PegaWorld iNspire 2023: Building for the Total User Experience with Pega Constellation

As customer and employee expectations continue to expand, enterprises grapple with how to meet demand. Determining how to optimize seamless experiences across channels is forcing many leaders to rethink how they deliver innovative solutions that delight end users.

Join this session to hear how LeasePlan dared to innovate across three business scenarios, leveraging Pega Constellation’s open UX technology and prescriptive design system to deliver exceptional experiences in Pega work portals, embed Pega workflows in other web applications, and drive Pega workflows via Constellation DX API.

Transcript:

- All right. I think we're about ready to get started here. Can you all hear me okay? I can't really see, the lights are blinding up here, so I apologize if you give a smile or a frown and I can't tell what's on your face. I see a thumb right there. Thank you. Excellent. Well, thank you all for attending this afternoon session Building for the Total Experience with Pega Constellation. I think we've got a real treat here, we've got a couple folks from our LeasePlan team who implemented Constellation in the last year and have some really great stories to tell about how they leverage the different aspects of Constellation to solve different business problems. So, I guess by way of introduction, my name is Paul Barnes. I'm a Senior Director of Business Excellence for Intelligent Automation here at Pega. I work on our go-to-market and product strategy team. I've been with Pega for about 12 years, spent most of my time in consulting, implementing our solutions in the field, and then 18 months ago left the field to join our team now. And I am really passionate about a handful of things within Pega, one of them being Constellation and ensuring that our clients really understand the value proposition, that they're not afraid of it, not afraid of the changes that come with it because it is a slightly different architecture. You know, we have some great new guidance that's coming out as part of Infinity 23 about how you can leverage all of your existing, traditional architecture use cases, applications while still being able to leverage some of the newer capabilities and Constellation. We're not gonna go over those in detail today, but I urge you to go stop by the booths in the Innovation hub to learn about that and talk to, I think I saw Sean Wardus earlier in the room in the back there. I see it's not as blinding, I see him in the back there raising his hand. But go ask questions about it, understand, what we've got today and what's coming and I think you'll be delighted by it. So with that, I'd like these two gentlemen to give a quick introduction of themselves and then we'll launch into an overview of Constellation and then get into the meat of the material.

- My name's Lex Ruijter. I work for LeasePlan my role is Pega Global Application Manager, if I read it correctly. Been doing it for two years now. Background is delivery, always project management, change management, mostly in consultancy firms. But now I switched over to LeasePlan to do this role.

- Yep. I'm Marco Duizer. I'm a consulting manager from AMEA based in the Netherlands. I'm also analysis and basically I combine both roles within Pega, five years within Pega. I'm mostly focusing on low-code, enterprise development, constellation and developing basically the skills and the best practices on that level. Looking forward to share our experiences, our bad stuff and good stuff that we did with you all today so that you can learn something from our lessons learned

- Only good stuff. No bad stuff.

- Oh, we had some bad things.

