Month: February 2008

Final session of the conference, and I’m in the financial services breakout track to hear Lee Atkinson, SVP at iDNA, and Marc Hebert, CMO of Virtusa, discuss a real-world example of using enterprise search to build a true 360-degree customer view. They started with some background on the problems with enterprise applications and how dynamic business applications (Forrester’s term for composite applications; he’s quoting from a Forrester report) are starting to take on some of the functionality. Enterprise search applications provide a layer on top of the enterprise applications, files and databases to create search solutions such as corporate search or intelligence solutions. They see enterprise search as a key enabler of dynamic business applications in order to provide both speed and agility of those applications.

The case study that they presented is the implementation of enterprise search in a top ten global bank, providing fast retrieval of structured and unstructured data, and integration with business process management (not a term that I expected to hear at this conference!) to manage events being generated by the system. Their technology platform included enterprise search, BPM, SOA and enterprise portals, and they addressed the 360-degree customer view and a GRC (governance, risk and compliance) event management system. They didn’t use search because of its inherent properties — in fact, the users don’t even see this as a search application, and the applications look like standard structured data extracted from operational systems — they use it to extract information quickly from heterogeneous data sources. Prior to this, the bank had point solutions, multiple data warehouses, and no commonality between systems and databases to provide any sort of consolidated customer view. They needed to integrate data from multiple sources, and also meet their compliance regulations.

They started by providing a compliance and risk view, plus product and customer profiling, in 2005, then expanded to include event-driven business processes and exception management in 2006. In 2007, they brought in the single customer view and more advanced business processes and analysis. Of course, there is no such thing as a single view of a customer in a large organization: different business areas (compliance, operations) have different needs, and each user type’s customized view of a customer is actually a subset of the entire customer model, with other supplementary information pulled in and additional analysis added appropriate to the task at hand. The result is a number of different end-to-end processes, such as know-your-client, anti-money laundering and sanction lists in account opening.

For them, search technology is a way to integrate legacy systems — not an application that I thought of when I considered search — although it requires a deep knowledge of the business domain and the nature of the underlying data. Once the core integration structure has been created, additional data sets and applications can be added quickly and at a fairly low cost. The focus on event-driven business applications based on search results is where search really contributes value to their applications.

Philip Bierhoff, Systems Manager at Proctor & Gamble, spoke about strategies to increase user adoption as business intelligence goes mainstream.

P&G’s Symphony project creates “decision cockpits”: dashboards based on specific roles and corporate divisions, and including information ranging from traditional BI reports to documents to news.

The underlying data landscape has moved from their first iteration of a common data warehouse in the mid-90s with regional servers plus ETL, storage and aggregation, where BI was driven by stored aggregations; to the current atomic data warehouse with a central server plus ETL and storage, where BI is driven by query rewrite — effectively, aggregation on the fly. They also have SAP generating data into SAP/BW; altogether, they have about 65TB in the data warehouse and 50TB in SAP/BW.

Originally, they used a traditional monolithic BI approach using a BI tool that acted as a portal as well as providing dashboards, graphs and reports as well as its own security layer. They had some challenges with scalability, and the boundary behavior when they pushed the size envelope. They felt restricted by the functionality of the tool, and by the lack of flexibility. Based on these restrictions, they developed a new vision of BI: one based on service-oriented architecture and industry standards, working directly from the corporate data warehouse instead of reporting data marts, and with a thin layer of BI as one of multiple layers of technology that could be changed out as required. The resulting solution uses an SOA-based (I assume JSR168-compliant) portal with various portlets, fed by FAST Radar for BI repots and graphs, and SharePoint for document storage. Under all of this is a service bus connecting to a data services platform, which in turn connects directly to the data warehouses and legacy applications. A WS-Security stack sits alongside to provide standard security and authentication.

They selected FAST Radar because it pairs simplicity with power for fast response times, fits into a portal architecture, downloads to common formats such as Excel and PDF, requires no data model maintenance and can use web services as a data source in additional to traditional database access. They’ve found that it needs very little training for creating and using reports, although they’re still using it only for predefined reports with drill-downs rather than allowing ad hoc report creation. The time to create complex reports has dropped from 30-60 seconds with the old BI tool to 5-10 seconds using FAST Radar.

