iFuture: The Internet of Everything Has Arrived in Government
Industry Perspective
“ONE OF THE BIGGEST FACTORS FOR SUCCESS IS THE EFFECTIVE BALANCE OF PEOPLE, PROCESS AND TECHNOLOGY. TECHNOLOGY IS THE ENABLER, PEOPLE ARE THE TRANSFORMERS, AND PROCESS BRINGS IT ALL TOGETHER. IT REALLY COMES DOWN TO A BALANCE OF ALL THREE.“
– DR. SETRAG KHOSHAFIAN, CHIEF EVANGELIST AND VICE PRESIDENT OF BPM TECHNOLOGY AT PEGA
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Pega Industry Perspective
iFuture: The Internet of Everything Has Arrived in Government
In 1951, author Ray Bradbury described the Happylife Home in his short story, “The Veldt.” The home was filled with machines that do everything, from cooking meals to remotely locking doors and windows to heating and cooling the house based on the occupants’ desires. At the time, the story seemed like a futuristic sci-fi narrative, but now, more than 6o years later these futuristic technologies are becoming a reality. And now automated efficiencies like the Department of Agriculture’s RFID tags for tracking cattle are making a name for themselves in government.
INTERNET OF EVERYTHING Bradbury’s story may have served as a prequel to the phenomenon that society is currently undergoing: the Internet of Everything (IoE). In essence, IoE includes billions of “Things” or devices connected over the Internet – sensing, generating data, responding, and providing opportunities that are ripe for innovations. These Things or devices are intelligent. In fact, these digital-enabled Things will generate more Internet traffic than people over the next decade. As connected “Things” and devices become more and more pervasive, the relationship
between humans and connected things is going to profoundly affect not only our lives, but also our working environment. Not even government will escape this massive transformation. Inevitably, the intelligent interconnected devices that your agency adopts will need to be orchestrated and coordinated to achieve specific business results. Together with humans and systems, they need to become part of end-to-end automated processes. “Things” are a new and emerging category of process participants. By embracing transparent automated processes involving employees, constituents, and “Things,” government can increase efficiencies and save valuable time and money – much needed resources in times of budget cuts and sequestration. For example, the New South Wales Transportation Department monitors more than 18,000 kilometers of road and 5,000 bridges and tunnels. When an accident occurs the Transportation Department can use electronic message boards and variable speed limit signs to alert the public quickly and efficiently. The discipline and capability that will enable this new era of process automation is called intelligent Business Process Management (iBPM). To explore how the IoE will impact government, GovLoop spoke with three Pegasystems experts that are working on cutting-edge practices:
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• Dr. Setrag Khoshafian, Chief Evangelist and Vice President of BPM Technology at Pega. • Cathy Novak, Industry Principal for Pega’s Public Sector Business. • James Lawless, Account Executive, Federal Government for Pega. Their message was clear: connected devices will be generating billions of data sets every day. The first stage in understanding how to unlock the power of that data is exploring how iBPM can transform your agency.
WHAT IS INTELLIGENT BPM? iBPM is the engine and core to revamp and modernize business architecture in the public sector. Public sector organizations are realizing that iBPM is not just workflow automation. It is a new way of building solutions that create process improvement, automation, intelligence, architecture and end-toend participation involving government employees,
HEATHROW HAS ALREADY SAVED MORE THAN $44.8 MILLION BY CHANGING THE WAY IT MANAGES AND MONITORS A SEQUENCE OF PROCESSES THAT START FROM WHEN A PLANE LANDS AT THE AIRPORT AND ENDS WHEN IT TAKES OFF.
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Pega Industry Perspective
constituents, back-end systems, and “Things.” iBPM helps public sector align their business objectives to execution, while at the same time provide agility in making changes to policies and procedures. It includes support for process improvement. iBPM also provides visibility as well as control of government processes. It allows government teams, units or even cross-agency initiatives to “Think Big” but “Start Small” with concrete operationalized executions. “iBPM is being used as the glue or the unification force to hold everything together: the old, the new, the structured, the unstructured, the process, and the people. Intelligent BPM really unifies everything,” said Novak. iBPM presents three advantages for government: • Creates an adaptive enterprise that aligns its business objectives to operationalized poli-
cies and procedures with complete transparency, visibility and control. • Cuts down silos. It has the ability to not only connect agencies with other agencies, teams or groups but also to connect with constituents. • Promotes agility. “iBPM technology combines not only automation technology but also end-to-end cases. It enables organizations to capture their policies as well as their analytics from the data and continuously be able to change. iBPM is a game changer,” said Khoshafian. You can see Pega’s iBPM software at work at the Heathrow airport. Heathrow has already saved more than $44.8 million by changing the way it manages and monitors a sequence of processes that start from when a plane lands at the airport and ends when it takes off. The system uses a set of rules designed by British Airport Authority to detect an unusual scenario, such as delays caused by weather, or a terrorism alert. Business transformation starts with realizing that we need new roles. “These new roles can either have new titles such as ‘Director of BPM’ or ‘Chief Process Officer’ or ‘Chief Digitization Officer.’ The needed authority to realize transformational change with intelligent BPM also being assumed by the more traditional roles, both on the business and IT side,” said Khoshafian.
