things quickly”?

Action Latency: can you move decisions into actions coherently and quickly. In another life, we used to call this “mobilization”: sequencing actions in a coherent manner.

If you can imagine any supply chain in terms of these kinds of latency you begin to understand that for even the very well codified, formalized and well managed supply chain system, it is responding to the changes in the plans that matters, and collaboration modes are the way we bridge these latencies.

I imagine that the following situations are familiar to many of our clients:

- You have been performing Net Promoter Score questions all day long, and at the end of the week presenting the reports to senior management. You only question a few hundred people from hundreds of thousands and often with no accurate measure as to how long it was since the original customer service interaction occurred. Your collecting narrow, biased, and late data.

- You have undertaken a series of training programs, invested in new work systems, and yet the customer satisfaction levels just don’t seem to be going up. Are you capable of generating actionable insights into why this might be occurring? In short can you find “new levers”? In one client example, VoiceSage was able to trace customer satisfaction measures back down to specific customer-agent Interactions. The increased granularity and the fact that someone “ran the experiment” generated the insight that certain agents would not nominate a customer for a NPS survey if the interaction just ended wasn’t positive. The Net Promoter Score was thus ‘artificially high” and thus its effect was not coming through in other metrics.

- You receive a call telling you that you will be required to run a new contact campaign but you have not got enough agents to adequately service it; (mismatch of demand and supply). Where can you pull on these additional resources and will it be worth it given the value of the new campaign? Do you have all the details you need to make this decision and are you authorized to you make it? If you can’t make this decision within an adequate time frame, the decision latency becomes crippling.

- You are not receiving the planned level of confirmations that customers will be present on premises to receive and sign for a product delivery. Given calculations, everyone in the last 90 minutes of the day now has a 50% chance of not being properly serviced.  Now that you know this what do you do? Now that you know that there is a 50% chance that a few hundred customers are going to be badly left down you need to cancel some deliveries, apologize and compensate customers, and find new ways to go “that extra mile”. You know what the policies are, what the implications of each decision are, so how long does it take to organize and implement?

Conclusions

So what has Cisco and Salesforce.com got to do with all this “process stuff”.

Communications and Co-ordination need to occur around structured processes in a planned way, with approved processes that are policy compliant (security, compliance, legal, customer service policy based, etc.). You have to know in detail how these processes should work, how processes are inter-related, and how automate within this domain (By the way, this means that processes should be visible, searchable, and in some way “interrogatable”). To pull on the right resources at the right time, to get the right outcome, takes a lot of organization. This thinking has found an early example in Tibbr 3.0 (worth clicking on to read more).

But technology alone is probably less than 20% of your total success factors. The rest is down to management, culture and people. In an utterly simple example you know it when you meet someone that is genuinely happy to help you out.  That’s down to the person, and the culture, and the management that creates and maintains that culture. In nearly every ‘bad customer experience” I’ve had it was the technical and business systems that locked both the employee and the customer out of a happy and successful outcome. Where I’ve had really happy interactions I haven’t had cause to comment on the technology or the business rules. They had become invisible. The interaction did what it was supposed to do, usually no more than that, and I had as little work as possible to do myself close out that interaction.

I think this is going to be how we experience very many organizational processes. Processes have to be easy to interact with, demand ‘less work” on our part to complete within the interaction (i.e. no follow up calls, no hand overs, no you need to sign in on the portal when you’ve called customer service). Interesting to note that recent research in HBR “Stop Trying To Delight Your Customers” July/ Aug 2010,  points to the fact that customer failures loose you customers, but great service doesn’t create customer loyalty. So one way of looking at the cost of process fails is to look at the cost of customer churn.

I am beginning to think that maybe the manner and the degree with which companies embrace such “conversations around business processes” will be driven by culture. In another recent HBR Article The CEO of Salesforce.com explains that when their internal teams were trying out chatter pre-launch he was intrigued and realized that the many of the people that were actually knowledgeable and important were not known to management, and many of these people had no idea as to what senior management were thinking about. Mark Benioff thus broke open the “internal conversation” at Salesforce, and a $10bn company was re-connected to its mission and objectives with everyone moving in the one direction. That’s a little bit of the T in CEBT. Not every company will have a CEO like Mr. Benioff.

The openness of the conversational platform reconnected people because the formal organization and formal rules had not captured the true influence channels. This is one promise of “social enterprise”. How people connect to information, processes, and each other.  I think a long tail of Enterprise Apps will be able to reach those places that big procurement can’t reach, and make these connections happen in a fluid manner, but within an overall “policy container”.

Cisco and Salesforce.com are on the same continuum just coming at it from different ends. And to add a final twist, Cisco UC is available as a hosted solution within Salesforce.com. If you are a Verizon Enterprise customer, you can get Cisco UC as a Verizon hosted solution, and access your Salesforce.com as a hosted solution, through the one secure infrastructure. Things are getting pretty cloudy (sic). The technical challenges at the enterprise level are disappearing very quickly leaving the higher level issues of Latencies, Culture, and Business Transformation. We believe that these trends will inevitably foreground an engagement approach based on delivery of business outcomes, which you’ve guessed it, we’re passionate about here at VoiceSage.