- Fantastic. Only the good stuff. Just kidding. So we handled the introductions. So as far as the agenda goes, again, I'm gonna give you a quick overview of Constellation, give you a perspective of how we think about it, and then I'm gonna hand it over to Lex to give a solution story overview, what LeasePlan is trying to accomplish. And then three different solution, or three, I'm sorry, yeah, three different solution overviews here. One is an overall UI overview and then some examples of internal facing application of Constellation and external facing of Constellation. And then we'll have time for Q&A so hopefully there'll be some good questions coming out of it. So driving forward, constellation overview. So, as we're work shifts more and more towards the autonomous enterprise, users are going to become more of the exception to the norm. But users are still going to expect and demand that their experiences are exceptional. So Constellation, was built on this premise that we wanted to drive work from the center out, leveraging a stateless data architecture. We wanted to provide a fast build and ease of maintenance in using the technology. We wanted to make sure that we are providing intuitive back office experiences while also providing seamless self service through various options. And then lastly, ensuring that you're getting consistent customer experiences in through whatever channel you're choosing to drive a Pega workflow on. So, starting with the basics, working from the center out, again, a stateless modular architecture that really separates the logic from the UI. If you think about our traditional section based implementations, that logic is often built up into the UI. So in this case, if we look at the, the model here, which is our low-code application definition, everything about that model is exposed to the Constellation JS engine through our DX API, all of your stage information, business rules, personas, data, right? Everything is moved into that engine there. And then from there, really the strategic benefit, one of the major strategic benefits of Constellation is that you can manifest that work in multiple different ways. All driven off of, you know, the one application definition in the backend. Our Constellation work portals, which I'll go through in a bit, our customer self-service options with web embed and WSS and then of course non-PEG UI where you can bring your own Constellation SDKs and your own design systems to bear. So just thinking about, you know, the architecture, thinking about the design system and the experience itself, it's form-based UI configuration in App Studio and we have found that it's 50% faster time to develop compared to traditional drag and drop UI builders. On top of this though, we're also giving you all of the accessibility, requirements and capabilities that you might have had to spend hours or weeks or longer configuring on your own through our traditional approach. So, really has helped speed development efforts and provides that prescriptive experience across the board. On top of that though, we've also done a lot of studies with back office workers and our back office portal has been optimized to provide work for that back office worker. So thinking about the type of things that they're gonna wanna see on their dashboard, thinking about how the work is organized, what's the right information that they need in order to get the work done as quickly as possible. That's what all of these, I'm not gonna go through all of these in detail, but this is how we've structured it and we really have seen that this particular approach drives back office efficiency and productivity. So as you're thinking about implementing Constellation and wondering, "Hey, I used to be able to drag and drop "whatever I wanted in my section based approach, "and had ultimate power and configurability." When you think about leveraging our Constellation back office portal, you're still gonna get great outcomes, but you're gonna be using a more prescriptive approach to accomplishing that. So just think about that as your approaching your Constellation projects. It again, is a little bit more constrained in terms of how you do it, but the outcomes are as powerful as what you would achieve with a section based approach to implementation. Enabling seamless self-service. So you know all of the same work that you are able to accomplish in your back office portal, we have the ability to publish that out to customer self-service. So you can do that through web-embed through the WSS portal and of course you can style it to match your particular corporate theme with branding and themes in App Studio and of course it's all auth two integrated. And then lastly, we know that, consistent and great customer experiences are the lifeblood of your organizations. 94% of US consumers say that they're very, very likely to buy from a business that has a great customer experience, but only 9% of of client facing companies actually provide that customer experience across all touchpoints. So one of the unique things about Pega Constellation and building with your own SDKs is that you can drive a consistent workflow across all your channels while providing your own great experience, coming through the SDK and we've got great starter packs for that and continuing to put more and more into that. And with Infinity 23, I think you'll see this capability even more built out. You'll also see a lot more information coming out in Academy and on our Pega or docs pega.com to teach you how to approach this and how to do it, to get the experience that you're looking for. That's kind of it in terms of my Constellation overview. I'm sure there will be questions that you may have at the end. Again, our product experts, Sean in the back, will be at the booth to be able to field some of those, but we'll be happy to take any after the session is done. I'd really like to hand it over to the exciting part of the conversation, which is these two gentlemen talking about how they leveraged the different aspects of Constellation technology, the different business problems they were trying to solve. And again, I guess the bad and the good of what they experienced with it. So I'll hand it over to you guys.

- Yep.

- Yep.

