Citizen-Centric Smart City – What does it take?

Even as the ink was drying on my previous blog about Blockchain in the context of Smart Cities, I had the opportunity of attending a workshop on the evolving IoT landscape and the practical implementation opportunities and challenges associated with it, to deliver an enhanced city experience.

This got me thinking – while there are multiple “new-age technology initiatives” that hold a lot of potential, how does one narrow down to the right technology that must be adopted. We are all aware that cities do not have an unlimited monetary supply for them to be wishful in their approach to exceptional service delivery; on the contrary, most cities today are struggling with funds available at their disposal. This calls for due diligence and deep thinking from a customer perspective – what does a good city service mean for your citizens/residents? A city resident anywhere in the world has minimal expectations that must be delivered against and once this is achieved, the city executives can drive further initiatives to deliver a signature city experience that sets their city apart from the rest. The focus of this blog will be on the former – what does a citizen/resident expect from a Smart city service like public transport, utility payment, land registration, public safety and security, traffic management etc?

The following graphic represents the 3 key attributes of a Smart City Service and the citizen/resident’s expectations against each of them:

From the perspective of the City Administrators, these statements represent the voice of their customer. So, this provides direction for them to shape their service delivery in alignment with citizen expectations. While each city is different in the way its city agencies/departments are structured, the leaders within a city administration needs to put their thinking hats on and figure out what do they need to deliver against these citizen expectations. The following extension to the graphic represents this at a broad level. The city administration should delve deeper and evolve their master plans against them.

To achieve these capabilities, there are multiple measures that could be taken – Operational optimization, Organization restructuring, Performance monitoring, Peer Benchmarking, Citizen Engagement etc. The one initiative that will have the highest impact (in cohesion with the above measures) is adoption of relevant technology. City administrations are not new to technology and most of them have already adopted technology in some form or the other. However, these technologies are predominantly inward-focused (easing operations, publishing reports, regulatory obligations etc.). Today’s world demands city administrators to look at technology through an entirely different lens that has a strong emphasis on customer expectations. This requires some thought on how technologies can be leveraged to deliver a positive city experience to its citizens/residents. It is in this regard that the relevance of new-age tech initiatives comes to the fore. The graphic below extends the story further and details my point of view on the technology initiatives that could be embraced. It needs to be noted that these are not a replacement for existing systems but need to be used as a complement to leverage the true potential.

Reliability is established on one simple premise – having access to the right information at the right time. The mapping of IoT (Internet of Things) as the technology of choice for this service parameter is based on the same principle. For example –  Mr.A wants to travel from his home to a Convention Centre to speak at a conference being held there. Considering the importance of him being there on time, he wants to know the best way to get there – drive down vs hire an Uber vs take the public transport. Considering that he has travelled extensively on this route, he is concerned based on his past experiences. Most often than not, he has experienced heavy traffic on this route. Recently, he struggled to find parking for his car and had to eventually park far from the conference center and walk back all the way. During another instance, on his way back from the Conference Centre, there were unexpected rains that lashed and his favorite car bore the brunt.

So, his expectations of a reliable travel from home to the conference center is dependent on him receiving the right information about the real-time traffic situation, parking availability in and around the convention center and weather forecast for the day. This can reliably be achieved through deployment of sensors across the city and then feeding the data generated by these sensors into an IoT platform operated by the city administration. Further, the IoT platform can draw correlations and run prediction algorithms (needs analytical capability) that will eventually provide contextual information to Mr.A to plan his travel.

City administrations also need to establish a level of transparency that builds trust and has the citizen appreciate the efforts being put in by their city to make lives easier. Today, every city agency has an IT system(s) that is used to record all the operational activities (meter reading, bill payments, maintenance schedules etc.) that the respective agency is responsible for. In a few cases, such information could be recorded on paper or a rudimentary spreadsheet. However, these records are not available beyond the boundary of the owner city agency and this results in lack of visibility to generate a city-wide operational view – a Common Operating Picture. This is where an initial version of an Open Data Platform needs to established to drive exchange of Government Data between agencies. This needs to be supplemented with reliable recording of cross-domain operational activities on a common ledger that can be trusted and accessed by every party based on their access permissions. This is where Blockchain comes to the fore. Considering the case of Mr.A who travels regularly between his home and the convention center, he wants to know of the work that the city is doing to make his travel easier. So, if city agencies could extend the open data platform to its citizens (sanitized to ensure that sensitive information is not being shared) so that Mr.A can also gather a true and transparent view of the relevant work being done by his city administrators.

Further – Considering that the city is a huge ecosystem, we do not expect that there will be absolutely no failures during operations. What irks most citizens is that it is a huge challenge to identify where the fault lies and they are left running from pillar to post to identify the root cause and plug it. This is when the call for accountability needs to catch the attention of city administrations. Blockchain’s common ledger lends beautifully to this requirement. For example – Mr.A has come across a huge pothole on the roads following 2 weeks of cable laying works. As a responsible citizen, he reports this to the city’s single-window operator. This warrants a deeper investigation and thanks to an existing Blockchain ledger, it is observed that the Contractors responsible for cable laying work have captured the proof of their completed maintenance activities where they mention that the Roads Agency has been informed to complete the road repair as per the contractual clauses in the Smart Contract. This helps narrow down the deviation in service to the right agency and fix this accordingly. There is no longer a problem of each agency having a different view of the truth about what might have happened. Combine this with the transparency that was established through the Open Data platform and the reliability of the data coming from the instrumentation across the city, and your citizen is bound to have a happy city experience.

Remember, the best if yet to come.

Blockchaining the Smart City

While my previous blogs have focused on Smart City initiatives that have proven their relevance and effectiveness through implementations worldwide, I am testing unknown waters through this latest blog and attempting a leap into the future by bringing Blockchain to the Smart city context.

Blockchain technology has been around for some time and has gained popularity in its “bitcoin” avatar, but there has been recent interest across multiple industries to leverage it in their business context. Blockchain, in simple words, is based on a shared ledger technology allowing any participant in the business network to see the system of record. It has the potential of disrupting legacy operations and is evolving at a rather brisk pace. The financial services industry has been at the forefront of Blockchain adoption with its most important attributes – “security, transparency, indelibility and trust” – aligning naturally with their business operations. However, there are many other industries like logistics, travel and transport, legal services, government that are donning their thinking hats and ideating around this innovative technology.

