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  • Thoughts (on Windows Phone 7) from the MVP Summit

    - by Chris Williams
    Last week I packed off to Redmond, WA for my annual pilgrimage to Microsoft's MVP Summit. I'll spare you all the silly taunting about knowing stuff I can't talk about, etc... and just get to the point. I'm a XNA/DirectX MVP, an ASP Insider and a Languages (VB) Insider... so I actually had access to a pretty broad spectrum of information over the last week. Most of my time was focused on Windows Phone 7 related sessions, and while I can't dig deep into specifics, I can say that Microsoft is definitely not out of the fight for Mobile. The things I saw tell me that Microsoft is listening and paying attention to feedback, looking at what works & what doesn't and they are working their collective asses off to close the gap between Google and Apple. Anyone who has been in this industry for a while can tell you Microsoft does their best work when they are the underdog. They are currently behind, and have a lot of work ahead of them, but this is when they bring all their resources together to solve a problem. After the week I spent in Redmond, and the feedback I heard from other MVPs, and the technological previews I saw... I feel confident in betting heavily on Microsoft to pull this off.

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  • Thoughts on Technical Opinions

    - by Joe Mayo
    Nearly every day, people send email from the C# Station contact form with feedback on the tutorial.  The overwhelming majority is positive and “Thank You” notes.  Some feedback identifies problems such as typos, grammatical errors, or a constructive explanation of an item that was confusing.  It’s pretty rare, but I even get emails that are not very nice at all – no big deal because it comes with the territory and is sometimes humorous.  Sometimes I get questions related to the content that is more of a general nature, referring to best practices or approaches. It’s these more general questions that are sometimes interesting because there’s often no right or wrong answer. There was a time when I was more opinionated about these general scenarios, but not so much anymore. Sure, people who are learning are wanting to know the “right” way to do something and general guidance is good to help them get started.  However, just because a certain practice is the way you or your clique does things, doesn’t mean that another approach is wrong.  These days, I think that a more open-minded approach when providing technical guidance is more constructive. By the way, to all the people who consistently send kind emails each day:  You’re very welcome. :) @JoeMayo

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  • Thoughts on exception handling.

    - by AndyScott
    Was working on a windows form app (something I haven't done in a while), adding threading and logging so that it would work a little more smoothly and have a record of who did what.  I was just about at the point where I was going to check it into source control when I noticed that the Output window was showing "A first chance exception of type 'System.InvalidCastException' occurred in mscorlib.dll", so I googled it.  In reading some threads about the error, I came across the following comment and it got me thinking: "In addition, while they should be avoided if possible, exceptions are a quite legitimate part of program execution. It's their going unhandled that is a real issue, because that means crashy, crashy." How do you normally use exception handling?  I feel that exceptions are intended to handle errors in code (in my experience generally related to bad data making its way into the system).  Now don't get me wrong, I understand that exceptions happen and should be dealt with, but I feel that they are a "last resort" to keep a program from crashing, but should never be a way to pass data or continue logical processing that could be handled in standard code flow. I mention this, because I have seen it done. What do you think?

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  • windows azure thoughts.

    - by foxjazz
    Well I had a relatively unpleasant exprience with Microsoft's new offerings when it comes to azure.And of course they deleted the forum trail.They don't want the consumer as a customer, expect to pay $200 - $250 or more a year for azure and that doesn't include a good email solution. This is for the smallest slice offering.If you want a simple website solution 1and1.com isn't a bad choice and it's less than $50 a year.

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  • Thoughts and rambling on the X protocol

    <b>jd:/dev/blog:</b> "Two years ago, while working on awesome, I joined the Freedesktop initiative to work on XCB. I had to learn the arcane of the X11 protocol and all the mysterious and old world that goes with it."

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  • two thoughts about career excellence

    - by john.rose
    I love Dickens, warts and all. Sometimes he is sententious, and (like the mediocre modern I am) at such points I am willing to listen non-ironically. This bit here struck me hard enough to stop and write it down: I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for. It is Woodcourt's kind. (John Jarndyce to Esther Summerson, Bleak House, ch. 60) Woodcourt is, of course, one of the heroes of the story. It is a heroism that is attractive to me. Here is a similar idea, from the Screwtape Letters. In the satirically inverted logic of that book, the “Enemy” is God, the enemy of the devils but the author of good: The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. (C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, ch. 14) Though I will be happy with a good Bazaar, I also dream of Cathedrals. Put whatever name you like on it, as long as I get some part in the fun of building a good one.

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  • Google Thoughts on Website Speed

    Improving website efficiency and speeding up response time, has become increasingly important to search engines, a majority of Internet users; and in-turn, website operators. A quick website response time, to generated requests, has been proven to encourage satisfied Internet visitors; and reduce website operating costs.