- That's me. I'll keep it short 'cause at 3:15 I'll tell the whole LeasePlan story. So for now, I'm Lex Ruijter, I worked for a couple of companies. I think the red light through my career is a delivery. So I'm making things happen and I really believe if you really want it, it's possible. And I think Constellation is one of those to add to the list, it's possible. If you go to the LeasePlan. Next slide. LeasePlan it's a company, it's actually a bank. And I think a lot of people don't know that. And I think also interesting is that we want to be the first digital company to have a end-to-end solution. But currently we're still have a lot of manual steps in the process. And we look at Pega and what we're doing in LeasePlan, it's a lot about getting the processes right but then being able to offer it in any channel because the world and also our customers are digitalizing. Little bit background on LeasePlan. We're back from the sixties and that tells a story. So we have legacy and we grew, yeah, organically. So we bought a company, we had legacy here, legacy there and we connected it all together. You can imagine what that looks like after 20, 30 years. I think another aspect which is also interesting why we also chose for Pega is we have 29 countries. So that's a dynamic which you need to figure out how to solve that in your architecture. But also we have corporate clients, SME and individual clients, privates. And we needed to have one process that could deal with all these different aspects and dynamically behavior. Yeah, the others not that interesting. Yeah. So what we are aiming to do, little disclaimer, this is the LeasePlan story. As you've probably read in the papers, we're now taken over by LD but I cannot disclose anything about that. So basically the aim is to become the first digital end-to-end car as a service. So the way we tried to solve it first didn't really work out. We had a wall-to-wall monolith kind of solution and we ran against a lot of struggles. So we came to the next generation digital architecture, which basically we thought we had global processes and harmonized services and if we figured that out and we make a blueprint for the whole world, all the companies in the world, then we could have a much easier way to roll them out and maintain 'em, get the TCO down. And also from a project point of view, and that's also where Constellation runs it really closely, is we need to roll out fast. If you have a project from half a year or three quarters of a year and you wanna do that 30 times, well you do your math, the time has passed, you're too late. So we go to next slide. This is our NGDA. I'll go a little bit more detail in the next session, but in brief we have customer facing, core business, supporting and at the back data it's more like an organization of functions within the company. And where you see Pega, that's where we chose Pega to be a part of that domain. So all the boxes are domains. But it's not just Pega, so keep in mind that is often there's an interaction with our Salesforce CRM system or SAP for finance and 43 other applications in that total landscape. So what we did, and again, quarter past three I'll tell a little bit more detail about the story. But what we did is we first created the Journeys and what we then realized really quickly is with the UI kit way of working, if you needed to, all your channels and all your front ends, including internal, you need to either create a new application for your sales agent, which was in a different world than they were used to, which is Salesforce. So when we first started we used the DX API Version 1 and that enabled a sales agent to stay in his own world, Salesforce but on the background it was powered by Pega. And that was the first step where we started looking at, okay, we want to take this to the next level. And then we had talks with Marco and with Pega wider and the second account we do in a different way. And that's where Cosmos came, Theme Cosmos, Cosmos React and later on Journey turned into Constellation. In the background, you see also the system of record is not Pega, nine out of 10, there are some exceptions. But basically we use CRM for customer information, SAP for finance and then yeah, a lot of .net and AVA databases for storing other kinds of data. So I'll hand over to Marco.

- Yeah.

- And then we'll see if we can get some interaction where I wanna try to... Every time when we touch on a subject, try to tell the story from LeasePlan on why we want to do this. Because I think it's always interesting from a client point of view, Pega client, to understand why does it benefit, why are we doing this? 'Cause that's I think for me, every time the core reason we want to be able to move fast.

- Yeah. All the requirements basically coming in. And I started one half year ago I think, and I came in basically I saw some projects were already running. At the end we were running 12 project at the same time. We only had like a year. We already set up the modular approach, which basically is now also available. We componentize the things that we did because the challenge we had and the reuse we need to get in a year 12 projects end-to-end leasing done. So we worked on that part but was not really exciting, right? It's already easy. So we said let's take Constellation. I saw Sam Alexander presenting that at one of of our sessions and I was really interested like, "Hey that's great." Because that way we don't build something that we need to change in a couple of years. We have something that will be going on and on for next couple of years because we are on the latest and greatest. So I had a call with Sam and said like I explained our modular approach, the way we set it up, how we did reuse. And he got excited about it and he said like, "Okay, let's go for it with Constellation." So that was step one because yeah, then I knocked on the Lex's door like, "Hey we have something that's new, "we are the first one going to use that "in that kind of scale." So you must be excited, right?

- Absolutely. I love new stuff. Yeah. And I also don't believe in trying, I believe in doing things. So I think that's also where we join forces and we also compliment each other 'cause he's a true believer and he goes for it. And I also believe in if you choose a direction, you need to stick with the plan and go for it.

- So yeah.

- [Marco] Yeah.

