Dec 3 2013

Customer Service via Social Media

A large majority of organizations are planning to use social media for customer service/support. Companies like Freshdesk, Salesforce.com, and HootSuite provide tools to help social enterprises manage tons of customer service queries.

It was really very interesting to see KLM Airlines leveraging social media (Twitter) as one of the channels for providing Customer Service.

Going with the latest trend where people walk with their heads down, eyes glued and fingers moving frequently on their mobile phones/pads – the social media savvy generation, KLM has taken this step to help their customers.

The simple question that arises is “How is it helpful ?”

Firstly, you dont have to call the customer care number multiple times, keying in the options 1-2-3 for IVRS and keep holding the phone next to your ears with an angry/expression on your face.
With the new update status flashing on the twitter screen image(regarding the wait response time), you can get a response for the army of customer executives lined-up for responding to your feeds
Based on using the twitter channel – the customers can be rewarded with some goodies (in one of the instances KLM rewarded the customer with a movie ticket for using the social channel)
It improves the social visibility, transparency and dominance based on the customer feedback and experience
it also reduces the infra related costs incurred in maintaining IVRS and other systems along with the training for executives (agreed to the fact we cannot totally shutdown the customer service setup via IVRS as all users may not be comfortable with Social Media )

Being a techie ‘am interested in the technicalities as to how it is implemented @KLM ?

Does Twitter provide a medium for every company to integrate their customer support systems ? The answer is “NOT YET”
Basically, what KLM has done is, it keeps refreshing the twitter cover photo/image every 5 minutes. The data for the wait response time is picked up from the datastore and displayed as a new image. In simple words, KLM has automated and is updating profile cover photo every 5 minutes.

Are there any other way where we can leverage social media to trigger a Business Process or vice-versa. Yes, many other organizations have taken similar steps in this regard. You can refer to some of these scenarios :

SocialBPM was talked about topic on the internet few months back, and good to see companies and organizations making an effort to unleash the benefits of using Social Media in serving their customers

Reference Link - venturebeat.com

Image Source - Thanks

Happy Learning!! & Happy tweeting!!

Nov 19 2013

PDC-2013 – Day-2 Summary (Data Mgmt/Int Track)

The Day-2 of the PDC-2013 was full of breakout sessions and were split into 4 different tracks:

Optimizing System Operations
Data Management / Integration
Business Visionary
User Experience

The attendees were allowed to choose any one track and stick to it for the entire day. There were restrictions in swapping or attending sessions from multiple tracks. From a personal front, I did not like this idea as it was more forced to attend all the sessions pertaining to one track. Attendees should have been given session selection, along with the tracks.

The deep-dive sessions were taken by a group of enthusiast developers and specialists from the data management and integration group of Pegasystems. The speakers were the people who coded the features we see in Pega7. I opted for the “Data Management / Integration”

As a part of these sessions, I felt like a school and college going student taking running notes, through-out the session.

Will be sharing the notes that I took as a part of these sessions :

Notes from the Data Management / Integration Track :

What are the challenges we face with respect to data management :

huge scale
reusability
procedural load
tight coupling

The Data Management initiative for the Pega7 development had the following Vision items :

Reusability
On-Demand Access
Usage and source decoupled
Caching & Performance
Improved Tooling

Changes and new features from a Reusability front :

parametarized data pages
multiple data sources

Changes and new features from a On-demand access front :

autopopulate property
direct data-page access

Changes and new features from a usage and source decoupling front :

data source virtualization
data source simulation

Changes and new features from a caching and performance front :

asynchronous loading of data pages (on-demand or procedural)
enhanced caching mechanism
new addition of data page alerts
refresh strategies (time-based, conditional or reload)

(Pega shared that Pega 7 is 5000% faster response than previous versions. And on a personal front am very curious and eager to know, what gave a nitro booster performance to the product)

Changes and new features from an improved tooling front :

wizards for making life easy with the click of buttons and configurations
tools to identify and notify threshold limits
tools for pruning based on least recent usage items
integration tools

One of the concepts which I liked was:

Data Source Virtualization :

For this features any new data source can be added, for eg: data exposed by BestBuy, Google or my custom database.

