COMMUNITIES

The solution release, and earlier Care Management Webinar hosted by Pegasystems and Gartner Inc, have generated substantial buzz in Pegasystems? healthcare community.

View press release

View recorded webinar

Kaiser Permanente Selects Pegasystems for Customer Service
Kaiser Permanente, America' leading integrated health plan, has selected Pegasystems' Customer Process Manager^TM for Healthcare (CPM-HC) as the new desktop solution for its national call centers. CPM-HC will be used to service member and provider inquiries for multiple business lines including Commercial, Medicare, Medi-Cal and Direct Pay. Kaiser Permanente is well respected for its high customer service rankings and the deployment of BPM technology will allow them to reach even higher standards of excellence for customer care and quality of service.

View press release

Community Content Top 5 Downloads
A new feature of Pega Perspectives is to provide you what is the five most popular downloads of Community Content.

1. Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites, 2007
   Pegasystems is understandably very pleased to be placed in the leader's quadrant in the 2007 release of the Gartner BPMS MQ. Pegasystems' unique capabilities allow it to offer organizations unprecedented agility especially when addressing frequently changing local contexts and circumstances that must be managed globally.
   
   
2. SmartBPM® vs. Eclipse IDE: A study to compare the productivity of SmartBPM and Eclipse Java IDE
   In a head-to-head comparison of integrated development environment (IDE) features and performances, Kanbay (a Capgemini Group company) measured both Pegasystems SmartBPM and Eclipse, Kanbay found that application development using SmartBPM is 550% faster than with Eclipse IDE. This figure rises to more than 600% faster if analysis and design activities are excluded.
   
   
3. The Forrester Wave™: Human-Centric BPM For Java Platforms, Q3 2007
   Forrester evaluated 12 vendors across 150 criteria for this BPMS Wave. The report demonstrates in detail that Pegasystems has improved significantly in the past year, and now “lead[s] on the strength of their people-oriented products and excellent monitoring and analysis tools.
   
   
4. The Forrester Wave: Business Rules Platforms, Q2 2008
   Forrester evaluated 13 platforms from 11 vendors using 175 different criteria that organizations typically review when selecting a Business Rules Management System. The report found Pegasystems to have the highest scores for Current Offering and one of three "resounding Leaders as general-purpose business rules platforms."
   
   
5. Process Commander SmartBPM for Smart CIOs
   Automating processes and rules to solve CIO woes
   Learn why the combined automation of processes and business rules provides the ideal platform to address CIO concerns and priorities. And how the Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite is the most advanced and powerful BPM solution available today.

SunTrust to Speak at Gartner BPM Summit
SunTrust will take the stage and talk about how they quadrupled their online account opening activity using Pega' Build for Change® technology at the Gartner BPM Summit on Wednesday, September 10th from 4:20 – 4:45pm. The redesign of SunTrust's online account opening application has become one of the bank's largest sources of new deposit accounts. After re-engineering this complex process and driving it to the Web, the time required to open a new account was reduced from weeks to minutes and online account openings have increased four-fold. Hear from SunTrust about how they quadrupled sales by automating online account opening and the lessons learned from this and other BPM initiatives.

Product Spotlight – Claims Servicing Backbone
Pegasystems' Claims Servicing Backbone (CSB) framework provides the industry's most comprehensive automated approach to claims processing. The CSB helps insurance carriers increase productivity in the claims process by automating what has traditionally been a manual procedure handled by multiple departments utilizing multiple systems. The CSB provides intelligent claims processing through its end-to-end management, tracking, and reporting on policyholders' requests for payment, along with real-time metrics and analytics. By automating the process and ensuring the flow of work across departmental silos, CSB dramatically reduces claims processing times and expense, while improving accuracy, compliance and customer experience.

View a product data sheet

Webinar: "The Claims Organization Challenge"
Can an insurance company transform their current claims processes into a source of competitive advantage? Insurance industry veteran Tony Pavia and Pegasystems' Insurance Professional Service Director Tony Castelli will discuss the challenges facing Property and Casualty claims organizations and how business process improvements can help insurers turn these challenges into competitive differentiators. Attend this webinar to learn how claims organizations are improving claims process efficiency in order to compete more effectively.