This blog puts together a view of a potential set of use cases from the Smart Cities operational context that I believe are well suited for adopting Blockchain technology and deliver an enhanced experience to its residents. These are early days though, and these ideas do not necessarily have a precedent to assure a successful outcome. However, a Smart City is an ecosystem by itself and this blog provides a futuristic Point-of-View to identify how this ecosystem could benefit from Blockchain technology.

Before delving into further details, I believe a classification of the Smart Cities landscape is essential to map Blockchain initiatives accordingly. Not every initiative can be applied to every Smart City out there. Some of the initiatives are better driven by Government while there are a few that better suit Private ownership. So, the broad classification and a point of view of the initiatives that map to them are represented in the graphic below. The categorization of initiatives is not cast in stone but indicative of where I believe the initiative maps the closest.

The overlap between the X and Y axes in the 2*2 quadrant captures the relevant initiatives. For example, Public Owned Brownfield Smart Cities would gain immensely from leveraging Blockchain technology to deliver Social Services benefits while this is not the case with the Private Owned Smart Cities.

Let us get into these Blockchain applications in further detail:

• Smart Payments – As mentioned earlier, Blockchain technology has its roots in the Finance industry and has found early adopters in banks worldwide. In fact, Banks are now racing to harness the power of the Blockchain technology with a strong focus on e-payments and money transfers. Once the technology is proven, these can be implemented in a Smart city environment to execute utility bill payments, wallet-enabled transactions, payment of fines etc in a secure and transparent manner for its residents. This eases the life of the Smart City residents while assuring them that every fund transfer is being permanently recorded.
• Smart Land Records – Blockchain technology lends itself perfectly to help overcome property frauds by preventing or reducing it. The underlying reason for Blockchain to have gained in credibility is the indelible nature of its distributed ledger and transparency that comes with the ledger. Property prices have been on an upward swing worldwide and there are many fraudsters who are making most of the hype cycle by dubiously creating ownership records and disappearing as soon as they have made their money. These instances can be taken out of the system effectively and efficiently if every single transaction associated with a property is recorded in permanent ink, a.k.a Blockchain ledger. Smart cities, both private and government owned, can leverage the technology to establish a property management system that ensures peace of mind to all city stakeholders.
• Social Service benefits delivery – Most countries provide social service benefits to its citizens based on their socio-economic position in the society. The intent of these benefits is to result in upliftment of the society at large. However, there are umpteen instances when middlemen do not let these benefits reach the actual recipient by exploiting loopholes in the supply chain. The centralized nature of a Blockchain where everything can be tracked by the central authority will make it challenging, if not impossible, to fool the system thereby ensuring that all social benefits reach the intended recipients and all leakages are plugged. A smart city needs to accommodate every strata of society and join hands with the larger Government machinery to implement such a Blockchain-based initiative will be ideal in most of the developing world.
• Tax collection – The distributed ledger of Blockchain has the potential to help government in tax collections. As governments are making attempts to establish a simple tax system that places accountability on the individual/company to pay tax impromptu rather than charging them retrospectively, they could find their answer in Blockchain’s real-time, secure and reliable execution and recording of transactions. This results in plugging revenue leakages and provide data that is reliable both for taxpayers and tax authorities. For example, in India there is a push for tax reforms through the proposed GST policy that will establish comprehensive indirect tax on manufacture, sale and consumption of goods and services throughout India. Taxable goods and services are taxed at a single rate in a supply chain till the goods or services reach the consumer. This lends itself beautifully to track tax paid all along the supply chain using the reliable Blockchain technology.
• Smart Voting – Blockchain has found a rather unusual use in enabling transparent and reliable e-voting. While most countries have adopted various technologies over the years to improve voter percentages, e-voting adoption has yet to take off meaningfully worldwide. There are concerns that existing platforms are vulnerable to fraud, corruption and sabotage. It is to solve this challenge that Blockchain technology is being used to deliver convenience to the voters while ensuring security and reducing voting fraud. As mentioned earlier, Smart Cities are ecosystems by themselves and can use such Blockchain technology based voting systems to encourage participation in local elections (Example – Smart City Governance Boards) within the Smart city’s purview – delivering a signature city experience through effective and efficient resident engagement.
• Smart Transportation – Residents of almost every city in the world face transportation challenges today . The urban dweller looks for the convenience of moving from Point A to Point B with least hassle. It is this need that cab aggregators like Uber have tapped into and have a business model that is widely successful. However, what has also been irking some customers is the “centralized” nature of their operations with one HQ governing their operations worldwide. In response to this, Arcade City launched an innovative operating model being built on Blockchain technology in September 2016 that will decentralize the operations and provide lot more authority and decision making capability to the driver, who is the all-important “touchpoint” to the customer. The coming months will tell if this stands a chance of being disruptive. A Smart city can take this a step further and implement all transport services across various modes within the city – school buses could implement Blockchain-based identity, 3PL service providers could leverage it to make their supply chain more effective, public transport could be made more accurate and reliable etc. and innovations like the Arcade City initiative could provide alternates to move around that truly differentiate the city from the rest.

While these initiatives are futuristic in nature, the pace of innovations today is swifter than ever before. There are a number of Smart City initiatives being taken up worldwide and it is all about delivering a “differentiated signature city experience”. Towards this end, Blockchain technology and innovations around it could provide an alternate worth exploring. With all the hype also comes a word of caution – do not underestimate the technical and organizational challenges of building and adopting Blockchain-based systems. In summary, a pragmatic and thoroughly thought-through approach is suggested.

Making Informed Decisions within Government

Through my previous blogs, I have emphasized consistently on the significant value that lies within the data housed in various government systems and records. While there is significant in-house data, a small fraction of the possible value is being realized today. So, the progressive journey that I had shared in an earlier post and illustrated below again provides a practical staged transformation approach that governments can adopt.

This transformation towards the establishment of an Open Data Platform not only drives ease of operations within Government but also promotes innovation from the larger ecosystem. This can be achieved by encouraging participation of Private Entities and General Public to tap into the Government datasets and thereby, creating citizen/resident experiences that would have otherwise been impossible, considering the limited resources at Government’s disposal. While this scenario considers the value that external stakeholders can generate by leveraging Government data along with non-Government data, the converse of this scenario will be the focus of this blog.

