PegaWorld has kicked off and if you’re following the Twitter hashtag #PegaWorld you’ll already have seen a lot of buzz being generated from this morning’s keynotes. Whilst most of the tech world are either watching E3 or WWDC there are some of us still interested in that old timer called BPM so here we all are. Of course, the radio silence that has since descended is once again down to 2,000 thought leaders bringing down the hotel network at the same time with 2 or more devices, a pet gripe of every conference it seems.
Alan Trefler took to the stage on Pega’s 30th anniversary year (Who knew ?! That makes them a legacy system now lol) and ushered in Pega 7 and a new partner solution called “Upgrade Factory” from Virtusa and Cognizant, an easier migration path from one version to another to ease the pains of an implementation. Can’t say it’s not an overdue one but also shows that Pega are starting to take more interest in the partner ecosystem.
Alan called technology “an insult to business” and made way for a more business focused Pega v7, something the company has spent 2 years developing with improved QA and based on a model driven approach to development which aligns more with the existing “Build for Change” ethos. He also positioned Pega as sitting between Systems of Innovation and Systems of Differentiation and as a key component to building a “digital business”. Still based on open architecture they’re now utilizing HTML5 and CSS3 for web and mobile capabilities. The new UI looks pretty clean now and basically in line with how apps are tending to end up.
Annette Barnes of Lloyds Banking Group took to the stage after Alan to bring her customer story to live about one of the largest transformation programmes in Europe today with key highlights such as
- Reducing errors by 50% in the Life and Pensions business and implemented case management using Pega
- Creating Processing centres, automated workflow, skills based routing, load balancing and multi-skilling through Pega
- Account closure process revamped, takes 3 minutes to close an account now with Pega
One of the messages that Anne relayed was that “We’re spending over £2bn, this is not a cost reduction programme” and went on to say that over a third saved is being directly reinvested back into the programme for future change. It’s a rolling programme essentially. One of the interesting points Anne brought up about working with Pega was that it forces you to rethink how you view your business, and that working with Pega is like having a “critical friendship”. More importantly though, if she had the chance to do things differently she mentioned that she would get the right key skills in place earlier in the change agenda with Pega rather than mobilize later, and I think this is more to do with the constraints of the skills availability like LSAs and CSSAs more than anything else.
AIG took to the stage next and gave an inspirational picture about how they’ve turned their business around. AIG has paid back over $200bn and all thanks to the leadership and colleagues who believed in the business said Eric Martinez. “We are 50,000 employees, but we lacked scale. You can be really big but completely lack scale” he said, going on to blame a federated business model which created 91 silos (!) and which wasn’t agile enough. It was an interesting keynote but I didn’t get any sense of a real Pega story in the back of it.
Kerim Akgonul was next, evangelising the major development that’s gone under the hood with v7. This new release of Pega is to make it easier to capture business vision using a new method called Stage Based Case Management.
I’ll try to cover this in more detail in a follow up post once I’ve grabbed more time with Kerim directly.
Accenture was up last to talk more about the Digital Business, the connectedness of everything and how it’s disrupting the retail industry and how Pega is perfectly designed to play straight into this. I won’t cover that here but below is a shot to give a flavor in any case.
Watch this space for more info as I take to a Q&A session with Alan soon.