- Yeah. So basically what we did, we say, "Okay, let's go for Constellation." And the funny thing is because yeah, it was also new for us. So first we need to figure out what is it. And I got some questions also sometimes like people were like, "I wanna do DX API." So let's do DX API. And I always answer like, "Constellation, that's great because whatever you do, "it's DX API." You cannot do anything else than DX API. What you can see in this drawing at the fourth layer, basically from the bottom bit, it's running on the DX API. If it's your Pega Native or even if it's the SDK or it's your embed, everything's running on the Constellation DX API. Which makes a lot easier because what happened is basically before we started with Constellation, we said, "Okay, we're going to use DX API client facing." And we saw there that it took six weeks and maybe we had one screen done and then we calculated how many screens and we had a year. So you can do the math, that's not really going to work. So with Constellation, we did a POC and we did a small hackathon together with product development and within a couple of hours we could show the whole process from the SDK, already. So that was a big change. So six weeks basically for one screen and you see the whole flow in a couple of hours. It was a change. And I think it gives a little bit of confidence for you also when you saw that.

- Yeah, absolutely. And that's when we all started thinking, "Okay, this is really something we need to continue doing "and also let's see where the boundaries are." And I think we started in the Salesforce lightning component and I think maybe we'll touch on that a little bit later.

- Yeah. Yeah. Because that was the next thing like okay, we work on it the SDK we developed together with Pega, the newer versions we learned a lot about how to set it up and how to make it easier for us to use and to maintain with newer versions. And we like new stuff. So normally we are an 883, which been released a week ago. We are running 883 now. So we always keep updating because we want to be on the latest and we want to use the latest technology. I get a lot of questions from clients wanting that and then they say, "I'm in 86." So if you wanna be running the latest technology, you really excited about it, you also need to make sure your upgrade process in place, otherwise you cannot come along with the latest. We were designing later the remarketing process where we sell the car at the end. And so we made something, we had a screen where you see the damages on your car when you give it back to LeasePlan. And on that moment of time we said like, "Okay, once we did that." And we say, what do you need to pay for? What's basically fair? What's wear and what's the tear what they call it? They said like, "Okay, now we make the need to make "that design of this screen "so we can also design it in Salesforce." Like, "What? We going to do it again in Salesforce?" "Yeah, we're going to build it also in Salesforce "so that basically in customer service from Salesforce "or in the sales portal that these agents can do it." Like, but that's double work, right? So everything that I do they need to do doesn't make a lot of sense. So basically what we said then is why don't we use our Pega Lightning connector for Salesforce? So that's the third one from the left. So we use that, which is basically a set component library that's lightning from Salesforce and it's basically going also through the Constellation DX API. And we are showing it now to the sales users, to the customer service users. If we change something in our screens, in our flows, it'll automatically also be in Salesforce. So we are not depending on that anymore. I think that saves also already a lot of time, right?

- Yeah. And also don't forget that if you have a user community and you need to train them, it's now you can train them in their native environment. They know Salesforce so they know how to navigate through it and they can stay in that safe environment and you don't need to spend a lot of time and money in training them into a new tool like Pega or a React frontend. 'Cause that's the alternative often in sale and LeasePlan is that we have a React frontend stack. And I think that lightning component really also was the first step where we realized like this is gonna change it. 'Cause this is gonna enable us to have one process and we can offer it to any portal. Or actually you should say different personas. And that's, I think where you also see the other options really quickly deliver value.

- Yeah. And that's the central out thinking. Your designs need to be of course for your real end user. It's not the customer service representative, that's your end user it's a client and they talk with them or they send an email to them, but your client is the actual actor and that's what you design it for. And in that way we can open all the channels if we want. And so then the next thing came is that the SDK we're developing it. And so we had it up and running, but the styling was applied. We had to add some custom components, the DX components to it for the things that were missing where we were running then at 86, 87. So then we had another thing because yeah, we really like changes. So they came with business as usual, so not the NGDA program. And they said in the Nordic, so in Norway, Sweden we want to apply a small part basically of the sales process and we want to set up a new project and build something new. And we said like we have that process, it's been dynamically built for all the countries, so why would we build that again? And I think you had quite a struggle, but that's good if you have a CE manager that gets it and that will do the fight for you on a political level. So you had a quite fight there. Right?