Once the new data source is added, a data transform can be placed to absorb or use a bunch of properties/parameters exposed by the services (eg:BestBuy/Google)
Based on the transformation, necessary application properties can be mapped (based on naming conventions)
This actually makes the Application independent of the Data Source – having a loose coupling
It provides a flexibility to add a Data Source of any class at any point in time – which was not the case earlier
The Data Pages can be defined as D_Location, D_Weather, D_ProductList or D_Offers

PN: Collected the notes for the Executive Panel from a fellow attendee

The last session was the Pega Executive Panel,a Q&A session. Key highlights:

No lightweight version planned, as it sees a lot of opportunities in marketplace to resolve complex business challenges
Pega wants to move to a partner led delivery model, with Pega in a advisory role and focusing more on license

Please do share your thoughts and inputs on the session – if you attended and i missed out to mention it in my blog

Learning Avenues :

Pega7 - an overview
Pega7 – Webinar Series
Pega7 – Help
What’s new in Pega7
Pega7 – Multitenancy Administration Guide
Pega7 – Platform Support Guide
Pega7 – Deployment Guides
Pega7 – Designer Studio
Twitter Handle – #pegadevcon #pega7

If you are looking for Pega7 Personal Edition and eagerly waiting for it like me - have a hawk eye on this link

Happy Reading!!

Nov 14 2013

PDC-2013 – Day-1 Summary

Pegasystems the pioneer and the leader in the BPM & CRM arena, had its first ever Developers Conference in Hyderabad, India from October 27-28 2013. The venue was at Novotel Convention Center.

Punch line for the event “THE POWER TO SIMPLIFY”

The Day-1, started at 10:30am with everyone queueing up at the registration counter to collect their goodies and bags. With many desks and Pega folks assisting, the registration process was very fast and smooth.

Suman Reddy(MD Pegasystems India), kickstarted the event with a Welcome note “Welcome to the land of PRPC – Hyderabad!!”. The audiance which included techies, managers, practice heads, architects and business analysts from different vendor/partner companies responded with full enthu!!

The Day-1 was lined up with all the Keynote Sessions.

The Grandmaster Alan Trefler (CEO & Chairman Pegasystems) - started with the keynote session, talking a brief about the history and the transformation the enterprise and the product went through for a model driven development. Also shared some interesting thoughts and stories when the company(Pegasystems) itself completed 30+ years of its existance and rolling everyday with new features n innovation. Kudos to the company!!.

The Sessions, followed up with Mike Pyle joining Alan and talking about the Future of Technology.

There was a slide presented with the list of all Pega customers, seemed everyday the font size of the customer logos reduces in size to accomodate all the customer list in one ppt slide.

Kerim Akgonul, the main force behind the Pega development spoke in length about capabilities in new Pega 7 around Security, Data Management, User experience, Case Management and many more. Very neatly, he summarized the features that actually drive an enterprise solution (which are the tenets of Pega7) :

Think like the business does
World class ux
Simplify n accelerate
Data Mgmt

The demonstrations that were done along with the presentation were very live be it on an iPad or a Mobile device. No pre recorded demos – which was just awesome.

Image source hybiz.tv

Rachna Bahadur (MD JP Morgan Chase) presented a view point and thoughts from an end user and customer perspective. And how, they leveraged the product in most of their processes to reduce the time to a greater extent than it used to be earlier. Liked the perspective she gave regarding the CoE every organizations has, and how they need to be organized and focussed.

The drivers behind a CoE are :

focus on cust experience
code reuse
ways to improve bpm maturity
work completion in silos not at enerprise level

The last keynote session was presented by Dr. Rob Walker. He presented some really nice story line that push organizations to follow the analyical way of approaching a solution.

Somes notes :

Average, assumptions and guess cannot be used as a key to differentiate the customer’s behavior…it has to be justified.
Predictive Analytics is the way to go – Define Design Develop and Decide.
Predictive Analytics is the future of business. You dont have to speak, let your data do all the talking
Data Prediction Decision Process – (DP) square – Building blocks for differentiator engagement.