The converse is this –

• Government is not the data provider but it is the data consumer
• External stakeholders (Private entities, Citizens, Third parties) are not data consumers but are data providers
• Government taps into the value of Government data + Non-government data

The illustration below extrapolates the 3-stage transformation journey and appends a fourth stage that I call the “Analytics-driven Decision making Platform (ADDP)”. This ADDP can, and ideally should, co-exist with the Stage 3 of the transformation journey, viz the Open Data Platform (ODP). The idea is for the government to tap into its in-house data and correlate that with public data that is available to it (Open Data) and generate value through analytics on the integrated whole. The public data that can be brought on this platform include Quarterly/Annual filings by firms and individuals to Social feeds by residents/citizens/visitors about government services, weather data, media reports etc. Since the in-house data is not going out of Government boundaries, the concerns around data privacy and security are no longer relevant. Such a platform encourages government employees to innovatively think of ways to tap into the data from the larger ecosystem and leverage the same to deliver efficient and effective operations and more importantly, a positive people experience. So, they are not just doing the mundane daily routine but are being given an opportunity to be innovative and push their boundaries – something that you would rarely associate with government employees. Of course, this requires a cultural shift that needs to happen alongside the commissioning of ADDP.

The most significant value of an ADDP initiative is using the analytics to make informed policy decisions and also drive course corrections in real-time. A business scenario of such a platform has been depicted below.

The scenario shows Data at Rest (Historical data sitting in the Databases, Datawarehouses etc) and Data in Motion (Real-time data about events, incidents, status) from different entities like Government, Corporate, Citizens, Media houses, Weather etc. It is obvious that if this broad spectrum of incoming data has to staged on the ADDP, one has to be considerate of the Four Vs of data – Volume, Velocity, Variety and Veracity. The platform should be able to gather data that is unstructured or structured, real-time or static, machine readable or non-machine readable, clean or nonsensical and from thereon identify data that is relevant in a certain government context. This needs to be facilitated by a reliable Big data platform with strong analytical capabilities.

Here’s an example – Imagine that the Ministry of Education wants to make a decision  whether the subsidized education scheme that has been operational for last 3 years should be continued from the coming financial year onwards. Traditionally, this would be done by tapping into Government’s historical records to see the success and outreach of the scheme in terms of its adoption rate across the country. While this is an important parameter, combine this with

(a) what the citizens or the school administrations have been saying about this scheme on social media

(b) what the media houses have been writing about it

(c) correlate that with improvement in employ-ability rates that has been tracked by the Ministry of Labor studies and

(d) correlate that with financial burden on the exchequer tracked by the Ministry of Finance

(e) combined with what the UNESCO publishes in its “Global Education Digest” report about the status of child education in the country

Such aggregation of datasets from various sources gives a holistic view that can then be analyzed by drawing correlations between various perspectives and provide insights that would otherwise be unavailable. The Government, viz their internal workforce, should be entrusted with the responsibility to identify the nature of datasets that are required to achieve the comprehensive picture. The government employees are best positioned to identify the lacunae in existing information and with the ADDP platform, the get a rare opportunity to be creative and innovate.

Between Stage 3 (ODP) and Stage 4 (ADDP), governments would ideally want to adopt the ODP approach first but there is no stringent requirement to do so. So, while it is not absolutely necessary to have ODP and ADDP done in a sequential manner, these initiatives are complementary and should ideally co-exist. Each of the four stages of the transformation journey brings unique value as they are realized.

It must be noted that governments worldwide are yet to reach this stage of informed decision making through a data platform. However, in this age where gigabytes of data are generated at the wink of an eye, there is immense potential in such a platform. While ODP initiatives has been picking up steam worldwide and are widely published and talked about, there are very limited initiatives to establish an ADDP and the known few are in their nascent stages.

This ADDP stage requires a huge transformational shift internally but the incentive to get there is unprecedented.
Note: I presented on the topic of Open Government Data at a conference held by The Open Group in Feb 2016. This presentation summarizes the posts from my blogsite.

I’ve opened my Government data – What next?

In my previous blog, I published my views about how governments can (and should) conduct due diligence in identifying the relevant datasets from their blackbox databases and open them up. This included identifying attributes of open data and mapping the data to a 5-star rating. Having touched on the significant potential that Open Government Data holds in the evolution of the Smart City ecosystem, I paused my thoughts with a question –

Is the Open Government Data story complete once government entities have made data available in 5-star format (the best possible format)? Or would you say the story has only started on a strong footing?

The answer to that question is fairly obvious to anyone who understands the Supply-Demand equation of any transaction – . However, what is important to note in the Open Government Data context is that the demand side of the equation involves substantial dynamics. There are 2 very critical aspects of demand – drive consumption and, more importantly, drive value-generation from open government data. The illustration below captures this journey succinctly.

 

The rest of this blog will detail what it takes to drive the consumption story for open government data.

Driving Data Consumption

In a simplistic view, all this requires is for government entities to make a few commitments and honor them at all times.

• Commitment to provide fresh data at all times
• Commitment to bind the data service with a Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• Commitment to maintain data quality at all times
• Commitment to ensure data anonymity

The key to data consumption is to provide the Data Consumer sufficient evidence to instill trust in the relationship. As is observed with any relationship, an honored commitment is the best way to drive this. Hence, it becomes essential for Data Provider agencies to step lock with consumers at all times. One of the key concerns most consumers have is the governments usually are high-handed and set the rules of the game. Here is a scenario – A flourishing start-up has built a rich mobile app and open API for a service that brings together datasets from 3 different government agencies and combines that with data gathered from 2 other private entities. The app sources government data from an open data portal hosted by the government. The app has been in the market for about a year and has seen a good uptake because of the uniqueness of the service it offers. The start-up has been making healthy revenues through the mobile app and the open API that renders this service. One of the government agencies has done an internal study and has put in a regulation which restricts the contours of data that is shared outside the government. Following this, what if the agency decides that –

• A certain dataset that was being used by the start-up will not be made available from the next quarter
• The dataset refresh will be done only once every quarter instead of monthly
• The nature/quality of data shared will change from the next refresh onwards
• The dataset access will be blocked completely with immediate effect

The flourishing start-up will have no choice but to rework their innovative service around these new changes, provided that is feasible and practical. Unlike a B2B relationship where both parties have almost equal say, a G2B relationship is steered by one party – the Government.

It is to be recognized that the lack of transparency has an adverse impact on the public trust in the objectives and motives of the government. Open Data consumption is not a one-time task but a continual process that requires objective commitment levels from the data source entity over an extended period of time to gain the confidence of data consumers. It is time Governments get the balance right in the G2B relationship – as an example, they should come out with clear SLAs that govern the relationship. This is a common practice in any B2B and B2C relationships.

Another area that the governments need to work on is to influence and create the perception that they are doing enough to protect individuals’ rights to privacy and confidentiality of the data held by them. The last thing a data consumer would want is to be entangled in legal issues because the data was not anonymized¹ or pseudonymised² adequately/accurately at the source. Governments should be able to confidently state that the data is anonymized to an extent that it rules out any chances of a reconstruction through the Mosaic Effect³.