- [Lex] That's interesting. I think the key question that came to me is like, I wanna set up a new product, a new product on Earth. I want three developers, I need an LSA and LBA and then we're gonna have, this is the use case. I was like, "What's the use case?" And then they told the story about the same process we already have. I was like, "Okay, but we just need to turn it on guys. "It's a matter of it, I think a couple of weeks "and you can do it." And there were some tweaks we need to still do in SDK, it's still not completely there, but we used the web-embed to bypass to get time to market and you can really see that this architecture works. It enables you to really first bring it to the market. And we have two countries already live and it was like, yeah, hardly any effort.

- Yeah. But Sweden was in I think two weeks with one SA. And before we had a whole scrum team, right, of people half a year for a country and then you go back to two weeks with one SA and Norway took a little bit longer. Why? Because they were the first one and was a different channel. So you need to add some functionality to it. But what you see is that we use the second one from the left, the web-embed for that because the SDK was not yet done. And the web-embed, I also do it in trainings. It's like 10 minutes or you have web-embed up and running, it's performing, it's secure. So you can use web-embed for your first go live and then in the meantime work on your SDK if you really need it. If you need to go for your own a design system. But if you don't need a separate design system, you can go just for styling. You can match pretty closely. I know German Bank is using web-embed. They said like it's 99% the same, so let's use that. It's still possible, but it gives you the flexibility. It doesn't change anything in what you build as a team. But the SSA, the LBA is what they're building. It's just showing it in a different way.

- And I think to add to that also, it's funny you said SA and it's actually a BA job and we're seeing also that a lot of the tendency and also in the Peg community, we're tending to put SA's and LSA's to do these kind of rollouts. But it's not an LSA job anymore, it's a BA, it's just configuration. You just have to create your new application on top layer and then configure what you wanna use from your application, which is already existing. And if you need to add something organization wise, I wanna push that back to the product team who's actually building the core process, the global process. And then your implementation team is just configuring and they can run and they just need to take care of the change. 'Cause it's not just a build program, it's also you need to go to the country, there's a different process, they need to get adapted and need to learn how to work with the new system. So focus on that and focus on configuration and turn it on.