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  • What would be your thoughts in this situation?

    - by craftsman
    Imagine there's a businessman who has a solid internet idea. He hires you as his first employee and pays you well (also offers you shares if product generates revenue). You code the product for more than a year. But the product is not properly marketed and left almost unused. You get frustrated by loneliness and working endlessly on an unused product. You start applying at different companies. You don't get response from anyone. After a month, you realize that things are beginning to change. The businessman has started to give more attention to the product. You have defined a solid marketing plan with him. Things are almost sure to work. Suddenly one day, you get a call from a big company you yearned to work for. They invite you for an interview. If you respond to the interview and get the job, you will lose the chance to earn something from your one year hard-work. If you don't respond, you will obviously miss the chance to work in the big company. If your marketing doesn't work as well (you will know it in a couple of months), you will probably not get a chance in the big company again. What would be your decision?

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  • Thoughts on MPM-ITK?

    - by Rich
    I have several sites on my server set up as virtual hosts. What are your thoughts on MPM-ITK? Are the tradeoffs and the potential root exploit vulnerability worth the security of internal system files? http://mpm-itk.sesse.net/

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  • Thoughts on Apache log file sizes?

    - by Nathan Long
    Do you place any limits on the size of Apache log files - access.log and error.log? Specifically, can you give: Reasons to limit log file sizes Disk space Any other? Reasons NOT to limit log file sizes Research into performance issues or security breaches Any other? Methods of doing so Cron job that periodically deletes the file, or the first N lines? Any other? Anything you might salvage before deleting For example, grep out how many times a file was downloaded before deleting the access logs I'd like get the thoughts of experienced sysadmins before I do anything. (Marking as community wiki since this may be a matter of opinion.)

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  • Bye Bye Year of the Dragon, Hello BPM

    - by Ajay Khanna
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} As 2012 fades and we usher in a New Year, let’s look back at some of the hottest BPM trends and those we’ll be seeing more of in the coming months. BPM is as much about people as it is about technology. As people adopt new ways of engagement, new channels of communications and new devices to interact , the changes are reflected in BPM practices. As Social and Mobile have become an integral part of our personal and professional lives, we’ll see tighter integration of social and mobile with BPM, and more use cases emerging for smarter process management in 2013. And with products and services becoming less differentiated, organizations will strive to differentiate on Customer Experience. Concepts like Pace Layered Architecture and Dynamic Case Management will provide more flexibility and agility to IT groups and knowledge workers. Take a look at some of these capabilities we showcased (see video) at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Some of these trends that will continue to gain momentum in 2013: Social networks and social media have provided a new way for businesses to engage with customers. A prospect is likely to reach out to their social network before making any purchase. Companies are increasingly engaging with customers in social networks to influence their purchasing decisions, as well as listening to customers via tools like sentiment analysis to see what customers think about a particular product or process. These insights are valuable as companies look to improve their processes. Inside organizations, workers are using social tools to engage with each other to design new products and processes. Social collaboration tools are being used to resolve issues where an employee needs consultation to reach a decision. Oracle BPM Suite includes social interaction as an integral part of its process design and work management to empower today’s business users. Ubiquitous smart mobile devices are trending as a tool of choice for many workers. Many companies are adopting the policy of “Bring Your Own Device,” and the device of choice is a tablet. Devices like smart phones and tablets not only provide mobility to workers and customers, but they also provide additional important information – the context. By integrating the mobile context (location, photos, and preferences) into your processes, organizations can make much more informed decisions, as well as offer more personalized service to customers. Using Oracle ADF Mobile, you can easily create user interfaces for mobile devices and also capture location data for process execution. Customer experience was at the forefront of trending topics in 2012. Organizations are trying to understand their customers better and offer them more personalized and differentiated services. Customer experience is paramount when companies design sales and support processes. Companies are looking to BPM to consistently and efficiently orchestrate customer facing processes across disparate systems, departments and channels of communication. Oracle BPM Suite provides just the right capabilities for organizations to design and deliver an excellent customer experience. Pace Layered Architecture strategy is gaining traction as a way to maximize agility and minimize disruption in organizations. It provides a framework to manage the evolution of your information system when different pieces of it are changing at different rates and need to be updated independent of one another. Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle BPM Suite are designed with this in mind. The database layer, integration layer, application layer, and process layer should not be required to change at the same time. Most of the business changes to policy or process can be done at the process layer without disrupting the whole infrastructure. By understanding the type of change needed at a particular level, organizations can become much more agile and efficient. Adaptive Case Management proposes more flexibility to manage processes or cases that do not follow a structured process flow. In such situations, the knowledge worker managing the case needs to evaluate what step should occur next because the sequence of steps can’t be predetermined. Another characteristic is that it requires much more collaboration than straight-through process. As simple processes become automated, and customers adopt more and more self-service, cases that reach the case workers are much more complex and need more investigation. Oracle BPM suite includes comprehensive adaptive case management capability to manage such unstructured and complex processes. Smart BPM or making your BPM intelligent has been the holy grail for BPM practitioners who imagined that one day BPM would become one with Business Intelligence, Business Activity Monitoring and Complex Event Processing, making it much more responsive and helpful in organizational decision making. In 2013, organizations will begin to deploy these intelligent BPM solutions. Oracle offers an integrated solution that brings together the powerful functionality of BI, BAM, event processing, and Real Time Decisions to help organizations create smart process based solutions. In order to help customers reach their BPM goals faster and remove risks associated with BPM initiatives, Oracle has introduced Oracle Process Accelerators, pre-built best practices applications built on Oracle BPM Suite that are fully production grade and ready to deploy. These are exiting times for BPM practitioners and there is so much to look forward to in 2013. We wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year 2013. Happy BPMing!