Generating value from Open Data

Once the trust between the Data Source entities and Data consumers has been established, it is mostly up to the data consumers to tap into the data and generate value that was unseen for various reasons. More often, the value generation comes from the fact that the data consumers are able to correlate various datasets – government data, private data, and proprietary data – and render use cases that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Having said that, the governments can still play a substantial role to positively influence the larger ecosystem.

As an example, in one of my earlier posts I had mentioned about the 5-star rating by Tim Berners Lee. One of the key aspects of open government data – ranging from 1-star to 5-star – is that the data consumer agency should be able to further license the data without restrictions on use as part of the public domain. Public data should be released such that it enables free re-use, including commercial re-use. The possibility to distribute data without restrictions will encourage consumption and generate new avenues in the city ecosystem to leverage the intrinsic value of open government data. This will spur further innovation.

Another way that Governments can play an active role in encouraging the community to innovate based on open data is by ensuring that datasets of real value are being made available. While the government may have thought through the data that can be opened up, it is only at the consumption stage that the lacunae in the nature or quality of data becomes apparent. Governments should establish a mechanism by which the consumers can submit their concerns about existing datasets or place requests for more relevant datasets. The government will be able to know the pulse of the consumer community only when such a closed loop exists. At the end of the day, the value of open government data is only realized when then data consumers can generate experiences (through mobile apps, open APIs et al) that enhance the living experience of the residents.

In conclusion, Governments have an active role to play all through the Open Data journey – from data identification to value-generation. Most governments consider their job done once the data is made available on the Open Data platform. As mentioned above, that is just half the job and will serve a minimal purpose without a focus on data consumption side. With large initiatives of this nature, it is essential to keep receiving encouraging signs for the government entities to stay engaged and for the Open Data initiative to sustain over a long tenure. Hence, it becomes essential to ensure that the data consumers are also constantly engaged and their expectations are reasonably met. The need is to establish an ecosystem where all stakeholders participate and play their role towards delivering an enhanced living experience.

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¹Anonymised Data – Data relating to a specific individual where the identifiers have been removed to prevent identification of that individual.

 ²Pseudonymised Data – Data relating to a specific individual where the identifiers have been replaced by artificial identifiers to prevent identification of the individual.

 ³Mosaic Effect – The process of combining anonymized data with auxiliary data in order to reconstruct identifiers linking data to the individual it relates to.

SMART CITY needs SMART DATA needs SMART GOVERNMENT

The most significant outcome of a smart city (and the key indicator) is to provide citizens of the city alternatives and opportunities to lead a better life. This could be in the form of efficient and effective public transportation, proactive traffic monitoring and easing, automated monitoring of utility services, weather management, emergency management, public safety and more importantly an amalgam of these services through correlations. Each of these Smart City services (and please note that the above list is not exhaustive) is data-intensive and results in reams and reams of real-time data, that when leveraged can generate meaningful insights, further driving an enhanced experience for all city stakeholders.

While City agencies and governments worldwide have been spending effort through various initiatives (Ex: Share-PSI) to tap into this data and generate value, they are also limited by the resources (time, money, labor) at their disposal. What if the reams of data generated through the city/government initiatives are made available to private entities and general public, at large. Of course, this needs a careful scrutiny of what data can be shared beyond the boundaries/firewalls of the agencies. However, that should be a small hurdle to overcome considering the immense potential of the data that will be tapped into by these external stakeholders further enhancing the city ecosystem. This needs governments to open up – open up between themselves and open up to external world. This needs Open Government Data.

In an earlier blog, I had highlighted how Government data can be used in different contexts – Government to Government (G2G), Government to Business (G2B) and Government to Citizen (G2C). The progression to Open Government Data needs a methodical approach and ideally takes the following transition path. Each government agency needs to scrutinize its data to identify datasets that is sought by other agencies and identifying non-sensitive datasets that can be opened up between each other. A further level of scrutiny is required to identify the subset of data that can be exposed to non-government city stakeholders (private entities, general public).

However, not all data that can potentially be opened up will be really helpful. Some of the data may be in a very crude form and will not help the data consumers since they cannot leverage this without extensive effort and investment. For example, scanned (anonymized) application forms are of little value until the data is actually digitized through some OCR mechanism or manually. This discourages the consumer (more specifically, the technical community) to tap into the data even if it is made available. During this era of devops and agile, the idea with Open data is to provision datasets that can be easily tapped into and generate value quickly and with ease. So, how does one identify high value data sets – data that is smart by default?

What does Smart Data mean?

While there cannot be a binary method of identifying Smart data, some very detailed parameters have evolved from the discussions at The Open Group. One such discussion has arrived at the following 9 dimensions of quality that should be applied to data:While these 9 quality parameters are important, one needs to look into the specific business requirement and the corresponding datasets to assign weightage factors to each of these parameters suiting the context. It is also to be noted that each parameter will have further level of detail that has to be studied before declaring it be of high quality. For example, is Credibility defined only by the trustworthiness of sources – what if the data has undergone some transformation in the interim before being made available?

Another example – the Processability parameter mentioned above can also be studied further using the 5-star-data definition provided by Tim Berners-Lee. Most government agencies will have a mix of these different segments of rated data with a heavy leaning towards one-star and two-star data. While one-star and two-star data is fairly easy to generate, this limits data usage on the consumers’ side, when exposed and made available as Open Data. Generally, there are very few consumers willing to invest and/or competent enough to refine the provider data further to make it more consumable. And hence, the uptake of this kind of data will be low. Provider agencies will need to invest in progressing further on the maturity roadmap – make data non-proprietary, add semantics and link to related data/content. More importantly, they should adopt these new methods for all data generated till date and in the future. As a data provider agency progresses on this maturity roadmap, it will start seeing a corresponding adoption and value-generation from the larger city ecosystem. It is to be noted that the progression towards 5-star data will involve a change in organization practices and culture but once that becomes business-as-usual, the effort required is fairly low compared to the uptake one gets to see on the consumer-end.

How can governments be smart?

Most governments worldwide have opened up to the idea of Open data and the ones who have not will only delay but eventually get there. The question is no longer whether government agencies will open their data, it is when and how will they open their data. It requires strategic planning by the governments to execute initiatives of this nature and drive collaborative execution of the same across agencies. Substantial focus on adoption enablement to ensure governance and adherence to standards is essential.