- Yeah. And that saves you a lot of time. So what we saw is that we used from the left, basically all four of them. Then you have a website with your own development what we did in the V1 version, I wouldn't know why you would use that. So we skipped that. So we said we are already using enough of the platform. But the only thing left that we did use was the, and we are basically building it now is the APIs. Because the difference with the DX API, what you see in the slide is the view definition that you want to use, right? All the information about your mandatory properties or optional properties, visibility of your properties are basically coming along in the DX API. But if we have brokers that basically say like I configured a car and now I want to know four lease companies what the price is, then basically we are not control of the UI. So they have their own UI and they just wanna know what the price will be. Which basically means that we also going to use the API channel and then we have to complete stack based care and we can cover everything on Constellation with the same application, which saves out a lot of time to develop it. So that's the global overview. Then a little bit more in detail because the SDK is quite new, right? It's a new concept that we have with Constellation and also we were struggling a little bit in the beginning like to find out what is it, how can we use it, how can we configure it, where is separation of concerns, what does Pega deliver, what do we do with it? So in this slide, basically we're showing the layers there where we get the Pega Constellation, SDK, there's also a sample application in there that you can use, which basically means that in a very short period of time, you can already see the result in the material wise styling, if you do it with the React SDK and it's already working and then you can see, okay, so that's up and running and you can connect your own application. Then on top of that you're going to build your own SDK package. And the way I see it, basically it's more you need to translate the UI. So you get templates for the different components that you have and in these templates you translate it to your own design system. And by doing that basically you will get your design system result. And the advantage of that is once you have that packaged and we do that, what you see also next to it, the COE team will do that. You don't wanna let that be done by all the different projects because you wanna do it once for your company, for your design system, you deploy it basically you create that package and all the websites that you have, they can just take that package and the only thing they need to do is yeah, take care of course your authorization there and connect basically to the right Pega application and say what you want to do with it. And in that way you are really fast. Once you got your styling there, you have your styling set up, it's very easy to apply them and connect to the right applications from your application stack. Then an important thing that we found out in the SDK. So the Pega Constellation SDK has two modes. Which one is the embedded mode and the other one is the portal mode, which is a little bit sometimes confusing because if you say it in embedded, you think like the web-embed, but that's something different. So the embedded mode basically is for if you create a case, right? You're coming into a page, you create a case and you're done. It's fair for simple processes and no optional task or parallel processing. For situations like that, you're going to use the embedded mode because we didn't know everything around the SDK when we started of course documentation was after it. We started with the embedded mode, but we knew basically afterwards that we have a more rich user interface because we work with clients, they have their car, they know which car they want and we need to do all kind of things for them. Upload documents, financial information, which already quickly goes to parallel processing. So you have multiple assignments at the same time. You want to give them context data of the documents you uploaded. So we switched basically to the right side to the portal mode. And in the portal mode you have, yeah, more possibilities, you can do more things because the portal that is being created already by the SDK team has the notion of connection and you can basically see if you want the whole portal that you normally see in the preview, you can also see that through the SDK and that's basically where we ended up. So we are now using the portal mode in the SDK to take care of our more complex processes so that we can do parallel processing. We can show context and it's the best way to go forward for these kind of processes. But it's an important decision that you need to take. Once you say, "Okay, I'm going to use the SDK." Think about if it's simple or not and choose the right implementation. You can change it later, but it of course takes a little bit of time to migrate to the other version. Then the internal facing, we already said we have of course the normal back office work where we use the Pega Native on Constellation. We have Salesforce for sales agents and for customer service agents for the different roles that they have. So the sales agents basically can work normally from Salesforce and do their work and they see what they are used to. The internal portal here an example, I think everybody will recognize it. That's the advantage if you are using Pega, basically all the demos that you see, you can recognize almost the same styling makes it easier if you change between customers from us and their applications. This is an example where for instance, in the fair wear and tear, you see an image around the damage or what needs to be done, qualified and with all the options basically the content around the case. So that's basically what they're used to. But what they can also see and this is a different process, the sales process, what you see on the top is Salesforce and the lower part basically is Pega and there we also, what you saw before from the image on the fair wear and tear the same way basically that's also shown in Salesforce. So these agents, they don't need to change the different applications. They can stay on their application and run it from there. Then for external facing, what we did before the web-embed and we moved over to the Constellation SDK for the fact that we had some requirements, like normally if see a property that's mandatory, you see the asterisk signs on top of it and LeasePlan websites, you don't see anything there. If it's optional, it says optional. So that's a real design system change. You cannot do that with web-embed, so you need the SDK basically to get that done. So an example of the web-embed solution, this is from I think Norway. So in Norway they built their application, so the left top screen is their normal website, the React website in Norway. And on the right side you see the textbooks basically already recognized the Pega styles in there. That's what we did with web-embed. So that's the first version that went live. And there we are running web-embed inside a React portal from LeasePlan. And here a small example of the React SDK and what you see. But with the trained eye at least I can see the differences. But what you see there, you see the optional text already. That's something coming from the design system, but also small things like the date picker is at the left side, not on the right side. So basically that's things that happen in the SDK. That's where we mapped design systems and basically based upon that every pack of application that we built, we can show it up to the customer, put it into my LeasePlan portal and it'll work from there.

- I think also nice to jump in here is like if you look at probably all your companies have a UX department, which really love Pixel Perfect and the conversation you'll be getting is, "Yeah, but will it deliver what our styling "and our yeah color codes and everything you want." And I think I had quite some discussions with my UX department and I think we needed to take them along on the journey and show them that the SDK translation is possible. You just need to also make a business case for it every time you need to make that choice. Like the day picker, is it really bad from Pega? Is it really terrible or could you live with it? 'Cause I think it's a trade off. It's your time to market verses investing like two months to fix it or to make an adaption to it, sometimes it's just not worth it. UX guys can go crazy in this area and make it look really beautiful, but what's the true value? And we did a lot of things for them and I think the SDK has come really mature now. So I also advise really try to stick with what's out of the box. 'Cause every time you customize something, you're gonna hit your face when you do an upgrade.

