Singularity Newsletter, July 2008

Welcome to the first edition of the Singularity Newsletter. We realize that a key element in our joint success is crisp communication. Throughout our relationship this newsletter will be just one way of achieving that goal. We will provide you with useful information including:

• Briefings on key topics in Business Process Management
• Customer success stories and industry analyst insights
• Industry news from each of our specialist sectors (Telco, Government and Capital Markets)
• Listings of where we'll be showcasing our solutions to the marketplace
• "Tech Tips" to successfully maximize your use of our products

We welcome your feedback and suggestions on the kind of information and news stories you’d most like to hear about.

To subscribe for future Singularity News items please sign up here.

We hope you enjoy!

The Singularity Newsletter Editorial Team

BPM Implementation Tips
Top Ten Tips for Business Process Management (BPM) Projects
by Michael White - Head of Marketing, Singularity

Today’s organizations compete through more efficient and better executed business processes. Business Process Management (BPM) is an approach and technology for implementing well-defined, well executed processes. Michael White provides his top tips on how to successfully introduce BPM to your organisation.

2. Obtain Senior Management Buy-in.
You want high-level sponsorship of the project at the outset to ensure you get the resources you need, to gain buy-in from staff and to overcome resistance to change. Your executive sponsor should have the authority and respect required to keep up project momentum. He or she should also be prepared to remain in a hands-on role throughout the first delivery – just showing up at project kick-off won’t be sufficient.

3. Get the team structure right.
Create a cross-functional, collaborative team to analyze the existing process and prototype a better approach. You will need subject matter experts - people knowledgeable about particular steps in the process as well as those who have an end-to-end view of the entire process. Have both business and IT staff on the team, but make sure that the business owners drive the project. If you’re using a BPM tool, get help from the vendor or your preferred system integrator for the first project, with a view to transferring their skills in-house over time.
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Singularity News

19 Jun 2008 - Singularity Hosts World-Wide Staff Conference
Singularity hosted a "Worldwide Singularity Day", on Saturday 14th June 2008, with over 100 employees travelling to the city from the company's offices in New York, Singapore, Hyderabad, London, Belfast and Derry. The event was organized to celebrate the continuing success and growth of the company world-wide and to confirm the values and behaviors Singularity staff believes will let them achieve the company's ambitious plans for the future.
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13 Jun 2008 - Singularity and O-bit Go Live on ISDN30
First UK Communication Provider to achieve milestone
O-bit Telecom and Singularity today announced that O-bit is the first communication provider in the UK to go live on ISDN 30 on the OpenReach EMP platform. OpenReach is the organization created in 2005 to sell wholesale line services to all communication providers in the UK. This achievement is of huge interest in the telecommunications sector, as many UK communication providers have delayed migrating to the OpenReach platform until ISDN30 services have been established. O-bit connected to OpenReach for ISDN 30 using Singularity's Wholesale Line Rental 3 solution in record time.
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30 Apr 2008 - Former BT Chief Scientist Joins Singularity
Dr Sinclair Stockman, former Chief Scientist and Chief Information Officer at BT, has joined Singularity as Chief Industry Analyst for the Telecommunications Division. Dr. Stockman has over 25 years experience in the telecommunications sector, working at the highest levels in the industry. Drawing on this expertise, Dr. Stockman will drive telecommunications product strategy for Singularity.
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16 Apr 2008 - Singularity signs major Telco partner deal with Actix
In potentially one of the biggest partnership deals in the company's 14 year history, Northern Irish software vendor Singularity has signed a technology partnership with Actix, the $150m telecommunications specialist. Actix, whose customers include Vodafone, France Telecom, Orange, Sprint and AT&T, is the largest provider of radio network performance engineering and status management solutions to mobile operators globally. Singularity's Business Process Management (BPM) technology will be used by Actix's customers to analyze network performance and schedule the deployment of network engineers.
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Featured Article

Spotlight on Singularity Process Platform (SPP) 3.6

The latest version of the Singularity Process Platform extends our lead in supporting knowledge-intensive processes and agile delivery, as well as providing enhancements for rapid prototyping, process modeling collaboration, compliance and security.