Exchanging data between agencies does not come naturally to most government organizations and when they do share data, they rely on very manual or archaic methods – paper-based, phone requests, email requests etc. Initially, the agencies have to move to an operating model where data is made available on a data exchange platform through a single window (Ex: a portal). Data can be requested and procured through the same window – either in real-time or in batch mode depending on the nature of the request. At minimum, this will ease government operations and make them more effective and efficient. Also, it makes life easy for the citizen so that he/she does not have to share the same data multiple times with different agencies.

This is best implemented by encapsulating the data sharing services as APIs since it can potentially foster further innovation within the government ecosystem.

Once the data has been opened up between agencies, it makes it relatively easy to progress to share the non-sensitive data with non-government stakeholders. The API-approach can be leveraged further to encourage innovation in the digital economy.The next level of progression will be to linked open government data (LOGD) and use this as a revenue stream. LOGD can demonstrate value in a wide range of use cases that were not thought of earlier. As an example, imagine the impact of accessing real-time public transport services data (from the Transportation department) to an event in the city (organized by Tourism department) that links up with the weather data (gathered from Meteorological department) and helps the citizen plan their journey.

Governments need to take up planned initiatives to tap into the potential of locked up data. The data needs to be pruned and polished to make it more relevant and ease consumption. This data, once tapped into by the city ecosystem, can be applied in daily-life scenarios that impact the community and thereby, deliver a signature city experience. The possibilities are immense. All that is required is to take the initiative and tap into the value of the new natural resource – data. The sooner the better.

Closing thought – Is the Open Government Data story complete once government entities have made data available in 5-star format (the best possible format)? Or would you say the story has only started on a strong footing? There is a lot more to follow…

Tapping into Social, Economic value of Government Data

Data has been dubbed as the new natural resource and the possibilities it creates are numerous. Its economic value is being tapped into by private enterprises worldwide. They are leveraging data from various sources to bolster their bottom-line through advanced analytics and generating customer insights. On the contrary, governments have been very late to jump on the bandwagon because of the closed environments in which they operate and the opinion that “all” government data is sensitive. While it is known that Governments often have a lot of personal data, a closer look at the public data in the context of relevant use cases will help identify data that can potentially be opened up.

There are a range of different arguments for open government data. It could be used to facilitate government transparency, drive accountability and public participation, support technological innovation and economic growth. The possibilities are immense and the society at large can benefit from making public data available to various stakeholders. Here are a few scenarios:

Government to Government (G2G) – It is imperative that government agencies have to communicate to each other during the course of their operations. This, at most times, involves exchange of information between agencies that is contextually relevant. Traditionally, this has happened through physical paper, phone conversations or emails, at best. For example, the Ministry of Labor (MOL) will need a regular feed of the commercial permits issued within a jurisdictional area by the Ministry of Urban Planning (MUP) and commercial registrations approved by Ministry of Commerce (MOC) to check and ensure regulatory compliance to labor laws by all commercial entities. The time spent by the government agencies in fulfilling these requests is substantial considering the repetitive nature of the requests. This is an ideal scenario to identify such datasets and make them available on a Government Data Exchange (GDX). Each agency exposes the datasets from its in-house databases and makes them available as web services on the GDX. The GDX can be accessed through a portal user interface by any agency to receive latest data that is relevant to their context from other agencies. This will potentially result in operational efficiencies and better utilization of the limited government resources.

The progression to Open Data needs a methodical approach and each government agency needs to scrutinize its data to identify datasets that is sought by other agencies and identifying non-sensitive datasets that can be opened up between each other.

Government to Business (G2B) – The inherent potential of data is only limited by the number of use cases that can be defined. Governments are being forced to “do more with less” in in a challenging economic environment worldwide. With constrained resources, the governments can deliver a limited set of services, thereby cap the potential of Government data. This is where the evolution to the next phase of Open Data initiatives kicks in. A further level of scrutiny of Government datasets is required to identify the subset of data that can be exposed to non-government city stakeholders (private entities, general public).

In today’s world, having a strong API strategy isn’t just good software practice; it’s a powerful business practice. The volumes of data provided through government systems can be leveraged through APIs by various business organizations that will benefit from the information to run their operations. This will be facilitated through exposed APIs that can be consumed by the individual organizations and drive their business-specific use cases by leveraging the data from various government agencies. This doesn’t just create value for business establishments. The government wins as well by expanding the ecosystem, increasing retention, and driving up the value of the data platform. As an example – The student transportation industry depends heavily on real-time traffic conditions to ensure that the students are transported from their homes to schools and back. They can combine and correlate the traffic data, weather data, and planned events data from the various government agencies to plan/adjust their routes. Another example is the 3PL providers who can also leverage the same datasets to deliver their supply chain management functions.

Governments can potentially develop models where they can enrich datasets and make them readily consumable by business entities. Such high quality datasets can potentially be used to generate revenue on an ongoing basis by selling them for a nominal fee to business establishments while the raw datasets are still made available without any fee.

Government to Citizen (G2C) – The digital movement has infused a plethora of rich mobile apps into the citizen’s lifestyle. From finding an ideal road route based on real-time traffic to pay your utility bills – mobile has had a significant impact on our lives and enhanced our living experience. Citizens interact with multiple government agencies as part of their routine and are best equipped to identify challenges that they face during these interactions. Some of them also have potential solutions to these challenges, that when implemented to have a widespread impact on the society. They are however constrained by the limited access to government data. As was done in the case of G2B, government agencies can potentially make data available to the Citizens. This is when the social value of data could potentially be tapped into by the citizens themselves. As an example – Mandi Trades is a Location based F2S (Farm to Shop) Trading Platform for agricultural products. The App provides the daily agricultural commodity prices as updated by Open Government Data Platform in India.

There are many such citizen-centric applications of open data in the emerging markets, developed by the citizens themselves. This drives engagement of citizens and more importantly, it drives social uplift.

Indeed governments need to approach their open data strategies with an open mind. Governments need to take up planned initiatives to tap into the potential of locked up data. The data needs to be pruned and polished to make it more relevant and ease consumption. The potential that Open data holds is immense – no two ways about it.

The “Smart” in Smart Cities

Having traveled to different countries, I am quite demanding when it comes to my city experience.  I am sure that today’s “well-traveled” urban resident also has equally high (if not higher) expectations from their city. The overall city experience is driven by the city planner’s vision for their city and execution of this vision by various city agencies. In today’s scenario – this vision, more often than not, involves an aspiration to transform into a Smart City. I am penning this blog against the backdrop of a huge awareness for Smart City initiatives in the emerging markets – MEA (Middle-East Africa) and India.

