Live from Brainstorm: Making the transition to services engineering

In Brett Champlin's session on the Making the transition to services engineering this morning. A couple of interesting points came up in his discussions of how the processes of delivering services are different from those of delivering products.

• 90% of process time is work waiting to be performed
  • As Brett put it "Queues are evil". This is one of the key ways in which decision management can help in service delivery - automating decisions so that far fewer transactions have to be queued up for manual review. In an underwriting case, written up here, this was from 100% to 1%.
• Service processes are a series of states involving the decision-making process and the experience of the customer.
• Customer acting in the role of co-producer
  • Service processes are more decision-centric and more customer-centric and this makes the power of business rules to act as a platform for decisions and to provide customization key.
• Definition of  "good service" may be different for each customer
  • Hence rules-based personalization.
• Heterogeneity a problem - too much variation from worker to worker
  • Consistency is one of the key values of decision management. If I automate the decision making rules, formalize the assessment of risk and uncertainty using predictive analytics and ensure a single point of decisioning then I get consistency of decision across my people.
• Dimensions of performance hard to measure
  • This is one of the reasons for considering Decision Yield as a way to measure decision effectiveness. The dimensions of performance are different when you are in decision-centric environments. You must consider precision, consistency, agility, speed and cost.