By Emilio L. Zapata, founder Tedial
Effective business process management is a difficult challenge for today’s business leaders. M&E companies have a greater need to reinvent themselves and, at the same time, drive efficiency improvements. Many of the systems accessed are rigid and difficult to change, while operating models and internal organisation are also transforming. M&E companies need to equip themselves with flexible and agile technology to help them improve the customer experience, business agility and overall efficiency.
Customer Experience (CX) is the feeling that the customer generates as a result of their relationship with the product or solution purchased. CX is receiving increasing attention and will continue to do so in the near future. Improving CX will mean even faster business transformation, with higher expectations and the adoption of appropriate new technology to support customer-facing and operational process improvements.
The current mobility crisis has revealed that the operational inefficiencies of any company can no longer be financially sustained. In the M&E market, maintaining a positive and lasting CX between providers and customers will be key to success. For M&E technology providers this means evolving from traditional product sales to delivering solutions that improve customer ROI, so it is necessary to focus on developing solutions that provide agility, interoperability, flexibility and mobility to customers. In addition, it will be essential to meet the needs of customers to create content from anywhere and strengthen their business and operational models.
From a technology perspective the focus is on instilling an agile mindset that centers on finding elegant and simple solutions to business problems. A smart approach would focus on creating minimum viable solutions that can be delivered faster and therefore generate value more quickly. To be successful, an architectural framework that supports modular hybrid cloud services and plug-and-play capabilities is required to leverage a variety of both packaged and custom solutions.
M&E companies must implement a business agility (BA) strategy to enable new services and processes to be rapidly modified, deployed and integrated. Never in the history of the M&E market has BA been more important. It enables the monitoring of process changes, rapid adaptation of the CX strategy and a shift from orchestration of systems to choreography (coordination) of people, tasks, relationships, applications and systems. It also considers the dynamic adjustment of processes to enable interaction between people or with partners in an ecosystem.
Media Integration Platform for improved Customer Experience
Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) have radically simplified the use of commercial application and development platforms. They have also created data silos that remain difficult for other systems to access. Solving the problem of access to data silos in the M&E market is the Media Integration Platform, which provides a set of hybrid cloud media services that enables the development, execution and governance of integrations (iPaaS) and connects any combination of on-premise or cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within single or multiple organisations.
The Media Integration Platform must combine integration power and usability. This is achieved by combining conventional business tools and a new generation of simpler self-service tools, designed for business users (citizen developers), using the low/no code paradigm.
M&E companies need to adopt BA strategy and improve CX where new services or systems can be rapidly deployed and integrated in a multi-site hybrid cloud environment. Combined with an intelligent business process management (iBPM) tool, the Media Integration Platform is ideal for implementing an efficient BA strategy and improving the CX of M&E companies. This brings many benefits including:
- Support business responsiveness to the need to change individual tasks, sub-processes or at the overall process design level.
- Develop applications with low/no code interfaces so that business users can design many of their software defined workflows autonomously, without recourse to IT.
- Move from orchestration to choreography (coordination) of people, applications, storage systems and relationships. The expectation to control the set and sequence of activities of many types of processes, especially those that allow interaction between people or with partners in a multi-site ecosystem.
- Rapid prototyping capability. Business processes change regularly in a volatile business environment and there is a need to make rapid, non-destructive changes to applications/processes even when they are already in use. This allows the organisation to iteratively prototype new solutions and test them in practice with minimal obstruction to ongoing processes, significantly reducing the time to market for new products and services offered.
- Encourage collaboration between multidisciplinary teams. Developers and users have complementary views and can work together to design the ideal process flow. Process flows can be complex, but the Media Integration Platform allows users to view processes as sets of tasks. It also facilitates quick and easy implementation of process modifications suggested by users, improving not only communication but also ensuring that the process works as intended.
- Facilitate social interactions within the context of a process. The Media Integration Platform provides the ability to manage interactions across a variety of channels (web, chat, social media and others) in an adaptive manner.
- Increased transparency and visibility of business processes. The Media Integration Platform records audit information from all processes, making visible changes introduced by users, providing a “bigger picture” of information through better analytics. This facilitates business continuity, improved support for the people involved in the processes and long-term maintenance of the system.
The way M&E companies find, evaluate, purchase and consume technology offerings will evolve dramatically in the coming years. M&E companies that use technology to drive new business models and competitively superior business outcomes will force providers to raise the level of functionality, flexibility and quality of their products, because they need tools to seek out new opportunities, experiment with ways to exploit those opportunities, and then quickly adapt or reinvent business processes.
Technology providers cannot operate in isolation. They must adopt interoperability and application integration ecosystems to meet customer expectations and gain access to desired markets. Providers must proactively embrace market changes, understand customer wants and needs, and seize emerging opportunities. In short, M&E technology providers must evolve from traditional product sales to delivering solutions that improve customer ROI and accelerate the customer experience. That is the challenge, and the hybrid cloud Media Integration Platform is an excellent candidate that empowers customers to choose the systems and applications that enable them to improve customer experience, business agility and overall efficiency of M&E companies.
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Tedial