I work in the MEA region that brings together a spectrum of countries that are at different points in their evolution journey and are driving Smart City programs in pockets. I come from India and there has been a recent announcement by the government about developing 100 Smart Cities in 5 years. An obvious observation would be that a resident from Dubai (UAE) has very different expectations from one in Nairobi (Kenya) and a resident in Johannesburg (South Africa) has different expectations from the one in Bangalore (India). However, every city dweller wants one thing in common – a better way of life in the cities that they reside. Everyone likes to be at a place that welcomes him/her and delivers a signature city experience.

So, what makes a city “Smart”?

The City ecosystem is made up of important entities – people, agencies, systems, procedures et al. Smart City initiatives have to be tied to these entities and drive improvements and deliver exceptional experiences. I believe the transformation into a Smarter City has to go through a progression path spread over three waves.

Wave 1 – Foundational Smart City Initiatives

City planners would have a wide range of possible initiatives that they can consider to make their city “Smart”. While taking them up at one go could be overwhelming – not just for the planner but also for the average resident – there are services that the resident expects “bare-minimum” from a Smart City. It is prudent that cities evolve by establishing a strong foundation that can be leveraged and extended further with time. Here is a sample list of these Foundational Smart City initiatives:

Wave 2 – Advanced Smart City Initiatives

With the number of Smart City programs being executed worldwide, there will always be a demand on city planners to ensure that their city stands out from the crowd. Of course, this can only be done once the foundational setup is in place. A unique experience for the Smart city resident is essential to ensure stickiness and brand appeal. These initiatives build on top of the foundational initiatives and further differentiate the “city experience” 

Wave 3 – Correlation between Initiatives

Having established the Smart City initiatives, a mature Smart city will have to deliver an “one-city” experience to its residents across all interfaces with the residents. This can be achieved by having the data between different initiatives integrated into one data hub and generate correlations between various sets of silo-ed data. An interesting example would be to correlate weather data with water consumption levels to draw patterns on a hot day vs cloudy day scenario and leverage this further to predict water usage in the future. Another example would be adapting traffic management based on incidents happening in the water network (sewage pipe leaks). A representation of this solution is shown here.

What makes a city “Smart” is dependent on where you are on the evolution journey. For established cities that want to evolve into Smart Cities, there can never be a standardized journey template since each city will have its unique needs, demands and constraints. For Greenfield cities, like the ones coming up in emerging markets (Dubai Design District, Palava, Lavasa et al), they have an advantage of not being bound by existing systems/infrastructure. They can be innovative and plan their journey so that they can extend and scale over time with an end-objective of delivering a differentiated city experience to their residents.

Never-Seen-Before business processes

During the days I was doing my MBA, I was introduced to Porter’s Five Forces analysis – Threat of new entrants, Threat of substitute products or services, Bargaining power of customers (buyers), Bargaining power of suppliers and Intensity of competitive rivalry. While all of these forces are very relevant for any business while defining and refining their strategies, I have always been intrigued by the “Threat of substitute products or services” because it can come from rather unexpected quarters and does not give an established businesses enough time to react.

An interesting case study that we analyzed during my classes was about Cadbury’s evolution in India at the turn of the century. Like everywhere around the world, India loves celebrating its festivals and mithais (Indian Sweets) are gifted and consumed with gusto during the festive season. Over the years, mithai and dry fruits have been in many cases replaced by boxes of chocolates and biscuits. This change was driven by Cadbury’s around 2004 when it started its campaign “Kuch Meetha Ho Jaaye (Let’s have something sweet)” and presented its box of chocolates as an alternate gifting option. This caught the fancy of the urban Indian and soon, Cadbury command a lion’s share of the non-traditional gifting space. This impacted the businesses of the mithai-sellers and by the time they realized the impact of this new substitute, the brand had registered in the minds of the consumers.

On similar lines, you would find numerous examples from the current marketplace – and the underlying theme is that this cuts across industries. The advent of technology and digital transformation has meant that the competition need not necessarily come from within your industry. It is in light of this that Porter’s “Threat of substitutes” gathers more moss.

The future will unfold numerous interesting shifts in the business landscape – leaving some of the established businesses, and possibly roles, redundant. Consider this –As per a recent announcement, YouTube will be going offline in the coming few weeks, allowing users to save videos. You can download a video once, save it to your phone, and watch it multiple times. This will definitely be a game-changer in countries where broadband internet is a premium and is not as widespread – YouTube offline will allow users on data network to watch the same videos over and over again without having to bother about data charges. Another recent report by Nielsen found that YouTube reaches more American adults between the ages of 18 and 34 than any cable network. Overall, where does this leave the TV media?

The media houses have absorbed some of the effects that YouTube’s popularity has had on their businesses – loss of viewership and reduction in advertising revenues. If they are not jolted yet and have not been working their strategies around this, they would fail to evolve and therein lies the risk of Digital Darwinism.

Some more unusual action is being observed in the Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) space in the technology world. The big technology firms have surprised the industry with their unique acquisition strategies – possibly taking a long shot on futuristic business models. How else would you explain Google’s investments in wind-energy and driverless cars, Facebook eyeing drones and satellites? Non-technology firms have also moved beyond their traditional industry verticals to drive new business models. It is this confluence of industries that could generate the next big buzz in the marketplace.

What do all these industry shifts mean to the BPM practitioner? Essentially, it means that one needs to be prepared to study the client’s business without preconceived notions of the business processes within the enterprise. You may not only come across the traditional business processes but some rather unique ones given the fact that the businesses are constantly venturing into new spaces.

For example – a present day Telco firm need not necessarily be restricting its business services to Voice and data-based services but can expand into mobile banking and retail sales, an e-commerce player could go beyond retail sales and establish payment gateways and mobile wallets, a health insurance vendor could go beyond issuing and servicing insurance policies and establish health monitoring practice to track their customers’ health using M2M technology. The examples and possible scenarios are endless.

One needs to be well-aware of the confluence of industries and constant shifts happening in the marketplace. The confluence will be more evident now – thanks to digital transformation drastically pulling down the entry barriers of the past. As a BPM practitioner, it is imperative that you are aware of the “never-seen-before” business processes in the context of your new-age client.

