Artificial Intelligence, Paving Cowpaths and Process Intelligence
Standing in the check-out line at the grocery store the other day, I spotted a magazine that caused my arm to reach reflexively. It was one of those special topic publications that focused on a single and timely subject. The title was 'Artificial Intelligence,' and the tag line read 'Its perils and its promise.' The cover graphic was a brain dissected exposing non-organic artificial something-or-another inside. The New York Times published it.
With coffee in hand, the next morning found me speed-reading the publication. Expecting an AI narrative reduced to pablum for the masses (after all, it was in the grocery store), I was surprised to find my mind both reveling in something familiar and exploding with new possibilities. I had an AI moment. The article postulated that AI would affect everything. Naturally, I mentally tested the assertion against my professional tapestry of experience and found both something old and something new. The 'new' held promise to fix an old problem.
You see, I am a professional operational manager and, therefore, a business process guy. My career in telecom focused on the pursuit of high-performance customer service for the most demanding of clients. I learned that the best instrument for that pursuit was continuous process improvement. For decades, the pace of improvement was measured in months. If we could make the process incrementally better in say, three months, we celebrated our cleverness and basked in our customer's appreciation.
My little lightning bolt AI moment triggered a long-held belief that the pace of service delivery and customer experience was profoundly slow. In a sense, reading about AI and its ability to predict gave a reference for and validation that something was now different. Not incrementally different mind you but profoundly different. It was about speed - as in the speed at which business process runs and the speed at which it improves.
A new truth -
Gone are the days when it was acceptable to measure customer service process improvement with a 'stop-calendar' - in months. Making the tired old cow path workflows a little better is officially now the express lane to self-obsolescence. AI is a game-changer in two significant ways:
1. Tasks that required months or weeks are now completed in minutes and seconds.
2. Proactivity and prediction are replacing reactivity.
For the old service delivery cow path, this could not be more profoundly different.
Customer Dissonance -
Dissonance causes a conflict or tension within a consumer. This sense of conflict is usually a negative feeling and, given a choice, often leads to the buyer taking their money elsewhere. Customers have more options than ever these days.
Historically, we deliver service and customer experience across the broad telecom industry with armies of customer service representatives, help desk technicians, and field service engineers. However, the core service assurance process was initiated, driven, and QC'd by the client. In effect, the job of service performance monitoring and service assurance was outsourced to the customer.
It was up to the customer to raise an issue whereby a call center someplace would follow scripts (primitive AI logic) to resolve the issue virtually. If that failed, a truck would roll. All too often, that cycle would repeat chronically until, mercifully, the problem would resolve. The customer, having grown habituated to this reality, dreams of alternatives and bristles with righteous contempt. Of course, all of this creates massive customer dissonance. It is a costly way to work, so more than a little 'CFO dissonance' was also created.
For decades, the industry was among the worst performers in customer experience and things like net promoter scores. While the telecom industry is responsible for some of the most profound innovations in the history of the world (the internet, high-speed connectivity, wireless connectivity), the sector had generated shockingly few changes in terms of customer service. While there has been considerable paving of the old cow paths, service delivery in telecom remains a reactive, slow, and costly machine. In the ultimate irony, fantastical new products and services innovation delivered by the same old reactive way of doing business is like an astronaut riding out to the launch pad on a donkey.
Times have changed along with expectations and definitions. Thank Amazon, Uber, and other examples of how digital transformation has re-imagined the world.
Did you know that Amazon received a patent for something called "anticipatory shipping" - in 2013!? The patent covers the notion of fulfilling customer needs BEFORE they realize they need it! Whoa!
Have a read of Scott Galloway's book 'The Four.' It is a fascinating tale of leveraging the power of uber-advanced data collection, customer preference awareness, and AI-enabled analytics to anticipate, influence, and predict customer needs. It is also a cautionary tale for those stuck in the old reactive cow path ways.
Uber used precision real-time location data to match drivers with passengers and wholly crushed the reactive Taxi model. They also moved the 'pay' part of the process from the end of the ride to BEFORE the trip. Every fast food and star-bucker out there is doing the same.
Google knows more about us than we do. They use our searches to deduce and predict preferences and future actions. Google knows what we want and need before we do.
The agents of change -
The pace of innovation has never been higher. We all know that. What might be less well understood is how seemingly un-related innovation might cross-pollinate new possibilities. Here are a few macro trend examples to illustrate:
Wireless - Eighty percent of all cell traffic originates indoors - as in our workplace. The horsepower in today's smart devices is staggering. Processors speed, memory, and bandwidth enable all manner and sort of apps to do things that were simple, not possible a few years ago. We work on our mobile devices from where ever we are.
IoT - Billions, yes, billions of new smart devices will be created in the next few years. Everything will get a processor, memory, and the ability to communicate. These new kinds of devices will generate data and capabilities never before possible.