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  • Career development as a Software Developer without becoming a manager.

    - by albertpascual
    I’m a developer, I like to write new exciting code everyday, my perfect day at work is a day that when I wake up, I know that I have to write some code that I haven’t done before or to use a new framework/language/platform that is unknown to me. The best days in the office is when a project is waiting for me to architect or write. In my 15 years in the development field, I had to in order to get a better salary to manage people, not just to lead developers, to actually manage people. Something that I found out when I get into a management position is that I’m not that good at managing people, and not afraid to say it. I do not enjoy that part of the job, the worse one, takes time away from what I really like. Leading developers and managing people are very different things. I do like teaching and leading developers in a project. Yet most people believe, and is true in most companies, the way to get a better salary is to be promoted to a manager position. In order to advance in your career you need to let go of the everyday writing code and become a supervisor or manager. This is the path for developers after they become senior developers. As you get older and your family grows, the only way to hit your salary requirements is to advance your career to become a manager and get that manager salary. That path is the common in most companies, the most intelligent companies out there, have learned that promoting good developers mean getting a crappy manager and losing a good resource. Now scratch everything I said, because as I previously stated, I don’t see myself going to the office everyday and just managing people until is time to go home. I like to spend hours working in some code to accomplish a task, learning new platforms and languages or patterns to existing languages. Being interrupted every 15 minutes by emails or people stopping by my office to resolve their problems, is not something I could enjoy. All the sudden riding my motorcycle to work one cold morning over the Redlands Canyon and listening to .NET Rocks podcast, Michael “Doc” Norton explaining how to take control of your development career without necessary going to the manager’s track. I know, I should not have headphones under my helmet when riding a motorcycle in California. His conversation with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell was just confirming everything I have ever did with actually more details and assuring that there are other paths. His method was simple yet most of us, already do many of those steps, Mr. Michael “Doc” Norton believe that it pays off on the long run, that finally companies prefer to pay higher salaries to those developers, yet I would actually think that many companies do not see developers that way, this is not true for bigger companies. However I do believe the value of those developers increase and most of the time, changing companies could increase their salary instead of staying in the same one. In short without even trying to get into the shadow of Mr. Norton and without following the steps in the order; you should love to learn new technologies, and then teach them to other geeks. I personally have learn many technologies and I haven’t stop doing that, I am a professor at UCR where I teach ASP.NET and Silverlight. Mr Norton continues that after than, you want to be involve in the development community, user groups, online forums, open source projects. I personally talk to user groups, I’m very active in forums asking and answering questions as well as for those I got awarded the Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET. After you accomplish all those, you should also expose yourself for what you know and what you do not know, learning a new language will make you humble again as well as extremely happy. There is no better feeling that learning a new language or pattern in your daily job. If you love your job everyday and what you do, I really recommend you to follow Michael’s presentation that he kindly share it on the link below. His confirmation is a refreshing, knowing that my future is not behind a desk where the computer screen is on my right hand side instead of in front of me. Where I don’t have to spent the days filling up performance forms for people and the new platforms that I haven’t been using yet are just at my fingertips. Presentation here. http://www.slideshare.net/LeanDog/take-control-of-your-development-career-michael-doc-norton?from=share_email_logout3 Take Control of Your Development Career Welcome! Michael “Doc” Norton @DocOnDev http://docondev.blogspot.com/ [email protected] Recovering Post Technical I love to learn I love to teach I love to work in teams I love to write code I really love to write code What about YOU? Do you love your job? Do you love your Employer? Do you love your Boss? What do you love? What do you really love? Take Control Take Control • Get Noticed • Get Together • Get Your Mojo • Get Naked • Get Schooled Get Noticed Get Noticed Know Your Business Get Noticed Get Noticed Understand Management Get Noticed Get Noticed Do Your Existing Job Get Noticed Get Noticed Make Yourself Expendable Get Together Get Together Join a User Group Get Together Help Run a User Group Get Together Start a User Group Get Your Mojo Get Your Mojo Kata Get Your Mojo Koans Get Your Mojo Breakable Toys Get Your Mojo Open Source Get Naked Get Naked Run with Group A Get Naked Do Something Different Get Naked Own Your Mistakes Get Naked Admit You Don’t Know Get Schooled Get Schooled Choose a Mentor Get Schooled Attend Conferences Get Schooled Teach a New Subject Get Started Read These (Again) Take Control of Your Development Career Thank You! Michael “Doc” Norton @DocOnDev http://docondev.blogspot.com/ [email protected] In a short summary, I recommend any developer to check his blog and more important his presentation, I haven’t been lucky enough to watch him live, I’m looking forward the day I have the opportunity. He is giving us hope in the future of developers, when I see some of my geek friends moving to position that in short years they begin to regret, I get more unsure of my future doing what I love. I would say that now is looking at the spectrum of companies that understand and appreciate developers. There are a few there, hopefully with time code sweat shops will start disappearing and being a developer will feed a family of 4. Cheers Al tweetmeme_url = 'http://weblogs.asp.net/albertpascual/archive/2010/12/07/career-development-as-a-software-developer-without-becoming-a-manager.aspx'; tweetmeme_source = 'alpascual';