Wearables in the Enterprise-context

A fortnight has passed by since I captured my thoughts around how the nexus of disruptive forces (Cloud, Mobile, Social, IoT) demands new-age BPM thinking. In a section of that blog, I had mentioned that BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and COPE (Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled) are forces that enterprises are coming to terms with. From the employer’s perspective, these measures are intended to optimize the experience for each employee, deliver the service and support to meet their unique needs, and maximize their contributions to the business. From an employee perspective, there is still a shortfall in BYOD – they need to lug these portable devices wherever they go. How easy would it be if one need not worry about carrying devices around but still get the job done on the move? Enter Wearables!!

In simple terms, wearables are computer-powered devices or equipment that can be worn, including clothing, watches, eyewear etc.

The wearables space is still in its early evolution phases and most vendors are in an exploratory mode. This has led to a huge influx of different devices serving varying needs. IDC, in its recent market analysis (Worldwide Wearable Computing Device 2014–2018 Forecast and Analysis), has broadly classified wearables into 3 categories – Complex Accessories, Smart Accessories and Smart Wearables.

The same analysis notes that “…wearables took a big step in 2013, reaching a total of 6.2 million units shipped, marking a 317.1% increase from the 1.5 million units shipped in 2012. Driving volumes higher was a combination of a warming end-user reception to complex accessories and the introduction of multiple smart accessories. Smart wearables, meanwhile, have yet to reach larger volumes.”

Wearables in the Enterprise

With this growing trend, how far are we before these devices enter our business environment? It’s not a question of “if” but “when” will wearables extend into the enterprise. Enterprises stand to benefit from the wearable story, if they think through this diligently and make smart choices that deliver an improved employee and customer experience. As things stand today, I observe that there are 3 broad use cases for wearables in enterprises:

Employee-empowerment

Providing employees with a hands-free operations will definitely add the productivity of the individual. How many times have there been instances when you have been in your favorite supermarket/electronic store feeling lost because of the combined lack of information displayed on shelf labels and limited knowledge of the salesmen around. A dissatisfied customer, a potential sale lost and, biggest of all, a customer delight opportunity lost – primarily because the salesman did not have the right levels of knowledge required to enable that sale. It is situations like these where it helps to have knowledge at the fingertips that businesses would want to drive in wearables. By strapping one of these devices on your limbs, you literally have the information at your fingertips.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Innovative thinking brings wearables and your customers together and driving more value into the relationship. While we have seen what mobile apps have done to customer experience and it is known that these apps can be made compatible to the smart watches, this use case goes beyond this scenario. Insurance companies are leveraging wearables to drive a more objective and individual assessment of insurance premiums, and making their customers aware of how they are performing on the health radar. Strap one of those Fit Bits around the wrist and each step you take from there on is helping you drive your insurance premiums lower. Some devices can even track your blood pressure and blood sugar levels and digitize this information. The insurance firm benefits from the close track it can keep on the health of its customers and provide a personalized experience.
Another smart implementation of wearables was Disneyland’s introduction of the MagicBand device that ties into a new service allowing theme park visitors to make purchases and reserve experiences.

WYOD (Wear Your Own Device)

An employee with a wearable computing device of their choice – sounds too distant? Businesses have taken a relatively long time in devising their BYOD strategies and transitioning into this new reality. If the influx of smartphones made them sit up and take note, wearables will be the next wave and businesses have to think of how they will evolve their WYOD strategies. The good news is that substantial mind-shifts have already happened during the implementation of their BYOD strategies and the resistance this time around will be less. However, the challenges of wearables entering the workspace will also unravel as this space matures, and businesses will have to be nimble-footed to generate value in that context. Just as it was in the case of smartphones entering work environments, security concerns will be center stage with wearables – perhaps, a few levels higher. Having said that, wearables will be an imperative and businesses should adopt and leverage rather than resist and lose out.

Impact on Business Processes

With such an advent of these wearables in the enterprises, there is bound to be an impact on business operations. From the retail floor to the insurance firm to the amusement park, the business processes will soon shape around these wearables. Call to action for BPM practitioners –

Develop Business Processes considering the wearable UI

The marquee BPM tools in the market have evolved in the context of the mobile wave. Traditionally, the business user has participated in the process through a User Interface that is rendered to him on his screen. Today, the BPM tools can additionally deliver this UI on the mobile/tablet screens, either through “responsive web” or a mobile app. With wearables, this UI design has to take the next leap – render the screens on the wearable screens and perhaps, include enhanced speech recognition! The need is to facilitate process execution by the business user through their device of choice – the wearable.

Optimize processes around Wearables

Business Process Optimization could possibly be taken to the next level if we leverage these devices as an effective aid in process execution. If a process participant is not bound to his desk or a handheld device, and is still able to carry out his task while on the move – this can lead to quicker response times. It requires some innovative design thinking by BPM practitioners to identify the “fit-for-wearables” scenarios that will enable clients see the value that they always long for. Businesses will be open to innovations in technology as long as we can demonstrate the value of leveraging them within their business processes. As an example, Virgin Atlantic has already made an early-adopter move and leveraged Google Glass to deliver a personalized check-in experience for its Upper Class passengers at Heathrow’s T3 terminal. Enterprises are in experimental mode and some of these early adoptions may not take-off smoothly.

The wearables space is evolving and maturing with each passing day. Technology firms and analysts are jumping on the bandwagon because they realize that the space has huge potential. There will soon be a consolidation based on market feedback and this should provide the much needed direction to the wearables market. There will be challenges and apprehensions around security with wearables entering the business environment but I am sure as this space evolves, those will be addressed as well. What is important is that a level of maturity is reached – both in terms of the device functionalities and enterprises evolving their strategies around these wearables. As BPM practitioners, do keep a close eye on this evolution and keep your “smarter thinking” hats on!

Disruptive forces and new-age BPM thinking

Change is commonplace. However, the forces driving change in the marketplace have never been as disruptive as they are today. Businesses have to be nimble to adapt to and adopt these inevitable changes. This process of adaption and adoption calls for a shift in the Business Process Management (BPM) landscape as we know it. Convenience and engagement are now prioritized ahead of automation and standardization as the core values of BPM. This blog discusses the impact that the disruptive forces – mobile, cloud, social, big data, internet of things – are having on business processes and shifts that the business have to make to ensure there are no tremors.

Reality of Disruptive Forces

While we all know that change is inevitable, it is the speed of change that has taken some of the less-nimble businesses by surprise. Widely available broadband bandwidth has led to explosive changes. As the marketplace changes rapidly, business strategists realize that they need to constantly reinvent themselves to overcome these VUCA challenges. So, in light of these disruptive forces (see graphic below) – Are you prepared to navigate the dynamic and rapidly changing landscape of Business Process Management?