Bandwidth - Just 25 years ago, 9600 bits per second was considered high speed. Now, gigabit speeds will usher in new capabilities and applications. The demand for bandwidth will continue to double every 18 months as it has for the past three decades.
Real-Time Location Service - Outdoor location services via GPS have become commonplace. Not so indoors. Imagine the possibilities if it were possible to know where things are with centimeter precision and do so in real-time.
Cloud Computing - In just the last dozen years, the idea that we all had to own our servers have been replaced by cloud computing and its newest offering, edge computing. Super low latency edge computing is critical to make all the connectedness, bandwidth, and IOT stuff useful.
Artificial Intelligence - Essentially the ability to discover, become aware, and apply cognitive action will re-write everything. AI is not a prophecy. It is happening now.
When taken in the context of business process workflows and customer experience engineering, it becomes clear that leveraging all of these innovations can unlock bold new process capabilities - providing, of course, that we think differently.
In my experience, the customer touch process has a nasty way of becoming cow paths. The process takes on a kind of malaise and becomes buttressed by tribal memory. It desensitizes to its dysfunction. A sort of learned helplessness develops. Innovation and doing things radically different become unimaginable. Attempts at process change are perceived as a viral attack on the status quo, and the white corpuscles of the BAU borg are dispatched to kill it before it can take root. Accomplishing change requires a mighty hand and every tool, method, and magic pixie dust available. It requires high PI.
Process Intelligence - the great integrator
It is time to re-think how the business process and customer experience are architected. It is time for a new kind of Process Intelligence. By purposefully adopting high PI mindsets and methods, it becomes possible to leverage innovation and AI to accelerate everything.
Think of Process Intelligence as a continuum of abilities starting with the most basic process management skills and continuing to a completely self-aware and deterministic workflow. More simply, it is the notion that you cannot know too much about your workflow and its customers, and you cannot know it fast enough.
It seeks to do two things - accelerate the rate of change and shift from the reactive to the proactive. Prediction is the top of the Pyramid. To reach a process-actualizing transcendent state requires a collection of skills and capabilities, each requiring the previous, each enabling the next. There are no skipping steps, no short cuts.
Here are a few building blocks of a high PI capability;
Process Management Skills - This is the tried and true blocking and tackling of process work. It is the best of DAMAC, Lean Six Sigma, and Kaizen. It is Statistical Process Control and a culture of continuous improvement. What has changed is the speed of the cycles. Months are replaced by days then minutes.
Data Science - I define this as an intrinsic ability to discover and metabolize data into actionable and useful information and do so quickly - in real-time or near real-time.
Awareness - The critical time and motion information from process steps, including inputs and especially outputs (i.e., Customers) quickly - real-time or near real-time.
Process Integration - The ability for the process to behave and perform as a cohesive and symbiotic unit requires anti-stovepipe design and execution. The boundaries and hand-offs are the danger zone.
Preference awareness - the ability to discover, retain, and utilize the preference of the inputs and outputs of the process - especially customers. Again, this is a time-sensitive commodity.
Process Cognition - A higher-order capability; this encompasses temporal processes such as memory, association, concept formation, pattern recognition, language, attention, perception, action, problem-solving, and imagery.
Process Automation - The ability to apply computer science and robotics to the rote, swivel-chair, and mundane tasks performed by humans to increase speed and accuracy creates acceleration. Well designed automation frees the humans for high value-add tasks such as applying inference or experienced-based judgment to complex questions.
Process Prediction and Discovery - A process that can discover and predict its world is vastly superior to one that cannot. This truth holds for both the input side of workflows as well as the output side. The latter being marginally more critical as it tends to involve the customer.
Process Acceleration - Least we forget, this is the goal. Cause the process to run faster, delivery to the customer quicker, deliver to the customer better. Note that faster is usually cheaper as it is devoid of costly rework and delay. Also, note that process acceleration speaks to the ability to effectuate process improvement, faster. The measurement scale here is minutes, seconds, and milliseconds.
In summary, innovations like AI and others are creating a fantastic opportunity to eliminate customer dissonance, costs, and accelerate everything - providing, of course, that the execution ability is present.
The process is, of course, all about execution.
So, the question is this - Do you believe that the speed of execution matters? If not, no worries. Move along, for there is nothing to see here. Your old and comfortable cow path awaits.
OK. Bad IQ test. Of course, you do.
If you do believe it matters, then you must also adopt the curious and probing mindset that searches for the next. I would even go so far as to say a fundamental disdain for the status quo is required. The next wave of Ai driven customer experience will come from the unreasonable minds powered by an ever-climbing Process Intellect.
In upcoming posts, I will expand on the attributes of a high PI and further my disdain for the status quo. I won't even need a grocery store magazine, either.