More details and recordings of the keynotes

The Day-1 sessions left us with some glimpse of great features, look and feel . the all new bricks(loading/progress image) and many more of Pega7. As a developer, the first thing that striked is…..”WoW”…..next… an eagerness like a child inside ever developer!!…”How is it actually built”

The Day closed with the Technology Pavilion where Pega showcased all its horizaontal and Vertical Industry solutions followed by a DJ Nite and dinner. It was a pleasure to see the Grandmaster dancing to the Bollywood numbers with the Rock band.

Picture courtesy Nikhil Desai (twitter)

From a personalperspective what I felt :

a forum to understand where the indusry is focusing and moving forward
should happen every year as an annual event to unite, collaborate, learn and hav fun
an event where people understand the language you speak
it was all about learning, networking and reuniting old pals, colleagues and friends
good to see and share thoughts how others feel about the product you work
add a face to the people you have in the linkedin network
bring out all the childish, crazy questions you always wanted to know about the product – its strong areas or loopholes
a platform to bring out the questions you felt –”naah the other BPM product has it”….or bring out the thought you always had in mind as a developer “crap…why the hell they dont have this feature….ooh man”
back to school or college kind of feeling – where you keep on taking running notes or follow the technical trend of “twitter” – micro blogging

Day -2 Deepdive storyline on the Data Management and Integration Session.

……to be continued!!

Please do share your thoughts and inputs on the session – if you attended and i missed out to mention it in my blog

Happy Reading!!

Nov 14 2013

Link

PDC – 2013 Pix!!

Pega Developers Conference – 2013. Photographs @ Event

It was all about Learning, Networking, Reunion and Fun!!

Nov 14 2013

PermGen Issue after installing Pega in Tomcat

have you been haunted by the “PermGen” Issue after installing Pega in Tomcat ?

It really haunted me for 2 days!!…

The PRPC Rules were perfectly istalled in the Pega Rules DB(Oracle)
The prweb.war was successfully imported to Tomcat
The service was started flawlessly
But after launching the Developer Portal(http://localhost:9090/prweb/PRservlet) and accessing a few flows and activities…the sytem just hung up and it freezed!!…Boom!!…I get a message “PermGen Error….Memory leak Issue “

Think of a situation, you have already built and configured workflows and activities – and just when you hit the save button…you get this scary message!!

The worse part was, I had to restart the Tomcat server every 15 minutes!!

Now having talked about the problem statement – how to come over it ??

I will just outline some of the steps that I followed and it really helped me to keep my system UP and running for almost more than a week. I did not see this issue getting resurfaced.

Happy Debugging n Error Fixing!!

Oct 29 2013

Image

Pega Developers Conference – 2013, Hyderabad

Link : http://www.pega.com/community/pega-developers-conference

W5H :

What ?
- Pega Developers Conference 2013
Where ?
- Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC)
When ?
- October 27th & 28th 2013
Who ?
- All Developmers, Architects, Managers, Consultants, Bausiness Analysts and many others from the Pega fraternity
- Senior Management and the Team of Pega
- Few customers, sharing the success stories based on the Pega implementation in their enterprise
Why ?
- Unleashing the beast behind the super powerful Pega 7.
- A gathering and event for the Pega fraternity
- There were 4 tracks defined for the Day 2 session, doing a complete Deep-dive of the functionalities and features
How ?
- It was just awesome
- The key objectives of the event which I personally feel were Learning, Networking, Collaborating and most importantly Reuniting old friends and pals
- It was an event, where everyone understood the language they speak
- It was truly a Developer’s Conference - Real hands on demo,process walkthrough n presentation. Just not about singing songs of the buzz words

Pega Developer Conference – 2013, Hyderabad
…Detailed Report….Coming Soon!!

Jul 17 2013

Puppet Labs acquires Cloudsmith to ease devops' automation burden

Reblogged from Gigaom:

Puppet Labs, a fan favorite configuration management tool among devops folks, has acquired Cloudsmith to make Puppet tools easier to use and deploy going forward. Devops refers to the movement to get software developers and IT operations people to work together, instead of at cross purposes, to deploy software updates fast and clean.