Cloud 

With businesses steadily opening up to the cloud model, we are witnessing business processes move to the cloud – especially the ones that do not deal with sensitive data. Businesses are increasingly turning to dynamic hybrid cloud to reduce costs and enable more scalable and flexible business processes. This means that the new-age processes could involve process orchestration between an application(s) sitting on-premise and another application(s) hosted on the cloud. While the BPM process engine functionality should be able to drive that orchestration, this also means that businesses have to think beyond the “process optimization” principles that have been at the heart of process improvement approaches. This does not take away the significance of all that has been done till date for process improvements – it just requires businesses to think differently about ways to drive efficiencies. Most of the process improvement effort till date has been relatively ignorant of the hosting location of the business applications. However, this rewiring of businesses will make it necessary to start considering hosting options as well because they drive down costs substantially and deliver a much better end-user experience. Innovative thinking around this could lead to the evolution of new business models driven by business processes that are remarkably different from the ones we have known in the past. Consider this – till a couple of years back amazon.com would have meant ordering your favorite book, an electronic gadget online. The fact that they realized there is inherent potential in their huge IT infrastructure that can be tapped into – and came up with Amazon Web Services – leading to a new business model. This innovative thinking means that Amazon today has business processes around remote computing services that were non-existent a couple of years ago.

Mobile

With handhelds (mobiles, tablets, phablets) replacing the desktops and laptops as the preferred gadgets to stay online, they are driving businesses to think. Mobile enterprises can attract new customers, transform their business and IT infrastructure, develop mobile apps to boost enterprise efficiency, and improve customer service and interactions.

The new-age mobile enterprise is opening up to the concepts of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and COPE (Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled) to deliver an experience that is employer-friendly. With handhelds being commonplace in work environments, the business processes stand to benefit from them – if leveraged the right way. The fact that a customer’s loan could be approved by a credit manager on his ipad while he is waiting for the boarding announcement at the airport means that the end-to-end process execution times are ready to be redefined. In today’s business-in-motion environments, workers expect to be connected to their critical business processes while on-the-go. It is imperative to deliver more meaningful user engagements by extending business processes to the mobile working environments. However, one needs to note that handhelds are not just another device to access the same service – they are a different form factor and that means that they need to deliver an experience that is substantially different from the web-experience. Boilerplate solutions that are clones of the web applications will not work here. So, while defining business processes for the new mobile world and defining the user interfaces along the business process, one has to extend their horizon to think of delivering the “right” experience across form factors.

Social

Social networks have invaded our world and are becoming (if not already) an extension of ourselves. Social business has created a new source of human data, enabling businesses to gain greater insight into the sentiment, activities, performance and behaviors of large number of people. These businesses are driving enterprise-wide collaboration and workforce talent optimization by interweaving their social strategy with their overall business strategy. With an influx of millenials into the workforce, social networking is already pervasive and business processes have to wake up to this reality. The new-age workforce wants to use social networks to share content, have livid discussions on communities, share experiences and work cohesively – at scale and without boundaries.

Business Processes stand to gain from this shift. Consider this simple use case – we have seen many business processes that keep looping back and forth between process participants for want of some information/document resulting in a longer execution cycle. Now, if social were embedded in process execution, the process participant can locate an expert in the relevant social community and reach out to him on-the-go over an embedded chat engine to have his opinion on how a particular situation can be handled better. Essentially, collective knowledge is enabling people to rapidly learn, act with greater confidence and influence others in entirely new ways. Business processes have to leverage the immense potential that social businesses can have on service optimization.

Internet of Things

While social networks connect people, Internet of Things (IoT) is the interconnection of uniquely identifiable devices within the existing Internet infrastructure. The term IoT has been around for some years (also popular Machine to Machine – M2M or Cloud of Things – CoT) and is set to transform industries through innovative use cases.

Equipment providers supply physical data – an entirely new and huge class of data – to be mined and to enable intelligent operations through deep sensing and instrumentation. Smarter businesses are looking for new actionable insights to transform their businesses. Integration of the physical world and business enables a new level of actionable insights, leading to new business optimization. IoT is about creating systems of insight by delivering actionable insights in the physical world. Business Processes need to be cognizant of this new disruptive force and rewire the existing processes to be responsive to the insights generated by the devices around. In fact, devices could soon do most of the straight-through processing work expected out of optimized business processes – in ways that have not been seen before. For example, retailers are already witnessing how RFID technologies have driven M2M from the boardrooms to the shop floor and this necessitates them to revisit their existing business processes. Not too far in the distant future, we could have businesses executing their processes through wearables!

What does this mean for BPM practitioners?

BPM practitioners have to respond to these inevitable changes and this means that they have to approach business process optimization exercises differently. This does not mean that you do away with the traditional study of AS-IS processes and brainstorm to arrive at TO-BE processes. What this essentially means is that the practitioners will have to rewire themselves in the way they think of business process optimizations. They need to be constantly cognizant that it is the user experience that is significant while automation and standardization are a given.

Design thinking is a collection of practices that helps teams better identify with customer experiences, and shift from logical problem solving to creative experimentation. With design thinking, the focus shifts from delivering features to delivering experiences. The practitioner should start his business process study by understanding what experience will appeal to the end-user of the solution. This needs him to understand the customer from all perspectives (see graphic below).

Once this understanding is gathered, you need to be constantly thinking of the end-user experience as you progress through the traditional AS-IS study and TO-BE definition. Importantly, the ideation during TO-BE definition should incorporate aspects that deliver an engaging experience to the business users through the BPM application.

Another important aspect of Design thinking is described by Don Norman – “Designers […] don’t try to search for a solution until they have determined the real problem, and even then, instead of solving that problem, they stop to consider a wide range of potential solutions. Only then will they finally converge upon their proposal.” As an example, if the client’s real problem is lack of visibility into process performance, BPM practitioners are used to prescribing a dashboard that can help them track the process on a single screen hosted centrally on the office floor. While that may not be a wrong solution, it is only one of the ways to achieve the requirements. However, restricting to this one prescribed solution may not deliver an engaging experience for a constantly mobile workforce. So, it is important to understand the end-user experience and consider a wide range of potential solutions before arriving at the TO-BE definition. This is Design Thinking.

The disruptive forces – Cloud, Mobile, Social, IoT – are already impacting the marketplace and these impacts are only going to grow in magnitude and speed. Businesses are realizing this new ground reality and boardrooms are evolving strategies to leverage them to drive growth and evolve new business models. This calls for a new way of thinking around business process management – the design thinking – and practitioners need to adapt to this new imperative to deliver processes that are user-centric. The sooner, the better!