The Blue Polaris Blog

Brad Strock of PayPal presented on innovation. He laid out the three stages of money:

• Money 1.0 is what you might call traditional coinage and notes.
• Money 2.0 was the credit revolution with revolving debt, credit and debit cards etc. These have become the pre-eminent means of payment for many people.
• Money 3.0 is what PayPal sees coming – Digital and Mobile.

Brad polled the audience to demonstrate how rapidly people update their phones – hardly anyone is using an iPhone that is more than a few years old for instance. This pace of change shows up with competitors also – Honeywell never thought they would be competing with Google but Google’s acquisition of Nest means they are. Brad and PayPal consider the changes happening now have a lot in common with the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution changed the world dramatically in 100 or so years – urbanization, power, manufacturing, steel and more.

Jeffrey Kuhn from BNY Mellon came up to talk about business transformation in the face of unprecedented and accelerating change. Technology is changing what is possible and allowing new competitors to emerge while offering new distruptors at every turn. We need, he says, to use these challenges to drive transformation in our organizations and this is what BNY Mellon has tried to do with Pega. Their Continuous Process Improvement program is designed to increase client satisfaction, increase employee satisfaction, eliminate waste, reduce risk, improve customer service and drive excellence in everything they do for clients. It’s about using automation to drive straight through processing and freeing people to handle exceptions and help clients: to partner with customers to add value not simply be order takers.

Some history: BNY Mellon is the oldest bank in the US. BNY Mellon is not a typical bank but is focused on the investment process, managing and services assets. $1.

Rob Walker kicked off day 2 of PegaWorld talking about Decision Management and the role of analytics in customer engagement. He began by talking about John Boyd and his theory of engagement – the OODA loop – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act (something I referenced in Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to Using Business Rules and Predictive Analytics). The OODA loop is ideal for next best action:

• Observe customer behavior
• Orient to the channel and context
• Decide on the best action
• Act to fulfill this action.

Good next best action approaches, he says,  have multiple dimensions of customer engagement. The action must be:

• Customer Desirable
• Brand identifiable
• Economically viable
• Operationally feasible

When customers are engaging w

OnStar presented at PegaWorld on their use of Pega Decision Management (the old Chordiant product) for managing telematics to improve customer experience. OnStar handles 7M customers worldwide and about 4 calls per second. It has handled more than 780M customer interactions to date including 3.8M emergencies and nearly 10M remote door unlocks. OnStar began as a single purpose application with dedicated components and has evolved into a platform for integrated services across multiple applications – bringing people’s digital life and car together. Their mobile app now has 2M downloads and 68M interactions.The new environment will provide 4G LTE allowing WiFi and multiple relaible connections.

OnStar was using an old CRM system and started looking for a new one. They saw Decision Management capabilities as a way to manage the change they faced – avoiding the “specify requirements now for next October” problem. They had some specific use cases t

Next up an executive panel on digital transformation from the C-Suite with a CTO, a CIO and a CFO from Lloyds Bank, UnitedHealthcare and the FBI.

UnitedHealthcare’s key element for digital transformation was a focus on members, consumers rather than on enterprise customers. For instance this means delivering customer service interactions that are not disjointed based on internal processes.

Lloyds of course was impacted by the financial crises and changes of recent years. Their digital transformation started several years ago with an initial focus on simplification, driving complexity out of the key customer processes. Now it is about digitization, delivering a completely digital omnichannel environment.

The FBI’s digital revolution is, of course, somewhat different. For many years the FBI was reactive and localized, responding to individual crimes with local resources. Now digitization of crimes as well as of evidence and investigations is tra

Next up at PegaWorld was a customer presentation from Vodafone. Vodafone is one of the world’s largest communications companies with 30,000+ employees and 400M customers across 30 countries. They have expanded from consumer mobile telephony to a broader portfolio of services (fixed and mobile, converged, enterprise and consumers).  This change has driven a need to serve multinational customers who have complex portfolios of services on which they rely. It has also changed their competitors, adding new cloud platform companies to their existing telco competitors.

Vodafone created a group to focus on enterprise services. This group has led a business transformation program focused on simplification, standardization, digitization and globalization. This means a greater focus on enterprise capabilities in support of local expertise. And while enterprise is an important new focus, consumers remain important also.

The enterprise delivery capability is about packag