Governance best practices

This video shows you how to implement Pega best practices for an operating model that works well with Pega Customer Decision Hub™ (CDH). We have developed these best practices based on deep product knowledge and years of delivery experience with clients around the globe. This amalgamation of successful strategies helps clients maximize their CDH implementation.

It is important to acknowledge that technology alone does not guarantee success in our engagement strategy. The key is a synergy between technology, people, and processes. Therefore, it is important to take the client on a holistic transformation journey that requires examination of governance in the organization, organizational structure, and the ability to cope with change, to be truly ready for business as usual with CDH.

In order to be successful in an engagement strategy fueled by CDH, we believe it is important to focus on three key areas:

• Effective governance – ensuring that priorities are unified across the organization in their approach to managing customer engagement in CDH.
• Efficient implementation – ensuring that we have skilled, streamlined teams supporting the implementation of CDH artifacts.
• Incredible Agility – ensuring that we have the right processes in place to accelerate time-to-market for customer communications.

Before we dive into these three topics, one of the most critical concepts to understand is how to categorize the type of work that people will be responsible for when working with CDH:

• Customer Decision Hub is designed to be easy to use by business people, but also powerful enough for all aspects of how it works to be configured.
• Having this flexibility means you need to carefully determine who does what.
• You need an approach that can handle high volumes of new offers, actions, or propositions and get them to market quickly. This work is represented in the upper-right corner of the diagram.
• The lower-right box shows the business-as-usual activities that IT provides in support of that work, which are typically focused on making new data available, or making small changes to improve the way that a solution works.
• On the left, you can see project activities, which are larger pieces of work that typically take place outside of the business-as-usual cadence, such as adding a new channel or a completely new business hierarchy.
• In this discussion, we will focus on being ready for the business-as-usual activities by thinking about how we govern change, our organizational structure, and change management processes.

Let's start with a focus on governance. Given a brief understanding of the types of changes that can occur from day to day in CDH, how should those changes be governed?

To deliver personalized, relevant customer experiences across channels, there can only be one brain, one centralized decisioning authority to power all engagements, and that is Customer Decision Hub.

So what does that mean for our operating model when we adopt CDH as our central marketing decisioning authority? The point is to ensure centralized governance of what is put into our model. Most organizations will have the basic structure of lines of business wanting to get messages out, and they will have a way of getting this done. Implementing CDH might just require some slight shifts to ensure that the customer is at the heart of these processes.

Traditionally, decisions about the management of customer communications are made at the line of business (LOB) or Channel level with little regard for a centralized view of the customer experience. To prevent those same siloed campaigns from being put into CDH, our most successful clients have implemented a centralized governance structure.

Given that demand will come from varying sources, we recommend establishing a centralized team to manage, approve, and prioritize requests to ensure that they align with the organization's overall customer engagement strategy, before they are implemented in CDH by the implementation and channel teams. An NBA governance board should also be established to manage the strategy and act as an empowering authority for the next best action (NBA) implementation team when issues require escalation.

The NBA Governance Board provides high-level governance of the Next-Best-Action customer strategy, which is translated into the tactics developed and managed by the implementation team. The purpose of the NBA Governance Board is to control the overall strategy that the business wants to take with the customer-centric, omni-channel approach to using next best actions.

The Board is responsible for the development and optimization of contact strategy, determining the roadmap for CDH expansion, reviewing performance, defining priorities, and resolving any potential conflicts in the organization. To achieve this, it is critical to have a governance team that spans traditional org structures and domains, consisting of stakeholders across:

• Lines of Business
• Brands
• Marketing Operations
• Analytics & Data Science
• Sales, Service & Marketing Channels
• Information Technology
• Risk & Regulatory Functions

The NBA governance board will meet regularly but on a less frequent basis than the other teams, maybe once a month, to review performance, define priorities and goals, propose strategic initiatives, resolve conflicting objectives, and balance the mix of competing business KPIs.

The NBA Execution Forum is responsible for developing and managing tactics from the overall NBA strategy set by the governance board. This forum sits in the middle and is responsible for taking in requests from client stakeholder teams, such as new Actions, updates to Actions, changes to Models, updates to strategies, and so on.

Once the Execution Forum receives requests, the group vets the change requests, typically meeting weekly to discuss and agree on several topics – for example, which requests should be accepted and added to the backlog, how items should be prioritized and assigned, and what type of change the request is. Once the requests are captured and approved, they are added to a backlog to be prioritized.

The NBA Execution Team then implements the backlog, as approved by the execution forum, according to the strategy set by the governance board. This ensures that execution is not siloed and the focus remains truly customer-centric.

You have reached the end of this video. What did it show you?

• The importance of a holistic transformation journey involving technology, people, and processes.
• The need to focus on three key areas for successful CDH engagement: effective governance, efficient implementation, and incredible agility.
• The critical concept of categorizing work types related to CDH.
• The role of centralized governance in managing customer communications.
• The responsibilities of the NBA Governance Board, Execution Forum, and Execution Team in ensuring a customer-centric approach.