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Activiti Update 2013: New Functionality And New Partners

I had a briefing on the latest version of Alfresco’s Activiti BPM a couple of months back, but decided to wait until the news about their new partners – BP3 and Edorasware – was released before I posted. This strong showing of enterprise support partners is crucial for them following the defection of camunda from the Activiti fold, since many large enterprises won’t deploy an open source product without some level of support from the open source vendor directly or via their partner channel.

Alfresco’s interest in Activiti is as a part of their open source enterprise content management suite: they don’t offer Activiti as a standalone commercial open source product, only bundled within their ECM. Activiti exists as an Apache-licensed open source project with about 1/3 of its main developers – likely representing more than 1/3 of the actual development effort – being Alfresco employees, making Alfresco the main project sponsor. Obviously, Alfresco’s document-centric interests are going to be represented within the Activiti project, but that doesn’t make it unsuitable as a general purpose BPMS; rather, Alfresco makes use of the BPM platform functionality for the purpose of document flow and tasks, but doesn’t force content concepts into Activiti or require Alfresco in any way to use Activiti. Activiti is continuing to develop functionality that has nothing to do with ECM, such as integration with MuleESB.

Activiti was one of the first BPMS platforms to execute BPMN 2.0 natively, and provides full support for the standard. It’s not a “zero-code” approach, but intended as a developer tool for adding high-performance, small-footprint BPM functionality to applications. You can read more about full Activiti functionality on the main project site and some nuances of usage on the blog of core developer Joram Barrez; in this post, I just want to cover the new functionality that I saw in this briefing.

Like all of the other BPMS out there, Activiti is jumping on the ad hoc collaborative task bandwagon, allowing any user to create a task on the fly, add participants to the task and transfer ownership of the task to another participant. The task definition can include a due date and priority, and have subtasks and attached content. Events for the task are showing in an activity feed sidebar, including an audit trail of the actions such as adding people or content to the task, plus the ability to just post a comment directly into the activity feed. The Activiti Explorer UI shows tasks that you create in the My Tasks tab of the Tasks page, although they do not appear in the Inbox tab unless (I think) the task is actually assigned to you. If someone includes you as a participant (“involves” you) in a task, then it shows in the Involved tab. This is pretty basic case management functionality, but provides quite a bit of utility, at least in part because of the ability to post directly to the activity feed: instead of having to build data structures specific to the task, you can just post any information in the feed as a running comments section. Mostly unconstrained, but at least it’s in a collaborative environment.

The other big new thing is a table-driven process definition as an alternative to the full BPMN modeler, providing a simpler modeling interface for business users to create models without having to know BPMN, or for fast process outlining. This allows you to create a process definition, then add any number of tasks, the order of which implies the sequence flow. Each task has a name, assignee, group (which I believe is a role rather than a direct assignment to a person) and description; you can also set the task to start concurrently with the previous task, which implies a parallel branch in the flow. Optionally, you can define the form that will be displayed for this task by adding a list of the properties to display, including name, type and whether each is mandatory; this causes an implicit definition of the process instance variables. The value of these properties can then be referenced in the description or other fields using a simple ${PropertyName} syntax. You can preview the BPMN diagram at any time, although you can’t edit in diagram mode. You can deploy and run the process in the Activiti Explorer environment; each task in the process will show up in the Queued tab of the Tasks page if not assigned, or in the Inbox tab if assigned to you. The same task interface as seen in the ad hoc task creation is shown at each step, with the addition of the properties fields if a form was defined for a task. The progress of the process instance can be viewed against the model diagram or in a tabular form. Indeed, for very simple processes without a lot of UI requirements, an entire process could be defined and deployed this way by a non-technical user within the Explorer. Typically, however, this will be used for business people to prototype a process or create a starting point; the model will then make a one-way trip into the Eclipse modeling environment (or, since it can be exported in BPMN, into any other BPMN-compliant tool) for the developers to complete the process application. Once the simple table-driven process is moved over to the Eclipse-based Activiti Modeler, it can be enhanced with BPMN attributes that can’t be represented in the table-driven definition, such as events and subprocesses.

There were a few other things, such as enhanced process definition and instance management functions, including the ability to suspend a process definition (and optionally, all instances based on that definition) either immediately or at a scheduled time in the future; some end-user reporting with configurable parameters; and integration of an SMS notification functionality that sent me a text telling me that my order for 2 iPads was shipped. Sadly, the iPads never arrived. Winking smile

We finished with a brief description of their roadmap for the future:

Hybrid workflow that allows on-premise and cloud (including instant deployment on CloudBees) for different tasks in same flow, solving the issue of exposing part of process to external participants without putting the entire process off premise.
Project KickStart, which builds on the table-driven process definition that I saw in the demo to provide better UI form display (making a real contender as a runtime environment, rather than just for prototyping) and the ability to make changes to the process definition on the fly.
Polyglot BPM, allowing Activiti to be called from other (non-Java) languages via an expanded REST API and language-specific libraries for Ruby, C#, Javascript and others.