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  • OpenWorld Session: Oracle Unified BPM Suite Development Best Practices

    - by Ajay Khanna
    Blog by David Read Earlier today,  Sushil Shukla, Yogeshwar Kuntawar, and I (David Read) delivered an OpenWorld  session that covered BPM development best practices.  It was well attended.  Last year we had a session that covered end-to-end lifecycle best practices for BPM.  This year we narrowed the focus to the development portion of the lifecycle.  We started with an overview of development process best practices, then focused on a few key design topics where we’ve seen common questions from customers and partners. Data Design Using EDN Multi-Instance Activity Using the Spring Component Human Task Integration We wrapped up with an overview of key concepts for effective error handling, including error handling within the process design, and using declarative fault policies. We hope you found the session useful, and as noted in the session, please be sure to try to attend Prasen’s session to see more details about approaches for testing Oracle Business Rules: CON8606  Oracle Business Rules Use Cases, 10/3/2012, 3:30PM  

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  • HYUNDAI @ Oracle Open World 2012 General Session (GEN9449): Engineered Systems - From Vision to Game-Changing Results

    - by Sanjeev Sharma
     Why do data centers still demand an “assembly required” approach? This necessity  proves costly and complex, forces customers to deal with a wide range of vendors  for each  application, and fails to deliver performance optimization for application and data  workloads.  Oracle believes that systems (just like automobiles) should be designed and engineered “at the  factory” with the goal of reducing customers’ costs and complexity and delivering extreme performance, reliability, availability, and simplicity with a higher degree of automation. Hyundai Motor Company was founded in 1967 and since then has become a global brand in the automotive industry. Hyundai Motor Company’s was looking for a solution to manage its intellectual capital by capturing and facilitating re-use of knowledge of its thousands of employees. To achieve this Hyundai Motor Company set out to build a centralized document management platform that will allow its 30,000 knowledge workers to collaborate by sharing documents in a secure manner, anytime, anywhere. Furthermore this new knowledge management platform would bring about significant improvements in employee productivity.  Hear senior business leaders from Hyundai speak about the role and benefits of running their knowledge management platform on the Oracle family of engineered systems at the following general session at Oracle Open World 2012: Session: GEN9499 - General Session: Engineered Systems—From Vision to Game-Changing Results Date: Monday, 1 Oct, 2012Time: 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm (PST)Venue: Moscone West (2002 / 2004)

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  • 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards for Oracle Exalogic

