I presented earlier today so I haven’t been doing any blogging, but I didn’t want to miss the repeat of the product strategy session with Roy Brackett, Mike Lovell and John Vaughn.
They’re hitting all the industry hot buzzwords – smart process applications, intelligent business operations, case management – but to be fair, they’re actually doing a lot of it. Although they’re just starting to bring in the dynamic and collaborative capabilities in recent versions, and their customers tend to drag their feet moving to new capabilities, AWD has long been a platform on which you build and deliver integrated business applications.
Their new(ish) case management, although based on the shared process and task engine as their structured processes, is based on research on how knowledge workers work, and they seem to be placing a lot of focus on evidence-based research into what they should be building, and Agile and SCRUM methods for building it.
A minor release (10.7.1) is due soon, and they have included some features that people in the audience were pretty excited about: variable timers (as opposed to having to define the timer duration at design time; multi-recipient outbound communications; AWD widgets, such as worklist and search, that can be deployed within other applications.
The next major release, 10.8, has a number of new features:
- Processing work space updates, including worklist grid view that can be personalized by the end user, and adding attachments directly from the desktop
- Communications content migration
- Creating a case from capture
- Tracking presentation flow time within monitoring
- Technical server improvements around session management, batch processing and clustering
In 2015, they are focusing on a number of themes:
- Dynamic processes for transactions, where process fragments may be assembled at runtime based on the specific conditions for that process instance
- Milestones and timeline management for cases, allowing predefined process fragments to be easily triggered from case milestones
- A new responsive user interface design tool that better accommodates what customers are actually doing with mobile apps – it sounds like they originally misunderstood how their customers would actually use presentation flows and mobile apps
- Improvement to multi-channel servicing
- Predictive analytics and services
- Architectural refactoring, including splitting the process and content management capabilities so that they are still tightly integrated, but both are not required – 70% of their deals now do not include imaging, which is pretty amazing considering that AWD started as an imaging and workflow product
Some ambitious targets, and certainly not all to be delivered in 2015, but it gives an idea of how they’re moving forward.