Pegasystems Extends Digital Business Process Reach

Five Ways to Use Data to Be More Relevant to Customers

As part of an effort to help organizations to make the transformation into becoming a digital business by design rather than by accident, Pegasystems today previewed its first software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, while at the same time moving to acquire Better Business Software to gain access to Firefly co-browser technology that enables customer service personnel to share data in real time with customers online.

Speaking at the PegaWorld 2014 conference today, Pegasystems CEO Alan Trefler says that when organizations look to transform into digital businesses, they need to start thinking more in terms of end-to-end processes that work together to create a better customer experience.

Trefler says the analytics application that Pegasystems is building is designed to help organizations apply predictive analytics to identify potential customer issues and determine what their next best action might be in any given scenario, without having to necessarily build that capability themselves from scratch. That application, says Trefler, will be exposed via application programming interfaces (APIs) that will make it simple to integrate within any number of business processes.

Finally, Pegasystems is also committing to bringing innovations to market via maintenance updates every two months that will give customers that ability to better understand the impact any new feature might provide their organization.

Rather than thinking in terms of mobile computing and granular transactions, Trefler contends that organizations need an omni-channel approach to managing customer engagements that is focused on the processes that support those interactions. Using a case lifecycle management approach to manage digital business processes allows that to occur in a way the business can consume, execute and understand, says Trefler.

The problem most businesses have today, says Trefler, is that when it comes to dealing with customers, they have no situational awareness of the context of the interaction. Because the engagements today are taking place across mobile and cloud computing environments, organizations just wind up adding yet another isolated silo for a customer interaction to get lost in, says Trefler.

As critical as IT can be, the simple fact is that it’s really a means to an end. If organizations are going to succeed in the digital age, they need to use IT to simplify existing business processes as opposed to deploying isolated pockets of applications that actually wind up making those processes more complicated than they unfortunately already are.