KNOWLEDGE WORKER SUPPORT
More of us work in knowledge intensive roles than ever before, carrying out skilled work that, while partly structured, has large elements of unpredictability, and where we are called upon to exercise discretion and judgment. Our staff acquires their knowledge through their experience of working day-to-day and through collaboration with more experienced colleagues, becoming thoroughly familiar with the tacit and explicit rules governing how particular tasks should be managed. Staff have to deal with issues that can be ambiguous and uncertain and that require judgment and creativity. Managing this knowledge so it stays within the organization and is passed quickly to new members of staff is a challenge. Singularity continues to lead the market with our support for these kinds of knowledge- intensive processes, and in release 3.6 we’ve added yet more features to fully support the way people work.

• Fine grained management of work allocation: We already support sophisticated routing of workflow so that work automatically goes to the most appropriate person at the right time based on the task, group membership, role, skill level, task priority, due date, budget and security level. We have added the ability for case managers and process supervisors to manually allocate and reallocate work to specific staff members over and above the existing automated routing. For example, a manager can manually allocate a particularly important piece of work to a specific member of staff, relying on the manager's own judgment and knowledge of the case to determine the most appropriate person to do the work. This ties in with our emphasis on automating what's appropriate, but allowing for human skill, discretion and judgment to have primacy in determining how a case or process should be executed.
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Comments & Suggestions

If you have any comments or suggestions for topics you would like to see covered in this quarterly newsletter please click here.

Upcoming Events

7-10 July, Houston - The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2008

Singularity will be attending the 2008 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), to be held at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

The Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) provides an online and in-person forum to learn more about business growth opportunities and product innovation from Microsoft executives. If you would like to meet with Singularity during this conference please contact Manus Savage, Partner Manager, by Email or +44 (0) 28 9029 2990.
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Customer Spotlight

Unicom Migrate to WLR3 faster with Singularity

Unicom operates in one of the most competitive telecommunications markets in the world. New entrants are constantly trying to increase their market share by competing on price or service innovation. Unicom felt it was essential that they use the introduction of WLR3 as an opportunity to get ahead of slower moving competitors by delivering better services more cost effectively to their customers. Click here to view the case study.
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Singularity Blog

Partner News

Helping you win business...

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Working with Microsoft

We have continued to build on our business relationship with Microsoft by adding the Business Process and Integration Solutions competency to the ISV competency. This reflects our close alignment with the SOA and BPM initiatives being undertaken by Microsoft, and allows us to share our view of the BPM market with the Microsoft team.

Working with the Singularity Microsoft PAM marketing team over the past few months, Singularity has authored a number of briefing sessions, aimed at communicating Singularity messages directly to our customers.  These have taken the form of targeting a specific niche, such as the WLR3 solution, and organizing a seminar to explain the business issue, and how Singularity can provide a process solution to address the point of pain. It's a great opportunity to find out more about how BPM can benefit your business, and to chat in a relaxed format with experts in the field. Attendance has been high, and feedback excellent. If you wish to be included in future sessions, please let us know by contacting our Partner Manager.

The Water Cooler

BPM – ‘Agile’, Agility and Agile Delivery
The words agile and agility crop-up more and more frequently in the business and technology press. Agile delivery techniques combined with BPM enable you to obtain working solutions faster, and these solutions are more closely aligned with business priorities. Through an iterative approach you get value delivered early and often. Singularity is a big believer in the power of combining agile techniques with the disciplines and technology of BPM. We’ve developed a specific methodology, called ASAP, that combines the best elements of agile techniques along with some BPM-specific elements, and to this we’ve added competitive ‘hot housing’ to drive out new and innovative approaches to business problems. At the recent Gartner BPM summit in London we gave a presentation on agility and BPM, in which we provided an introduction to the ‘Agile’ movement and its relevance to Business Process Management – to learn more, please click here.

Singularity continues to roll out more ‘Accelerators’, the pre-packaged BPM solutions we build on top of the Singularity Process Platform. Each Accelerator is targeted at a common business process problem and comes with pre-configured process models, detailed user interfaces, pre-defined MIS reports and pre-built integration to common 3rd party technologies such as document management and CRM systems. This month the BPM team wants to highlight the latest release of our Complaints Management accelerator which automates the capture, classification, routing and resolution of customer complaints. By automating these processes using our BPM platform, you can link your front-end systems to the back-end coordination required to quickly and successfully resolve problems raised by your customers. For more information on the Complaints Management accelerator, click here.