It’s great to see Activiti continue to innovate after so much change (losing both the original product architect and their main partner) within a short period of time; it certainly speaks to their resiliency as an organization, as you would expect from a robust open source project.

I also talked with Scott Francis of BP3 about their new Activiti partnership; apparently the agreement was unrelated to the camunda departure, but definitely well-timed. I was curious about their decision to take on another BPM product, given their deep relationship with IBM (and formerly with Lombardi), but they see IBM BPM and Activiti as appealing to different markets due to organizational cultural choices. Certainly to begin with, most of their new Activiti customers will be existing Activiti customers looking for an enterprise support partner, just as many of their new IBM BPM customers are already IBM BPM customers; however, I’ve been in a couple of consulting engagements recently where organizations had both commercial and open source solutions under evaluation, so I’m anticipating a bit of channel conflict here. BP3 has no existing Activiti customers (or any other BPM other than IBM), and has no significant open source contribution experience, but plans to contribute to the Activiti open source community, possibly with hybrid/HTML mobile front-ends, REST APIs architecture and other areas where they have some expertise from building add-ons to IBM BPM. Interestingly, they do not plan to build/certify WAS support for Activiti; although they didn’t see this as a big market, I’m wondering whether this also just cuts a bit too close to the IBM relationship.

Aside from the obvious potential for awkwardness in their IBM relationship, I see a couple of challenges for BP3: first, getting the people with the right skills to work on the Activiti projects. Since the IBM BPM skills are pretty hard to come by, they won’t be redeploying those people, so presumably have to train up other team members or make some new hires. The other challenge is around production support, which is not something that BP3 does a lot of now: typically, IBM would be the main production support for any IBM BPM installation even if BP3 was involved, although BP3 would support their own custom code and may act as triage for IBM’s support. With Activiti, they will have to decide whether they will offer full production support (and if not them, then who?) or just provide developer support during business hours.

OpenText EIMDay Toronto, Customer Keynotes

Following the company/product keynotes, we heard from two OpenText customers.

First up was Tara Drover from Hatch Engineering, a Canadian engineering firm with 11,000 employees worldwide. They have OpenText Content Server on 10 corporate instances containing 32 million documents for more than 37,000 projects, almost half at their corporate headquarters in the Toronto area. They use it for project documentation, but also for a variety of other administrative and management documents. It appears that they have configured and customized Content Server, and built add-ons, to be the core of their corporate information store. They’ve been using Content Server since 2002 (v9.1), and have upgraded through v9.5 (including “de-customization”, a term and philosophy that I adore), v9.7.1 and v10. The latest upgrade, to CS10, is the one that she focused on in her presentation. Their drivers for the upgrade were to move to a 64-bit platform for scalability and performance reasons, to get off v9.7.1 before support ended, and to set the stage for some of the features in CS10: facets and columns, an improved search engine, and multilingual support. However, they wanted to keep the UI as similar as possible, providing more of a back-end upgrade as a platform for growth rather than a radical user experience change.

They started in March 2012 with strategy, change assessment and planning, then continued on to environmental assessment, development and testing, people change management and their first deployment in July 2012. Their readiness assessment identified that they first had to update their Windows Server and SQL Server instances (to 2008 — hardly cutting edge), and showed some of the changes to the integration points with other Hatch systems. As part of their development and testing, they developed an 80-page deployment guide, since this would have to roll out to all of the Content Server sites worldwide, including estimates of times required for the upgrade in order to avoid downtime during local business hours, and plans for using local staff for remote upgrades. During development and testing, they simultaneously ran the v9.7.1 production environment on the upgraded Windows Server platform, plus a CS10 development environment and a separate CS10 test/staging environment where the production processes were cloned and tested.

If you’re upgrading a single Content Server instance, you’re unlikely to go to this level of complexity in your upgrade plans and rollout, but for multiple sites across multiple countries (and languages), it’s a must. In spite of all the planning, they did have a few hiccups and some production performance issues, in part because they didn’t have a load testing tool. From their first rollout in Santiago, Chile in July 2012, followed by a few months of tuning and testing, they’re now rolling out about one site per month. They’re seeing improvements in the UI and search functions, and are ready to start thinking about how to use some of the new CS10 features.

They had a number of success factors that are independent of whatever product that you’re upgrading, such as clearly defined scope, issue management, and upgrading the platform without adding too many new user features all at once.

