Business as Usual (BAU) to Business OPS

Introduction

The rapid evolution of technology and democratization necessitates a re-look at how we perceive the Business-as-Usual or steady-state of a Pega application today and how it is likely to evolve in the future. This POV aims to look at the direction of evolution of the product and assess how it may end up defining the future state of Business as usual. The effort is not to provide a prescription for the future of BAU but to see the evolving pattern and get ourselves ready for it.

What is the typical “BAU” for Pega Applications?

A typical Pega application goes through the stages of Build, Test, Deploy and Stabilize and reaches a stable state in production. In what can be perceived as a Business-as-Usual phase of an application, there are planned enhancements, some on-going bug fixes and some configuration changes (through delegated rules by the businesses)

Where is the product going?

The product as a whole is evolving through the years with more focus on the following:

• Ever-increasing focus on low code and configuration- Every release brings increased OOTB configuration.
• Business users are getting more involved in application configuration.
• Aimed at quicker time to market
• IT best suited for complicated technical changes only; Reduce IT involvement to get faster time to market.
• Boundaries of changes doable by the business to be defined by IT
• Evolved and nuanced overall release infrastructure to segregate Core technical changes from usual changes done by business to get faster time to market.

What the new Business-as-Usual will mean

Customers no longer view the period after the initial go-live as being as simple as keeping the implementation ticking. Business users now want to plan, build, test and optimize changes to their application in a controlled, forensic manner with best-in-class tools.

This evolution is typically called Business Operations Capability in Pega terminology.

For a complete Business Operations Capability, we need to consider key factors of successful Business Operations:

• Having a suitable environment in which to conduct these activities – Business Operations Environment
• Ensuring the environment has access to good quality production data – Data Migration
• Having a way of planning and making changes in a controlled manner – Operations Manager
• Ensuring you have the tools needed to analyse and optimize your changes – Simulations and testing
• A safe, controlled and audited way to push your changes to live mode- Deployment Manager

We are already at the tipping point

A template of the future BAU would look like it is already here with the release of Pega Customer Decision Hub

Here, since it is a CDH application, the segregation of rules related to complex technical changes and those related to less complex business-defined changes is easier to visualize. However, we need to understand that this template would gradually flow into the core Pega platform and other offerings. Applications would now have to be designed keeping in mind the kind of rules businesses can independently own well beyond the usual delegated decision rules and tables.

The recommended release infrastructure and its process is shown here.

Points to note:

• Business Operations environment enables end users to define and build code following a prescriptive case-based workflow process.
• Business Operations lets users test their changes along with sampled production data.
• Business Operations directly deploy to production, leading to Quicker release cycles.
• Business Changes later get merged with core technical changes in DEV.
• Boundaries of Business changes get defined by IT via application overlay and Revision management.

How do we prepare for this?

The mindset and understanding of developers and designers of Pega applications need to evolve to adapt to the changes and stay ahead of the evolutionary curve of the tool. While we do not have enough working experience with the new approach to help us define a set of best practices, and the boundaries of what rules businesses can own fully will keep evolving and changing with the nature of the application, we definitely need to be more aware of where things are going and be familiar with the tools and processes involved to be nimble in adapting to this new way of working.

To begin with, we can….

• Understand and be familiar with Business Operations and 1:1 Operations application
• Understand Revision manager and how it works
• Ask ourselves- What are the rules that the business can own in our application? Think beyond delegated decision tables and trees.
• Is our application designed to provide maximum flexibility to the business aligned for the new way of working?

By Anish Tripathi

Lead Architect- Pega Practice