Capital Markets - New Client On-boarding Product Release
Singularity is building on its established leadership in Customer On-boarding in the wholesale financial services sector with the July launch of a new release of its SCOBA product (Singularity Customer On-boarding Accelerator). SCOBA is a pre-packaged solution that can be implemented quickly to bring new transparency, efficiency and speed to the task of initiating new customers as effective trading partners. And by adding structure, control and auditability to the on-boarding process, SCOBA reduces customer-related risk. Already implemented in leading global banking institutions, SCOBA is now available with greater off-the-shelf capabilities and shorter implementation timeframes.

Providing high levels of automation while supporting human-intervention when required, SCOBA is uniquely a combination of industry best practice and system flexibility. The product incorporates off-the-shelf features supporting all steps in the on-boarding process, such as handling fund and manager information, selecting products, markets and services, account opening, managing rates and fees, enabling automated trading systems, etc. Crucially the product provides a single view of customer data relevant to the on-boarding process and the business relationship that is being initiated. And, as importantly, the product is built specifically to allow future flexibility to be incorporated quickly, easily and cost-effectively.

To schedule a walkthrough of the new release of SCOBA, contact Richard Cobb at +44 (0) 20 7826 4470 or by email.

Government - Shared Services and the Efficiency Agenda
Having attended several Public Sector events lately I noticed a number of recurring themes – improving the level of service provided, ‘joining-up’ these services more effectively and, in the UK, meeting the Efficiency Agenda by reducing costs, writes Olivia Bushe.

Several keynote presenters spoke about the steps required to achieve these goals and one element that was continually highlighted was the need for government departments to both streamline and improve their processes. What struck me at all these events was the close correlation between the goals of the Efficiency Agenda and the potential of Business Process Management (BPM) technology as a means to directly improve and streamline government processes. The thought process around how we meet the Efficiency agenda and use technology to help us do so are leading more government agencies to investigate and adopt Business Process Management as a potential solution. BPM will specifically help you identify efficiencies and to implement and automate the changes required to achieve those efficiencies. Because of the increased interest, we delivered a short briefing on how government agencies can achieve efficiency through better processes at the recent FOSS event in London – click here to access the presentation.

For recent news of public sector customers that are working with Singularity please see below:

• Continued knowledge transfer at DARD (Department of Agriculture and Rural Development): Singularity Process Platform skills transfer to internal staff members following recent implementation of Singularity BPM platform. The usage of Singularity BPM will be rolled out across the enterprise going forward.
• Nuneaton and Bedworth selects Singularity: Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council have chosen Singularity BPM to help them automate a number of key business processes across the council. Following a rigorous and thorough evaluation process Nuneaton chose the Singularity Process Platform (SPP) to manage and control a number of key systems which they plan to roll out over time.

Telco - The Day of the WLR3
You are wakened by the sound of the Today program on BBC Radio 4, then the Pips, then John Humphrys tells you it’s 7a.m. and your heart sinks. You get ready to leap out of bed when suddenly you remember it’s Saturday, and you fall back onto the pillow, hit the off button on your radio alarm clock and roll over for another hour or two of well earned blissful sleep.

That feeling of relief and well-being will also be felt by the growing number of CEOs of “calls and lines resellers”, who have chosen Singularity as their WLR3 Integration partner on the day Openreach announce they are turning off the SPG. The rest will be sitting bolt upright, wide eyed and frantically thinking about what to do next!

For that day is coming. Having invested considerable sums of money in WLR3 and effort in separating BTRetail from the Access network, BTGroup won’t want the expense of keeping WLR2 up when WLR3 is fully operational. When that day dawns there will be a rush to get connected, and those at the front of the queue will reap the benefits.

The ever increasing number of Singularity WLR3 users are already seeing the benefits of moving over to WLR3, by improving throughput and decreasing the cost of failure. Getting it right first time is the key to reducing costs and satisfying your customer, and WLR3 will help you with that.

So, while you have the time, why don’t you find out what’s going on and chose your WLR3 partner now rather than jumping into bed with the wrong one at 11th hour?

For more information on Singularity WLR3, please click here.