Sometimes it is hard to find an example of a broken process, but fortunately, USAir made it very easy for me. Yesterday, I get an e-mail from them informing them that I had lost my 50,000+ miles due to inactivity. Certainly, it is hard to fly USAir direct to many of the cities I fly out of St. Louis, but I would have used the miles for something (if I knew I was going to lose them).

Usually, I use them to visit my wife's grandparents in Philly. Since her grandmother was recently put in hospice care, I imagined we would be using them soon. I could argue quite strongly about whether they should be able to simply take miles that I have earned, but I won't go down that path.

Where I see the failure is in their communication to me. I am sure I got some message about the change in program status from 36 months of inactivity to 18 months of inactivity. It was probably buried in some other communication (or maybe I never got it). But, they clearly could have informed me 3 months before the miles expired or 30 days before the miles expired. Now, they simply get to hold my feet to the fire and force me to pay money for my miles, fly them to get the miles, or get one of their credit cards.

So, what can I do? I don't know. Maybe, I can get the Cranky Flier blog or some other advocates to bang on USAir? Maybe, their SVP of customer service (Anthony Mule) will respond to my nice e-mail about helping me? I simply asked them to extend this 30 days so I could use the tickets (likely for a funeral). Maybe, I need to try someone else like their VP of Marketing (Travis Christ) or another executive? I tried the call center which was nice enough, but (supposedly) not empowered to override this.

Anyways, just an example of a big company failing to care about their customers and ignoring common sense to proactively inform them when it benefits them.

Loyalty is a very interesting process. How do you drive people’s behavior to make them more loyal to your service or product? This is especially complicated in healthcare. For example, how do you encourage people to visit your pharmacy more often without incenting them to fill prescriptions unnecessarily. How do you encourage people to use your ER versus another ER without discouraging them from going to their primary care physician? Aligned incentives is a problem that HR and performance management consultants have worked on for years. It isn’t easy.

I was intrigued by another article in Chain Store Age (July 2007, pg. 150) about Green Hills Market in NY. This is a small, $18M company which is using technology from Pay By Touch to take their loyalty program to the next level of personalization by introducing biometrics.

• No more need to carry a card.
• The ability to know use by family member.

It seems to work. Participants are shopping more often and spending more. After they scan in at the front of the store, they get personalized promotions based on their shopping habits. They are getting supply chain efficiencies and improving cross-selling.

I also found it interesting that the author pointed out that at many stores you could scan any loyalty card and get the discounts. As she pointed out, this makes some of the data suspect.

I ended up being out of commission most of this week after my 3-year-old kicked me in the eye and scratched my cornea. Yes - it hurt pretty bad. Although the hardest part was being a type-A personality and having to sit around temporarily blind. For the first 24-hours, I couldn't open either eye.

I was reflecting back on the week (now that I can actually read) and realized there was one interesting example for BPM. There were little things that impressed me around the healthcare process...for example, the eye doctor had my chart at 8am on Wednesday when I had just left the emergency room at 1am.

But, the most interesting piece to me was the fact that neither eye would open the day after the incident. I asked the doctor about this and he said it was (essentially) my body's defense mechanism. This made me think about business rules which I thought of as an interesting analogy. Our bodies are probably the perfect BPM systems. They serve to process a series of rules that control our responses to things. They learn to improve the responses over time. And, with genomics and other areas of medicine, we can begin to map these processes.

Now, getting BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) or dashboards of our bodies' actions is a little harder (unless you are sitting in a hospital bed), but I think the general concept has some applicability.

Anyway, I won't stretch too far, but there is something there.

Is marketing a process or really a bunch of sub-processes that are part of other end-to-end processes? I was looking at how to automate the different marketing functions (new product development, product management, pricing, research, marketing communications, and voice of the customer) and realized that most of these are simply part of a bigger process.

The process that consumes most of these is the lifecycle from idea through sales through billing.

Here is a quick picture I came up with to describe the marketing function from a subprocess view.

Perhaps you wonder why this matters? Architecturally, it matters if you are building a system and want to connect processes.

Technology-wise, it matters if you want to focus on a SOA (service oriented architecture) approach where you can re-use components.

Organizationally, it matters to understand how data and tasks flow and how to optimize your investment.

Process-wise, it matters to understand best practices.

As I have talked about several times, the fear with any improvement is sub-optimization which often happens when you focus on a subsection of the entire process.

Here is a article to read on sub-processes (a little technical for some of you)

http://www.bpmenterprise.com/content/c070212a.asp

I found it interesting that The Wall Street Journal ran an article about the Strategic Execution Officer (SEO) and described it like I would describe a Chief Process Officer (CPO). Below are a few quotes, but I think it does a great job of explaining the role. It is difficult. It blends technology and business. Execution is critical. You become a change agent. You have to understand process and what is important. In other words, it is a difficult spot to fill.

"The SEO is an executive put in charge of building, and managing, a platform of digitized processes and data that serve key companywide purposes.

"Not only must they be well-versed in IT, but they also must have the authority to redefine roles and incentives for relevant managers and workers. SEOs and their staff have a personal stake in the outcome of such systems, and can move people out of the way if they are resistant to change.

"CIOs frequently bring to this role not only technological expertise but an awareness of how companywide business processes make new kinds of employee behaviors possible, and how the processes require greater coordination across units."

Source: Ross, Jeanne and Weill, Peter, All Roads Lead to the SEO, WSJ, 6/16/07, pg. R9