It’s Day 2 of the PegaWorld conference and it kicked off with KC Wu from Cisco Systems stating that they are moving from being a networking company to an IT company, a massive transformation and shift. A bit like the Nexus of Forces by Gartner, Wu said that we are moving to a more virtual, social, mobile and visual society and all these culminate to completely change the physical business models we have today, and through all these changes Cisco research claims that by 2017 more traffic will traverse global networks than all prior internet years combined, 1.4 zettabytes to be precise.
Cisco used Pega for a proof of concept to understand the technical capability and the art of the possible to solve real business problems and so they integrated the Business Rules and Business Process engines into their own cloud infrastructure. They built a central enterprise-wide rule repository and Wu said this is key for services to consume; build once, consume many times which reinforces the whole reuse ethos again with Pega (a recurring theme through most of the keynotes). Cisco is using the Pega rules engine to enable new emerging countries and business models.
Wu then talked about their Global supply chain integration of processes, using Pega to model and simulate, analyze with real-time monitoring, and looking ahead, CISCO wants to make use of the predictive real-time analytics of – Actionable Intelligence she called it.
Next up was Gavin Monroe from Bank of America talking about their Loan and Mortgage modification change program, which is a fairly key activity in driving economic recovery and stimulus in the US. BoA currently services 57 million customers in over 40 countries so it’s a big challenge for them and Pega to step up to.
Gavin talked about their Maze of Challenges they had to navigate through to get to where they wanted to go. BoA needed to make expertise accessible, make relationships human again, make interactions easy and remove operational inefficiencies which are mired in technical legacy, because of inflexible legacy systems and numerous integrations over the years, BoA had massive amount of manual workarounds so they picked Pega to sort it. To be honest it’s a typical set of IT challenges from BoA that any Bank faces; legacy and integrating with existing tech stack, so they should talk to LBG and share experiences in my view given their here right now. With Pega they created an enterprise dashboard, allowing Execs to see where loan pipeline and bottlenecks were, system health, operational KPIs, traditional stuff.
What was interesting was that Gavin admitted that the cultural shift was a big hurdle. They had process champions, mentors….”everybody felt we were playing ‘whack a mole’ ” and they didn’t plan for massive pushback from the business. They created CoE’s but weren’t ready, the lack of skills caused delays, and in hindsight they would have staffed up front and empowered first.
The Customer Experience Panel was up after Gavin but it was fairly lacklustre so I stopped taking notes at that point. Telerx discussed reuse as well during the presentation video before the panel and if there is one defining capability over other BPMS software it’s this.
Overall, the last two days we’ve seen some big names, hard lessons and successes with Pega but there has to be more themes out there than “simplification” in BPM and business transformation, those customer stories are getting a little stale now so that’s a challenge for PegaWorld 2014 next year to go hunting for something meatier.
And I call dibs on the term Pega Oriented Architecture which is better than Situational Layer Cake 