- Hmm. And what I think is important is that what we saw is that it's not just a UI chains, Constellation is not just a UI chains, it's a prescriptive way of working, right? It reads your models and you get the UI and which means that you need to design your data model, you need to design your case type. Luckily we don't have action sets anymore where you can basically fix everything in the UI layer, which is really nice if you want to choose another channel, right? So that's gone. But what you see, this works a lot easier. But luckily we had a very good team and I see a lot of our team here. So we have Laura there if you can stand up with Josh. I see also Rush here you can go. Yes. And there we have Ravi and Krishna, you can also stand of course. Yep. So, and we don't have Finitc Kichuli here, but basically he was also one of our key members. So these guys basically went through the pain, they learned again basically Pega. And I'm really thankful for all the hard work that you did that we made this possible within time and it's running now, so we're really happy with it. So guys, thank you very much. Some applause for you. So we still have a little bit of time left because I think there could be maybe a few questions.

- And we've got microphones on either side, so you can go ahead and step up to the microphone if you've got a question just queue up behind them. One other thing just to kind of put out there, this past year our go to market team launched a controlled adoption launch program so that we could really help shepherd clients that were trying out Constellation to get the great experience that LeasePlan had. So I'm leading up that initiative with a couple other members from our team and if you are interested in putting in place a Constellation application, I beseech you to reach out to your account team, any member on the account team will do, and then they know how to get in contact with me and we'll put together a plan to help you evaluate your use case, help you think through, risks or opportunities in adopting and work with our consulting team or a partner to ensure that you've got the right resources on your team in order to bring this type of solution to life. So again, we're really excited by the stuff that they've done here and we wanna see all of you replicate that within your clients or within your companies rather. So thank you again.

- Maybe if there's no questions, I see some-

- I see one.

- Yeah.

- We will do it like that. Otherwise we don't see you.

- Yeah, we can't really see anything.

- [Audience Member] Oh, can you hear me?

- Yes, I can hear you. Yeah.

- I think mostly it's a question to Pega, for the Constellation, I think data model and data structure is very fundamental piece to create a Constellation app. It's very, I think for the new applications it's going to really, it's going to be a great solution, question is like what is the plan for the existing applications, which really doesn't have a proper data model and data structure practices or in place. And second question is, I mean is there a migration strategy for those apps? And the second question is, is there a end of life support for the UI kit? You know, like Theme Cosmos?

- Yeah. So UI Kit and Theme Cosmos aren't going anywhere. They continue to be a core part of our product strategy and will continue to support them for as long as I know. I'm getting the head nod from Sean. As far as, reaching across from your traditional architecture, the data model, and everything else that you have in place, that's a question that a lot of clients have been asking us. And I think, a year ago, a year and a half ago, we wouldn't have had a crisp answer. But in the last really 12 months, our team has put together a strategy to enable traditional and constellation architectures to coexist with Infinity 23. We'll be releasing new, feature to enable traditional UI cases, traditional architecture, I'm stumbling on words, water, traditional cases to serve up in a Constellation portal and vice versa and to kind of hybridize the capabilities. So you will see more of that coming out with the Infinity 23 launch and more material published in Academy and on our documentation pages. We have had some clients who have gone forward and created some design patterns which have enabled them to take existing traditional back office applications and extend them to the web self-service or web-embed with Constellation. And essentially what they did was they created a simple abstraction layer. So they took their stateful data model and their workflows that they had in traditional architecture and just put in place a modular stateless model on top of it, which then fed to the Constellation UX. So it worked very successfully for them and it's one of the design patterns that we intend to, get out there to make sure that people know how to leverage it. But there are lots of little things like this that I think are going to enable you to start taking advantage of Constellation without having to think about taking everything you've got and doing a big shift over. So we do not want you to have to throw away discard your investments and what's working today, but we do wanna provide a path for you to start taking advantage of this great new architecture because we really do think it'll be a game changer.

- Yeah. What we see is that the modular approach basically is really going to help you also in that path. What just already explained by Paul and what we would least not see now is what we do is that we like this the short hackathon kind of styles to do things like do a demo or do a POC for something we already decided we have a credit risk application was running for longer time. And that we take our specialists basically put them in a room for a couple of days and see what happens if we try to migrate it and where do we get in a couple of days to see where is the pain. What is it in UI is the data model is the case type, so where do we need to spend our time? So that's an approach we are going to take, right to really do it.

- Also add to that, I think if you recognize your own projects and you see if the total span of a project, often like 60% of the time people are thinking, "What do I want?" And we already know what we want, 'cause the existing life, it's built in the last two years. So if you have a team who knows what they want and you design it with Constellation and also App Studio, it's really fast and I'm thinking we can rebuild this whole thing in a week because we know what we want we just need to design it in a day or two and then build it, configure it.