The resulting architecture looks like a textbook example of how to do SOA correctly. They’re getting a good level of reuse from their services, especially the data access services, and they’re positioned for future extensions without completely overhauling the architecture. They’re able to provide customized dashboards for their 40,000-person user base in a reasonable time frame, in a large part because they’ve designed the underlying services and components for reuse.

General sessions are done for the conference, but there’s still some interesting breakout sessions. I’ve moved to the financial services track to hear Ilkka Korkiakoski, a VP at TietoEnator (a European IT services firm) talk about the challenges for the financial services industry as it moves to real-time multichannel customer interaction. Korkiakoski was previously with the OP Bank Group, so he understands this not just from the vendor side, but from the customer side as well; TietoEnator prides themselves on their depth of vertical experience in banking and other specific industries.

He started with a perspective on what’s happening in the financial services industry, particularly in Europe:

• Consumer behavior is fundamentally changing
• The expected response time of a request is now minutes, not days
• The number of customer requests and transactions sent to the back office is 10x that of 1998
• The “Business to Consumer” model will die, and be replaced with “Consumer to Business”
• There has been a shift in strategy within banks from product leadership (1995-2000) to operational excellence (2000-2005) to customer intimacy (2005-now)

The first generation of digital services were created for the digital immigrants, whereas the second generation of digital services are being created for digital natives: those young enough that web technology has always been a part of their life. The first generation included (at the time) innovative — for the time — services such as self service and online access to information and services while still maintaining silos by channel, whereas the second generation will mix business and social components and destroy the barriers between channels for a multichannel consumer experience. To support this, the people within the bank must adapt, and new tools must be created.

Looking at the high-level trends:

• Digital service penetration: basic banking services continue moving to digital channels
• Customer retention: each interaction counts and service experience will be a critical differentiation factor
• Industrialization: growing digitalization and complexity of products and services drive industrialization
• Regulation puts pressure on margins: many initiatives, including SEPA, Basel II, MiFiD, IFRS, Solvency II and SOX
• Industry consolidation: a lot of issues related to integration, economies of scale and differentiation
• Service and product innovations: smaller segments, new types of offerings and bundling will grow rapidly

Moving on to look at opportunities for enterprise search in financial services:

• Customer knowledge, to augment the information in a CRM system
• Sales and customer service desktops, to assist with answering queries
• Service experience in real-time multichannel processes, to supplement the structured data offered to a customer
• Market and business intelligence
• Regulatory and compliance
• Fraud detection, where search and rules combine in complex event processing

Electronic banking has evolved from the basic ATMs of the early 1980s to web banking in the mid 1990s to personalized services in the early 2000s to interactive multichannel services today. As Europe moved to its reliance on internet banking — over 80% of retail transactions are conducted online, with the remainder split between in-branch and the call center — a single platform is required to support the multiple channels, such that the same information and functionality is available regardless of whether the customer is interacting with the bank on the web, in person or over the phone.

The result for the web-based user interaction is a customized portal view that includes supporting information personalized for that customer via contextual search, in addition to the expected structured transactional data.

I sat in on the bloggers’ lunch and the great panel discussion about Enterprise 2.0 adoption challenges, featuring John Hagel, J.P. Rangaswami, Jim McGee and Bill Ives, and moderated by Paula Thornton.

It’s hard to eat and type at the same time, so my notes will be brief, but a few points came shining out of the discussion:

• Resistance to adoption isn’t correlated with age, it’s correlated with position in the company: higher-level people are more resistant to bringing in Enterprise 2.0 technologies because it represents a democratization of content and a relative loss of power at their level. This was a blinding flash of light for me, since it explains a lot about why I, at the age of 47 and hence not the target demographic for most social networking, have so completely embraced social applications, and actively push their use in my customers’ organizations: as an independent consultant/analyst, I have no corporate hierarchy and therefore see the value without a filter of fear.
• The names of social networking applications sound like something from Dr. Seuss, and we all feel a bit silly stating that we blog (as opposed to maintaining a reverse chronological online journal), or use a wiki (as opposed to a collaborative editing workspace). Seriously now, “blog”? “Wiki”? “Mashup”? Do we really expect stuffy enterprise executives to get past the names and see how the technology can impact their organization?
• Adoption relies on familiarity with the technologies and methods of using social applications. Having people immerse themselves in the creation and/or consumption of blogs and wikis in the wild is essential to having them understand why this is important within their company.
• The fact that these technologies are inexpensive (or even free) and quick to implement causes them to be discounted by executives who are used to spending millions on information management systems.