Desktops are going to be legacies. “Our US Department of Agriculture customer discovered they had an issue where their field workers were spending 70% of their time in the office doing administrative work. So they chose Pega’s mobile case management and mobile-enabled processes so that they can flip-flop the time field workers spent in the office to productive time in the field,” said Lawless. For the federal government, this flexibility is even more essential after the White House mandated it in its Digital Government Strategy that employees should be able to work anywhere, anytime on any device. “Mobility is not just mobile tools and apps to watch movies on YouTube, or write on the walls of Facebook. It is really using mobile devices, so that the mobile workforce is able to track, affect and complete their work wherever they are. Government agencies should be able to design robust iBPM applications or solutions quickly and have them be used readily on any mobile device. iBPM enables them to ‘design once and deploy everywhere while leveraging the native capabilities of the mobile de-
INTERNET OF EVERYTHING ON THE MOVE Now that we have defined iBPM, we must also acknowledge that iBPM is more than moving information online or automating the process; it is also transforming how you access data. More than 130 million Americans own a smartphone. Millions more own tablets and other devices.
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vices, such as the camera or GPS. Both constituents and government employees will benefit from this, especially for the mobile workforce (e.g. employees taking care of patients, or in transportation, or military) – to name a few,” said Khoshafian.
ZEROING IN ON GOOD DATA Khoshafian’s comments show the power of mobility to transform how government conducts business, but this starts with understanding and zeroing in on good data. Devices already outnumber humans on the internet five to one and the number is only growing. The mobile explosion means troves of data entering the network. “Data Mining is about discovering patterns and extracting models from data (including “Big Data”). The models are decision rules that can potentially predict the behavior of constituents. However, they need to be operationalized and acted upon – not just ‘discovered.’ Also, the behavior of constituents needs to be captured so that the overall solution can adapt. In other words, what is needed for data mining is a platform to operationalize the predictive models mined from data and continuously adapt for
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Pega Industry Perspective
optimal actions. This can only happen through the platform that automates process execution: iBPM,” said Khoshafian. In order to make big data work, “You have to operationalize what you are discovering from the various data sets. That way you are effecting change while executing your processes,” said Khoshafian.
THINK BIG, START SMALL As Khoshafian identified, the Internet of Everything is truly transformational, a best practice is to “Think Big” but “Start Small.” IoE also has the power to transform the way government thinks. “The government needs to ‘Think Big’, transformational, but they need to ‘Start Small’. We have seen this again and again. The ‘Big Bang’ initiatives don’t work. In an overall initiative, they need to ‘Think Big’, but then they need to immediately identify those projects the low hanging fruit - that can show incremental transformation and results,” said Khoshafian. This goes hand-in-hand with agile methodologies: continuously capturing objectives, requirements, and execution in one environment that is agile and can operationalize quickly. In other words, iBPM.
“THE GOVERNMENT NEEDS TO THINK BIG, TRANSFORMATIONAL, BUT THEY NEED TO START SMALL.” The “Think Big and Start Small” mantra is especially helpful for procurement. “Procurement is always difficult in government. This agile approach really helps. It is low risk. It is a short time frame. You know if you have succeeded. If you haven’t, you know you can change very quickly. Even large modernization efforts are adopting this approach,” said Novak. There are two reasons why government needs to engage in this agile thinking: • Agility leads to continuous improvement. “The government needs to move away from traditional waterfall approaches where there are excessive requirements and documentation upfront toward a much more iterative process,” said Lawless. • Millennials already think agile first. “The millennials who are joining the workforce are tech savvy. They are modern, interact often, would like to quickly see results and adapt. They are not afraid of technology. So the traditional walls between business and IT will crumble,” said Khoshafian. Flexibility is essential, especially in government. If we don’t change the way we implement technology in fifteen years, we are going to be searching for retired employees who know how to program legacy Java or .Net systems,” said Novak. “We have to transform our thinking.”
A NEW BREED OF INNOVATION There are some agencies that are going through transformations where iBPM is on the cusp of taking hold. “We expect in 2014 to see that orchestration of process combined with case management, using things like predictive analytics to enable the field,” said Lawless. But it is not just technology that will transform innovation in the public sector. “Technology alone is not going to create innovation. Innovation happens when we have a culture of change and some organizations in the public sector are starting to realize that. A new breed of innovation is facilitating incremental but transformational creativity in end-to-end automated processes involving people, systems, and intelligent ‘Things.’ The way to make change happen is by operationalizing innovative processes through Intelligent Business Process Management,” said Khoshafian
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For more information about this report, please reach out to Emily Jarvis, Online Editor, GovLoop, at emily@govloop.com, or follow her on Twitter: @emichellejarvis. GovLoop 1101 15th St NW, Suite 900 Washington, DC 20005 Phone: (202) 407-7421 Fax: (202) 407-7501 Twitter: @GovLoop