    - by Sanjeev Sharma
    Companies from around the world were honored for their innovative solutions using Oracle Fusion Middleware. This year’s 27 award winners, representing 11 countries and a wide span of industries, wowed the judges with a range of projects across eight product categories. 4 awards were given out to customers who demonstrated innovative application of Oracle Exalogic for their mission-critical applications.Below is an overview of the 4 businesses that won the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award for Oracle Exalogic this year. Company: Netshoes About: Leading online retailer of sporting goods in Latin America.Challenges: Rapid business growth resulted in frequent outages and poor response-time of online store-front Conventional ad-hoc approach to horizontal scaling resulted in high CAPEX and OPEX Poor performance and unavailability of online store-front resulted in revenue loss from purchase abandonment Solution: Consolidated ATG Commerce and Oracle WebLogic running on Oracle Exalogic.Business Impact:Reduced abandonment rates resulting in a two-digit increase in online conversion rates translating directly into revenue up-liftCompany: ClaroAbout: Leading communications services provider in Latin America.Challenges: Support business growth over the next 3  - 5 years while maximizing re-use of existing middleware and application investments with minimal effort and risk Solution: Consolidated Oracle Fusion Middleware components (Oracle WebLogic, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Tuxedo) and JAVA applications onto Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. Business Impact:Improved partner SLA’s 7x while improving throughput 5X and response-time 35x for  JAVA applicationsCompany: ULAbout: Leading safety testing and certification organization in the world.Challenges: Transition from being a non-profit to a profit oriented enterprise and grow from a $1B to $5B in annual revenues in the next 5 years Undertake a massive business transformation by aligning change strategy with execution Solution: Consolidated Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite, Siebel, BI, Hyperion) and Oracle Fusion Middleware (AIA, SOA Suite) on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle ExadataBusiness Impact:Reduced financial and operating risk in re-architecting IT services to support new business capabilities supporting 87,000 manufacturersCompany: Ingersoll RandAbout: Leading manufacturer of industrial, climate, residential and security solutions.Challenges: Business continuity risks due to complexity in enforcing consistent operational and financial controls; Re-active business decisions reduced ability to offer differentiation and compete Solution: Consolidated Oracle E-business Suite on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle ExadataBusiness Impact:Service differentiation with faster order provisioning and a shorter lead-to-cash cycle translating into higher customer satisfaction and quicker cash-conversionCheck out the winners of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation awards in other categories here.

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  • Gauging Maturity of your BPM Strategy - part 2 / 2

    - by Sanjeev Sharma
    In my earlier post I had discussed the essence of maturity assessment and the business imperative for doing the same in the context of BPM. In this post I will discuss Oracle’s BPM Maturity assessment methodology. Oracle’s BPM Maturity model comprises of the following components: Maturity – represents stages of evolution of your BPM capability with 0 being the lowest level and 5 being the highest level  Domain – represents multiple perspectives both technical and business oriented against which your BPM capability can be assessed Adoption – represents scale of BPM rollout starting at the project level to the enterprise level Note: Your BPM capability can be at different levels of maturity for the different domains. Oracle’s BPM assessment methodology measures the maturity of your BPM capability at the individual domain level as well as the aggregate level. The output of Oracle’s BPM assessment benefits you in two ways: Gap Analysis by comparing the “As-Is” BPM capability with the desired “To-Be” BPM capability along the various domains  (see Figure 1) Systematic Adoption by aligning evolution of BPM capability with its rollout in multiple phases (see Figure 2)

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  • Managing Operational Risk of Financial Services Processes – part 1/ 2

    - by Sanjeevio
    Financial institutions view compliance as a regulatory burden that incurs a high initial capital outlay and recurring costs. By its very nature regulation takes a prescriptive, common-for-all, approach to managing financial and non-financial risk. Needless to say, no longer does mere compliance with regulation will lead to sustainable differentiation.  Genuine competitive advantage will stem from being able to cope with innovation demands of the present economic environment while meeting compliance goals with regulatory mandates in a faster and cost-efficient manner. Let’s first take a look at the key factors that are limiting the pursuit of the above goal. Regulatory requirements are growing, driven in-part by revisions to existing mandates in line with cross-border, pan-geographic, nature of financial value chains today and more so by frequent systemic failures that have destabilized the financial markets and the global economy over the last decade.  In addition to the increase in regulation, financial institutions are faced with pressures of regulatory overlap and regulatory conflict. Regulatory overlap arises primarily from two things: firstly, due to the blurring of boundaries between lines-of-businesses with complex organizational structures and secondly, due to varying requirements of jurisdictional directives across geographic boundaries e.g. a securities firm with operations in US and EU would be subject different requirements of “Know-Your-Customer” (KYC) as per the PATRIOT ACT in US and MiFiD in EU. Another consequence and concomitance of regulatory change is regulatory conflict, which again, arises primarily from two things: firstly, due to diametrically opposite priorities of line-of-business and secondly, due to tension that regulatory requirements create between shareholders interests of tighter due-diligence and customer concerns of privacy. For instance, Customer Due Diligence (CDD) as per KYC requires eliciting detailed information from customers to prevent illegal activities such as money-laundering, terrorist financing or identity theft. While new customers are still more likely to comply with such stringent background checks at time of account opening, existing customers baulk at such practices as a breach of trust and privacy. As mentioned earlier regulatory compliance addresses both financial and non-financial risks. Operational risk is a non-financial risk that stems from business execution and spans people, processes, systems and information. Operational risk arising from financial processes in particular transcends other sources of such risk. Let’s look at the factors underpinning the operational risk of financial processes. The rapid pace of innovation and geographic expansion of financial institutions has resulted in proliferation and ad-hoc evolution of back-office, mid-office and front-office processes. This has had two serious implications on increasing the operational risk of financial processes: ·         Inconsistency of processes across lines-of-business, customer channels and product/service offerings. This makes it harder for the risk function to enforce a standardized risk methodology and in turn breaches harder to detect. ·         The proliferation of processes coupled with increasingly frequent change-cycles has resulted in accidental breaches and increased vulnerability to regulatory inadequacies. In summary, regulatory growth (including overlap and conflict) coupled with process proliferation and inconsistency is driving process compliance complexity In my next post I will address the implications of this process complexity on financial institutions and outline the role of BPM in lowering specific aspects of operational risk of financial processes.