An important but often unexpected effect of Enterprise 2.0 is the emergent uses: users mash up data and functionality to create new content and applications that would never have been imagined by IT or management within an organization.

And now a speaker who we’ve all been waiting for: J.P. Rangaswami, CIO of British Telecom, but likely better known for his blog about information, confused of calcutta. He spoke on the new polarization: how the customer is gaining control, and the impact on corporate IT departments.

We’ve changed from the corporate IT environment of 20 years ago, which was completely permission-based (as in, you had to ask permission to get access to information and applications) and created an arrogant, ivory tower attitude within IT departments. Today, the inmates are gradually taking over the asylum, and the rise in user freedom — and the desire for still more freedom — is sending a chill through traditional IT types. Users are finding ways to work around corporate restrictions to make applications from Skype to Facebook a part of their work life.

Part of a driver for this is the increase in the amount of unstructured information, since many traditional enterprise applications focused almost exclusively on structured information. The first step in dealing with unstructured information in the enterprise came through the spread of desktop applications; the next step, which we’re undergoing now, is focused on dealing with unstructured information on the web. I’m old enough to remember dedicated word processing departments within companies, which centralized control of content creation, and the pain of transitioning to decentralized desktop word processing; someday, we’ll reminisce about the days when the IT department blocked access to Facebook from inside the enterprise.

Another driver for the user revolution that we’re undergoing is the rise of peer-to-peer rather than hub-and-spoke as a model for content creation and distribution. We’re all content authors now. We all recommend content to our friends.

A major hindrance to advancing the user revolution — the polarization that Rangaswami is referring to — is the discounting of youth due to lack of experience, when expertise isn’t actually connected to age in the rise of the technology and communities behind the revolution. A second dimension of the polarization is the democratization of participation, with some people rejecting the idea that good content can be created by amateurs, even in the face of success stories like Wikipedia and the whole open source community. The third dimension of polarization is about time, specifically the speed of implementation, with barriers against the use of products that are proudly still in alpha or beta release, such as Gmail and Google Apps.

The new generation of users — and the new generation of Web 2.0 applications — ignore documentation in the form of manuals, but focuses on self-evident functionality and just knowing what the next step to take.

This genie isn’t going back into the bottle: the power is now in the hands of the consumer, and it’s time to get over the polarization and embrace the user-centered world.

Jørn Ellefsen, CEO of Comperio, spoke about customer-driven innovation in search solutions. Comperio creates custom solutions based on the FAST platform, as well as providing a framework that I saw in yesterday’s session on enterprise mashups. Although they work mostly with customers in their Scandinavian home base, they’ve done some significant projects around the world.

This session was done in a semi-panel format moderated by a FAST executive, and Ellefsen was joined partway through by his colleague Stefan Sveen, who I saw in the mashup session yesterday, and and Jan Staff of SPH Search, a local search initiative for Singapore Press Holdings that will provide information and news about Singapore and its people and businesses for locals and visitors. Staff talked about how they were able to focus more energy on the content through the use of the Comperio Front framework, which simplifies access to the FAST platform. Because of the blend of languages used in Singapore, there are some specific search challenges: there are specific English terms, for example, that mean quite different things in Singapore than they do in other English-speaking locations.

Sveen gave a repeat of the demonstration that I saw yesterday, showing how the standard out of the box FAST interface that includes a variety of search navigation/filtering techniques, including the metadata taxonomy and four different “last update” dates. A simple customization using the Comperio Front framework combined the four date filters into a single control, simplifying the user interface. A second, more complex customization dynamically segmented the query search results to show a specialized results tab specifically with food-related results as well as the general search results.

Comperio also provides some productized solutions for less conventional search, such as their Music Search application for searching digital music: it creates a catalog of the digital music assets based on genre, mood and release decade, where search results include 30-second samples and “find similar” capabilities.