Cloudsmith, with roots in the Eclipse open-source world, has two tools that extend Puppet.

Architecture at a glance!!

Nice start to the weekend, exploring some of the finest Architectures in recent times :

All time Favourites Link

Happy Architecting!!

May 21 2013

Why is my Website Slow ?…Ahhh!!

We all have worked on multiple projects and have delivered multiple applications to Production, but one of the Common Issues that surfaces everytime irrespective of the technology used in the application is “The site is very slow”. This actually boils down to the latency and response time for loading the UI.

Even though some of the complex integrations, with external/legacy systems, workflows, business rules, database queries, customization of the screens and many more…have been incorporated in a project, the one single thing that can stump the customer or the end user is the page-load time.

Lets, forget about the project, even in our day-to-day life, we get irritated and pissed-off when the Banking Transaction or the Gateway Payment is slow – we just burst out. For any page we browse, if it takes, more than 4-5 seconds, we just move-on to some other link.

The best example to site here is : What is the link you enter in your browser to check if the network connectivity or wireless is ON. Have seen most of the people including myself hitting the url with – http://www.google.com. But Why??… The simple and straight forward answer is, it loads very very faster than other pages(agreed it can be debatable considering that the Google homepage just has a few lines texts)

So, the bottom line is, to please the end user and give him/her a better experience, its is very important to concentrate on the page-load time and the steps to improvize upon it.

My earlier blog post showcases an infographic (by GTMetrix.com) about “How much time is wasted in Loading Web Pages“. This is something that cannot be ruled out or kept aside.

ID-10041416

This brings us to an interesting question How??

Living in an era of high end technology and Open-Source Softwares, things may not have to be built from scratch. Here are a few tools and examples of the engineering tools that can be leveraged for identifying/debugging the loopholes and providing a lightening speed user experience.

1) YSlow :

YSlow is a tool that helps you to speed up your website.
It is an add-on for Firefox—or rather, an add-on to an add-on (Firebug).
This is developed by the Yahoo Exceptional Performance Team
It is built on 34 basic rules that affect a web page performance and slowness
The details of these rules can be browsed from the like - http://yslow.org/.
It Grades the web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset
It provides suggestions for improving the page’s performance
Summarizes the page’s components
Displays statistics about the page
FAQs on YSlow - http://yslow.org/faq/

Here are a few pointers, if breached may be the responsible for slowing down your webpage-loading :

CSS references should always be placed on top of a web page
The Java Scripts should be placed at the bottom of the page
Compressing the components with GZip
Expensive errors like HTTP 404 should be avoided as it degrades the end user exp.
Using a centralized content delivery network (CDN) for storing static images and documents for referencing in the web pages
..many more (from the Yahoo’s list of Rules)

At some point of time one curious question might arise, “my application has a performance score of 100% but still it’s very slow. Why?” Well then obviously it’s time for you to sit back and start optimizing your business logic and entire solution implementation. Remember “Yahoo’s problems aren’t necessarily your problem”.

Interesing Regerences :

Snapshot :

2) GTMetrix.com

Its is a free speed analysis tool for websites!
Logon to GTMetrix.com (signup for better tracking of results)
Enter the URL of the page/site you want to monitor and click submit
It gives a Report (PDF), with detailed information on the Page Speed and reason for slowness of the system
It is integrated with YSlow at the backend, and provides a Grading from the Page Speed perspective and YSlow perspective
With advanced options even the testing hub or location can be selected (if the application is globally accessed by customers)
Filmstrip capture can also be generated to showcase after how many seconds the page gets loaded, or what all portions of the page get loaded every second

Interesting Read :

Why is my page slow? (Detailed architecture and description for slowness of a web page)
GTMetrix faqs – nice read
How to Use GTMetrix Plugin to Improve WordPress Site Performance

Snapshots:

ps2

3) Google’s Page Speed Insights

The PageSpeed family of tools is designed to help you optimize the performance of your website.
PageSpeed Insights products will help you identify performance best practices that can be applied to your site, and PageSpeed optimization tools can help you automate the process.
Download plugin Page Speed Insights(by Google) from Chrome Web Store

Interesting Read:

Snapshots: