We have some exciting developments in the IBM Twitter strategic partnership that opens new avenues for us in the business operations space with Smarter Process. Our vision is to help our clients create more customer-centric business operations by reinventing how their businesses work. The new IBM Insights for Twitter service available on Bluemix provides a scalable way to bring external user insight to complement the operational data that our platform already manages. This opens up a number of opportunities as we apply Twitter data to digitally transform business operations.
Our BPM and ODM platform already manage our customers’ business and work directly on operations data – our customers can use this data today for business-led simulation to yield the best repeatable, day-to-day business decisions. We also provide detailed advanced process analytics with this operational data and we’re pushing the boundaries here using Watson Analytics, but that’s a topic to discuss another day. What is really exciting now is that we have a whole new purview into scalably acting on insight from user-generated data from outside the business through the new IBM Insights for Twitter service that’s available on Bluemix.
Yes, we had access to raw Twitter feeds before, but now the new service helps separate the wheat from the chaff to extract kernels of insight. If we can accumulate this insight and then automatically act when certain complex business conditions are met, we’ll have a sustainable way to turn this data into a competitive advantage. This is precisely what Decision Server Insights within ODM Advanced lets you do. It even goes a step further – it makes it easy to change the business conditions that trigger an action – after all, what worked yesterday, will not work tomorrow. The key here is to be able to scale up and bake-in the insight into the operational systems.
So what does all this really mean? What kinds of business operations problems can we now reinvent with this completely new digital transformation approach?
One of our clients, a large European bank, is now experimenting with harvesting insights from Twitter in addition to their existing customer information to accurately predict various life-events that their customers may be experiencing. Whether they are in the market for a new car, or about to be married or buy a new home, the bank can now estimate these life events with a high degree of certainty.
Our ODM Advanced capability becomes the brainbox that triangulates Twitter data with ongoing credit card transaction data and existing customer information to derive critical insight. Knowing what every customer is going through helps the bank tailor its offerings and personalizes the experience for each individual customer.
To broaden the scope a bit, here are a few more patterns and problems to think about:
Customer loyalty and promotion programs:
How can we directly convert existing customer loyalty to grow our customer base?
Customer satisfaction and support:
How can we proactively handle escalating customer situations within a call center environment?
Inventory and distribution management:
How can we account for localized conditions and sentiment as goods are restocked at distribution centers?
These are by no means exhaustive, but they show why the insight from Twitter (or anywhere else) must be embedded into the actual systems that run the business. This ensures the ability to scale up and impact into every, single repeatable operational decision that’s made within these critical processes. Now that’s making the most of your digital transformation.