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  • BPM in Retail Industry

    - by Sanjeev Sharma
    The following series of blog posts discuss common BPM use-cases in the Retail industry: Retail 2.0 represents the transformation in the retail industry triggered by the accelerated shift towards online and mobile technologies and social shopping paradigms. Never before has the consumer been of more importance or should i say in greater control, especially so due to the shrinking information asymmetry between merchants and consumers that has tilted the balance of power in the latter’s favor. For details, click Customer Experience Management for Retail 2.0 - part 1 / 2 Below is a concept architecture for streamlining front-end, mid-office and back-end interfaces through shared process to achieve consistency and efficiency in managing the customer experience from order capture to order provisioning. For details, click Customer Experience Management for Retail 2.0 - part 2 / 2 ARTS Retail Reference Model (Coming Soon!)

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  • Customer Experience and BPM – From Efficiency to Engagement

    - by Ajay Khanna
    Over the last few years, focus of BPM has been mainly to improve the businesses efficiency. To create more efficient processes, to remove bottlenecks, to automate processes. That still holds true and why not? Isn’t BPM all about continuous improvement? BPM facilitates and requires business and IT collaboration. But business also requires working with customer. Do we not want to get close to and collaborate with our customers? This is where Social BPM takes BPM a step further. It not only allows people within an organization to collaborate to design exceptional processes, not only lets them collaborate on resolving a case but also let them engage with the customers. Engaging with customer means, first of all, connecting with them on their terms and turf. Take a new account opening process. Can a customer call you and initiate the process? Can a customer email you, or go to the website and initiate the process? Can they tweet you and initiate the process? Can they check the status of process via any channel they like? Can they take a picture of damaged package delivery and kick-off a returns process from their mobile device, with GIS data? Yes, these are various aspects to consider during process design if the goal is better customer experience and engagement. Of course, we want to be efficient and agile, but the focus here needs to be the customer. Now when the customer is tweeting about your products, posting on Facebook and Yelp about their experience with your company (and your process), you need to seek out that information. You need to gather and analyze the customer’s feedback on the social media and use that information to improve the processes and products. This is an excellent source of product and process ideation. So BPM is no longer only about improving back-office process efficiency, it is moving into a new and exciting phase of improving frontline customer facing processes, customer experience and engagement. Let me know how you think BPM can enhance customer experience.

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  • Harnessing Business Events for Predictive Decision Making - part 1 / 3

    - by Sanjeev Sharma
    Businesses have long relied on data mining to elicit patterns and forecast future demand and supply trends. Improvements in computing hardware, specifically storage and compute capacity, have significantly enhanced the ability to store and analyze mountains of data in ever shrinking time-frames. Nevertheless, the reality is that data growth is outpacing storage capacity by a factor of two and computing power is still very much bounded by Moore's Law, doubling only every 18 months.Faced with this data explosion, businesses are exploring means to develop human brain-like capabilities in their decision systems (including BI and Analytics) to make sense of the data storm, in other words business events, in real-time and respond pro-actively rather than re-actively. It is more like having a little bit of the right information just a little bit before hand than having all of the right information after the fact. To appreciate this thought better let's first understand the workings of the human brain.Neuroscience research has revealed that the human brain is predictive in nature and that talent is nothing more than exceptional predictive ability. The cerebral-cortex, part of the human brain responsible for cognition, thought, language etc., comprises of five layers. The lowest layer in the hierarchy is responsible for sensory perception i.e. discrete, detail-oriented tasks whereas each of the above layers increasingly focused on assembling higher-order conceptual models. Information flows both up and down the layered memory hierarchy. This allows the conceptual mental-models to be refined over-time through experience and repetition. Secondly, and more importantly, the top-layers are able to prime the lower layers to anticipate certain events based on the existing mental-models thereby giving the brain a predictive ability. In a way the human brain develops a "memory of the future", some sort of an anticipatory thinking which let's it predict based on occurrence of events in real-time. A higher order of predictive ability stems from being able to recognize the lack of certain events. For instance, it is one thing to recognize the beats in a music track and another to detect beats that were missed, which involves a higher order predictive ability.Existing decision systems analyze historical data to identify patterns and use statistical forecasting techniques to drive planning. They are similar to the human-brain in that they employ business rules very much like mental-models to chunk and classify information. However unlike the human brain existing decision systems are unable to evolve these rules automatically (AI still best suited for highly specific tasks) and  predict the future based on real-time business events. Mistake me not,  existing decision systems remain vital to driving long-term and broader business planning. For instance, a telco will still rely on BI and Analytics software to plan promotions and optimize inventory but tap into business events enabled predictive insight to identify specifically which customers are likely to churn and engage with them pro-actively. In the next post, i will depict the technology components that enable businesses to harness real-time events and drive predictive decision making.

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  • Finding it Hard to Deliver Right Customer Experience: Think BPM!

    - by Ajay Khanna
    Our relationship with our customers is not a just a single interaction and we should not treat it like one. A customer’s relationship with a vendor is like a journey which starts way before customer makes a purchase and lasts long after that. The journey may start with customer researching a product that may lead to the eventual purchase and may continue with support or service needs for the product. A typical customer journey can be represented as shown below: As you may notice, customers tend to use multiple channels to interact with a company throughout their journey.  They also expect that they should get consistent experience, no matter what interaction channel they may choose. Customers do not like to repeat the information they have already provided and expect companies to remember their preferences, and offer them relevant products and services. If the company fails to meet this expectation, customers not only will abandon the purchase and go to the competitor but may also influence others’ purchase decision. Gone are the days when word of mouth was the only medium, and the customer could influence “Six” others. This is the age of social media and customer’s good or bad experience, especially bad get highly amplified and may influence hundreds of others. Challenges that face B2C companies today include: Delivering consistent experience: The reason that delivering consistent experience is challenging is due to fragmented data, disjointed systems and siloed multichannel interactions. Customers tend to get different service quality if they use web vs. phone vs. store. They get different responses from different service agents or get inconsistent answers if they call sales vs. service group in the company. Such inconsistent experiences result in lower customer satisfaction or NPS (net promoter score) numbers. Increasing Revenue: To stay competitive companies frequently introduce new products and services. Delay in launching such offerings has a significant impact on revenue realization. In addition to new product revenue, there are multiple opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell that impact bottom line. If companies are not able to identify such opportunities, bring a product to market quickly, or not offer the right product to the right customer at the right time, significant loss of revenue may occur. Ensuring Compliance: Companies must be compliant to ever changing regulations, these could be about Know Your Customer (KYC), Export/Import regulations, or taxation policies. In addition to government agencies, companies also need to comply with the SLA that they have committed to their customers. Lapse in meeting any of these requirements may lead to serious fines, penalties and loss in business. Companies have to make sure that they are in compliance will all such regulations and SLA commitments, at any given time. With the advent of social networks and mobile technology, companies not only need to focus on process efficiency but also on customer engagement. Improving engagement means delivering the customer experience as the customer is expecting and interacting with the customer at right time using right channel. Customers expect to be able to contact you via any channel of their choice (web, email, chat, mobile, social media), purchase via any viable channel (web, phone, store, mobile). Customers expect companies to understand their particular needs and remember their preferences on repeated visits. To deliver such an integrated, consistent, and contextual experience, power of BPM in must. Your company may be organized in departments like Marketing, Sales, Service. You may hold prospect data in SFA, order information in ERP, customer issues in CRM. However, the experience delivered to the customer must not be constrained by your system legacy. BPM helps in designing the right experience for the right customer and integrates all the underlining channels, systems, applications to make sure right information will be delivered to the right knowledge worker or to the customer every single time.     Orchestrating information across all systems (MDM, CRM, ERP), departments (commerce, merchandising, marketing service) and channels (Email, phone, web, social)  is the key, and that’s what BPM delivers. In addition to orchestrating systems and channels for consistency, BPM also provides an ability for analysis and decision management. By using data from historical transactions, social media and from other systems, users can determine the customer preferences, customer value, and churn propensity. This information, in the context, is then used while making a decision at a process step. Working with real-time decision management system can also suggest right up-sell or cross-sell offers, discounts or next-best-action steps for a particular customer. Timely action on customer issues or request is also a key tenet of a good customer experience. BPM’s complex event processing capabilities help companies to take proactive actions before issues get escalated. BPM system can be designed to listen to a certain event patters then deduce from those customer situations (credit card stolen, baggage lost, change of address) and do a triage before situation goes out of control. If such a situation arises you can send alerts to right people or immediately invoke corrective actions. Last but not least one of BPM’s key values is to drive continuous improvement. Learning about customers past experiences, interactions and social conversations, provide valuable insight. Such insight can be used to improve products, customer facing processes, and customer experience. You may take these insights as an input to design better more efficient and customer friendly sales, contact center or self-service processes. If customer experience is important for your business, make sure you have incorporated BPM as a part of your strategy to design, orchestrate and improve your customer facing processes.