PegaWORLD Agility '08

Announcing the PegaWORLD Agility '08 Training Schedule and Agenda
If planning for BPM success is one of your goals, then we welcome you to come to PegaWORLD. This year's training topics include:

• BPM basics
• Getting the most out of web services
• Basic and Advanced UI design
• SOA workshop
• Building a Center of Excellence

You also get thought-leadership keynotes from the CEO of Forrester, George Colony, the latest perspectives from Washington from the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Barney Frank, case studies, industry special interest groups and networking opportunities with hundreds of BPM practitioners.

View the Training Curriculum

View the Agenda

Make a date for business agility. Register today to join the industry's most successful BPM leaders at http://www.pegaworld2008.com/?pageID=home&elq=<span class=eloquaemail>recipientid</span>. Plus by registering early, you can save $200*.

*Offer ends September 19, 2008.

Financial Services Special Interest Group
Please plan to attend the Financial Services Special Interest Group (SIG) annual meeting as part of PegaWORLD 2008. Meet with your peers to share ideas, discuss business challenges, and learn about industry hot topics and trends. Hear project success stories and how others are applying SmartBPM technology to enhance business performance across every aspect of the FSI value chain.

Insurance Special Interest Group
Please join the Pegasystems Insurance Industry Special Interest Group (SIG) at PegaWORLD 2008! Meet and work with your peers applying SmartBPM technology to enhance their businesses in Life, Annuity, Commercial and Personal lines. Share ideas, discuss business challenges and learn about industry trends. Meet and discuss opportunities with the Pegasystems industry staff and our business partners who have years experience in working with carriers, agents, brokers and others in the field and in the home office. For more information on the Insurance Special Interest Group, please click here.

Healthcare Special Interest Group
Please plan to attend the Healthcare Special Interest Group (SIG) annual meeting as part of PegaWORLD 2008. Meet with your peers to share ideas, discuss business challenges, and learn about industry hot topics and trends. Hear project success stories and how others are applying SmartBPM technology to enhance business performance across every aspect of the Healthcare value chain.

News

• Pegasystems Announces Record Revenue of $51.1 million for Second Quarter and $99.6 million for First Six Months of 2008
  Total revenue for the second quarter of 2008 was $51.1 million, an increase of 43%, compared to $35.7 million for the second quarter of 2007. Net income for the second quarter of 2008 was $2.9 million, compared to $0.6 million for the second quarter of 2007.
  
  
• Pegasystems Launches Care Management Solution To Improve Patient Care While Cutting Healthcare Costs
  By unifying disease management, case management, and utilization management across the healthcare enterprise, CMF gives care professionals the ability to collaborate in real-time and in turn provides patients with an equally cohesive view of their personal care plans.
  
  

Blogosphere

Model-Driven What?

James Taylor of Smart (enough) Systems recently blogged on a reader's questions about development, business rules and model-driven development, and it made me realize that BPM vendors sometimes simplify the role of business buyers in a BPM implementation too much. James discusses four tenets of Agile development (Individuals and interactions; Working software; Customer collaboration; Responding to change) and points out that "fast iterations and test-driven development work well with the kinds of short-cycle changes that business users make themselves." Since the business itself has to respond to change, we have to involve the business users in every aspect of development. We are, in effect, turning business users into collaborative developers, and they will need to think differently and learn the virtues of models and processes.

John Reynolds looks at this same problem from a programmer's perspective in his Thoughtful Programmer blog. He asks "Is Programming Hard?" and says "Programming is the craft of transforming requirements into something that a computer can execute." John goes on to discuss Model-Driven Architecture/Development as an attempt to help programmers with that translation. Like most BPM practitioners, he believes "a Process Models is a clearer representation of Requirements than an Object Model is." We at Pega think you have to empower everyone involved in development – process owners, programmers, UI designers, analysts, managers, and end users – in the BPM process. John acknowledges that to make this work, you need to alter the entire stack of development tools, providing: 1. Process Modeling and Execution Environments (BPM), 2. Test Driven Development, 3. Aspect Oriented Programming, and 4. Domain Specific Languages. We believe Pega's SmartBPM provides the right tools for all these elements.

Finally, Paul Greenberg discusses chapter 6 of his book CRM at the Speed of Light in his blog on New Business Models. Paul's list of characteristics of new business models is right in line with a BPM approach, and requires business involvement throughout the process. In the area of process, I especially agree with: 3. The users and producers are engaged in the co-creation of value; 4. The users have the tools to configure and/or customize their personal experience with the product; and 5. The users and the producers encourage each other and mutually define the future directions of the specific products. Although Paul is discussing the production of game software, almost every point he makes here applies to successful BPM projects.