- Great. Thank you.

- [Audience Member] Thank you so much.

- If you've got a question, do you mind just going up to the mic?

- [Audience Member] Thanks for the presentation. So you also talked about BA's developing views and configuring within Constellation. So did that also change what you expect from a BA or like capability skills? Do you see a shift in what you guys expect from a business analyst?

- Yeah, but what we say is that if you talk about low-code, no-code, right? And then we start a project and we send an LSA out, that's a strange combination, right? Low-code, no-code that we send a technical person to start it up. So what we see is that the LBA is more in the lead of the case type and you spend more time in the business domain and you fix a business problem in your business domain. And we see that also your case types get less complex because you fix it on the right level. So what we also is that our BA's and LBAs basically they're the ones working in App Studio and we enable them with the essays with building the blocks in the modules, we enable them more and more. So basically our modules are getting more and more filled with features that are BA friendly and the BA's can use them to quickly build new processes. So the role changes, it's basically a Pega BA is working also in Pega and not in work because then you would be like a Microsoft BA. So that's basically where we are moving to.

- I will say this, there's a great video out there on YouTube that these guys put together called App Studio. Is this the Tipping Point?

- Tipping point.

- And it talks about the, what we've done with App Studio, what we've done with the role of business architects and fusion teams and they've referenced a modular approach to building applications. They talk about that. In the last session that I was in with Rabobank, we talked about this modular approach which really dovetails nicely with emergence of, more powerful applications being built in App Studio but still realizing that you need some things to be built in Dev Studio because it's just, you need that in order to get through some of the more complex requirements. So definitely the role is gonna be changing. You are gonna be seeing materials coming out on Academy that dive more deeply into the role of a business architect and configuring with Constellation as well as we're planning a webinar for the BA community where we'll be going through some details on what the role of the BA is gonna look like in the future.

- [Audience Member] Thanks.

- Yep. Yep. And the CLSA webinar, right? There was a- Yep. It's also there.

- A CLSA meet up where we basically talked about, I think two hours almost about the topic and there's the recording and the slides are there. So if you go research for it, basically the Pega CLSA webinar LeasePlan you will find the link basically and you can see the recording, which gives you more around also the modular approach and the whole story that we did.

- Feel free if you didn't write down any of those things, my email is [email protected] and send me an email on it and I will shoot you the links to the video and the training and all the things we're talking about.

- Yep.

- [Audience Member] Yeah, yeah. I hope that those videos could have actually answered my questions. You know, I can voice them, but I will anyway, ask my question. So like how the journey has been in adoption for Constellation for LeasePlan, what were the challenges you faced? You know, could you please tell us something? We haven't talked about the bad stuff yet, right?

- Yeah, I think it's-

- Well there was no bad stuff.

- [Audience Member] Okay.

- [Audience Member] Yeah, I mean like bringing the developers, I don't know if like developers they need to learn React or something like that.

- Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things, just talking out loud, I know that like building the custom components that you needed for your needs, like that wasn't something that was widely understood or known. And it was a little bit of a discovery process between our product team and the LeasePlan team to understand like what was the right way to approach building these. Technically we understood how to create them but we needed to create some best practices around when and where to leverage them. So I think that was probably one of the big learnings and it took some time to figure that out but.

- Yeah, I would like to add to that. I think if you ask Pega, "Should you step over the Constellation?" I think the policy now is, no, if you have something existing stay there only if you start something new. My personal experience is do it today, do it tomorrow when you come back to the office, start with App Studio, start with Constellation, do a POC, set up some team that really starts working on it. 'Cause you're gonna fall, you're gonna have to learn and you're gonna have to discover all the corners of App Studio, all the corners of Constellation, what it actually does, and show how it works. And then with that you can also show your business and see what are they struggling with. So if you ask the question, what's the big challenge? I think it's adoption is more about mindset change. We're used to section base, we're used to working in old way where it's very technical driven projects and we need to move towards business driven projects and LBAs designing together and showing it on the screen, doing it. And yeah, I try to stick really close to that. And the projects that stick with it are proving to go much faster.

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