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  • Oracle OpenWorld Session: “Business Driven Development with BPM: Lessons from the Real World”

    - by Ajay Khanna
    One of key values that BPM promises is “Business Empowerment”. People closest to the processes, who participate in the process every day, are the ones who know most about the process. These are the people who run day-to-day operations, people who triage customer issues, people who envision improvements and innovations. It is, therefore, imperative that when a company decides to use BPM technology to automate their business processes, business people take the driver’s seat. BPM is not an IT only project. Oracle BPM suite has been designed keeping this core tenet of BPM, Business Empowerment, in mind. The result is business user centered design of Process Composer. Process Composer is designed to let business users document their processes, analyze them using simulation, create web forms, specify business rules and even run them in testing mode using process player, to see if the designed process meets their needs. This does not mean that IT has no role in this process. In fact, Oracle BPM Suite has made it very easy for Business and IT to collaborate. The same process can be shared among business, and IT stakeholders and each can collaborate to create model-driven, process based executable applications. A process may need to integrate with multiple systems via various mechanisms, and IT leads system and data integration effort. IT helps fine tune the performance of process applications and ensures that the deployment of process application meets scalability and failover standards. In this session, we saw Harish Gaur and Satya Narayanan from Oracle demonstrate roles Business and IT play in BPM projects and how Oracle BPM Suite enables business and IT collaboration to design and automate process based applications. They also discussed real life customer stories. Some key takeaways from this session: There are no IT projects, only business initiatives, requiring IT support Identify high impact processes – critical, better BPM ROI Identify key metrics to measure process performance Align business with IT layer

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  • Oracle Exalogic Customer Momentum @ OOW'12

    - by Sanjeev Sharma
    [Adapted from here]  At Oracle Open World 2012, i sat down with some of the Oracle Exalogic early adopters  to discuss the business benefits these businesses were realizing by embracing the engineered systems approach to data-center modernization and application consolidation. Below is an overview of the 4 businesses that won the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award for Oracle Exalogic this year. Company: Netshoes About: Leading online retailer of sporting goods in Latin America.Challenges: Rapid business growth resulted in frequent outages and poor response-time of online store-front Conventional ad-hoc approach to horizontal scaling resulted in high CAPEX and OPEX Poor performance and unavailability of online store-front resulted in revenue loss from purchase abandonment Solution: Consolidated ATG Commerce and Oracle WebLogic running on Oracle Exalogic.Business Impact:Reduced abandonment rates resulting in a two-digit increase in online conversion rates translating directly into revenue up-liftCompany: ClaroAbout: Leading communications services provider in Latin America.Challenges: Support business growth over the next 3  - 5 years while maximizing re-use of existing middleware and application investments with minimal effort and risk Solution: Consolidated Oracle Fusion Middleware components (Oracle WebLogic, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Tuxedo) and JAVA applications onto Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. Business Impact:Improved partner SLA’s 7x while improving throughput 5X and response-time 35x for  JAVA applicationsCompany: ULAbout: Leading safety testing and certification organization in the world.Challenges: Transition from being a non-profit to a profit oriented enterprise and grow from a $1B to $5B in annual revenues in the next 5 years Undertake a massive business transformation by aligning change strategy with execution Solution: Consolidated Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite, Siebel, BI, Hyperion) and Oracle Fusion Middleware (AIA, SOA Suite) on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle ExadataBusiness Impact:Reduced financial and operating risk in re-architecting IT services to support new business capabilities supporting 87,000 manufacturersCompany: Ingersoll RandAbout: Leading manufacturer of industrial, climate, residential and security solutions.Challenges: Business continuity risks due to complexity in enforcing consistent operational and financial controls; Re-active business decisions reduced ability to offer differentiation and compete Solution: Consolidated Oracle E-business Suite on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle ExadataBusiness Impact:Service differentiation with faster order provisioning and a shorter lead-to-cash cycle translating into higher customer satisfaction and quicker cash-conversionCheck out the winners of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation awards in other categories here.

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