The second customer keynote was from Robin Thompson, CIO for the shared services sector of the Government of Ontario. They had some pretty serious information and records management issues, pretty much leaving the retention and disposition of information in the hands of individuals, with little sharing of information between ministries. To resolve this, they have developed a framework for information management over the next several years, targeted at improving efficiencies and improving services to constituents. Their guiding principles are that nformation needs to be protected and secure, managed, governed, accessible and relevant, and valued; in other words, the information needs to be managed as business records. Their roadmap identified an enterprise records and document management service as a necessary starting point, which they have deployed (based on OpenText) in the past year to the Social Services Ministries, with six more areas queued up and ready to implement. In addition to deploying in more ministries, they are also expanding functionality, bringing in email records management. to the Ministry of Finance later this year. This information management framework and vision is long overdue for the Ontario government, and hopefully will lead to better services for those of us who live here.

She shared a number of lessons that they learned along the way: the importance of change management and stakeholder communication; the time required for developing data architecture and taxonomy; the balance between overly-rigid standardization and too many customized instances; the need for external and internal resources to develop and maintain a records/document management practice; and the importance of governance. They’ve focused on an incremental approach, and have allowed the business leaders to pull the functionality rather than have IT push it into the business areas.

OpenText EIM Day Toronto, Company/Product Keynotes

I always try to drop in on vendor events that happen in my own backyard, so today I’m at OpenText’s EIM Day in Toronto. OpenText is a success story in the Canadian software space, focused on enterprise information management, which includes content and process management. They have grown significantly through acquisitions, acquiring (somewhat controversially) two different BPM vendors (Metastorm and Global 360) to add to their home-grown content management capabilities.

Following a welcome from Jim McIntyre, the regional VP of sales, we heard a keynote from Mark Barrenechea, CEO. Barrenechea was with ~~SAP~~ Oracle in the past, and obviously has continued to leverage those strong ties into the ERP market by integrating and partnering with SAP and other ERP vendors. He sees information-based strategies as the direction of business-technology transformation today, providing support for all of the unstructured information that lives alongside the structured information in ERP and other line of business systems. He outlined several transformations going on in the information enterprise: paper to digital; hierarchical to social; on premise to hybrid cloud; fragmented to managed, secured and governed; products to platforms; and ERP to EIM. He claimed that they will be able to replace multiple different products with a single platform from OpenText covering everything from capture to archive — capture, content management, process management, customer experience management (CEM) — although it appears that’s not yet released, and not clear if this will be a product branding exercise rather than a fully integrated platform.

This appeared to be a fairly conservative audience in terms of product adoption — I sat with someone who was just in the process of converting their LiveLink installation to Content Server, which I think is a bit overdue — so I’m not sure how well the message about their Tempo social collaboration platform went down, but OpenText will be pushing it later this year by using it for customer support and service interactions. What did go over well was Barrenechea’s scare tactic about Dropbox and Google Docs licensing — “did you know that they have the right to use your content for whatever purposes that they want?” — as a lead-in to the need for content security.

Barrenechea wrapped up with a product overview in their four main categories:

ECM, with Content Server, Tempo Box (an enterprise Dropbox-like product) and Archive (storage management)
CEM, with Tempo Social, DAM (digital asset management), WEM (web experience management) and CCM (customer communication management) making up the social suite
BPM, with Assure, MBPM and targeted apps making up their Smart Process Apps
iX (information exchange), with Secure iX, EDI and MFT (managed file transfer) providing secure transactions
DX (discovery), with InfoFusion and Semantic Navigation, indicating OpenText’s reentry into enterprise search; keep in mind that OpenText was a spin-off from a University of Waterloo project for indexing and searching the Oxford English Dictionary, making search part of their DNA

This still seems like a lot of products to me, many of which came through acquisitions hence may have quite different internal architecture. Although Barrenechea made claims that these are integrated, I did hear the qualifier “…on some level”. Hopefully they are integrated in more than his slide deck.

We had a deeper product view with Lynn Elwood, VP of product marketing, walking us through a (fictional) customer use case for a tablet manufacturer:

Creating and publishing product web pages using WEM (this functionality originated with the Vignette acquisition), including a review/approval cycle for the content before publication, plus cross-platform publication to update Facebook and Twitter with the newly published information, as well as mobile-optimized sites. This also gathers metrics and KPIs about the published information, including user actions, sentiment, ratings and comments.
Customer communications using StreamServe for customizing any customer communications, including adding customer-specific messages to invoices and letters.
Dynamic case management for help desk and product complaints/returns, which can include scanned documents with content captured automatically and added as case metadata. Mobile device support and Tempo Box allows a customer to take a photo of damaged goods and upload for the CSR to review.
Process analytics with ProVision (previously acquired by Metastorm, which was then acquired by OpenText) to model and simulate processes for improvement.
Records management within their Content Server product. This includes direct integration with Microsoft Outlook, so that emails can be manually dragged (or automatically moved) into folders that are managed by Content Server, hence can be part of a case and controlled by records management. There’s a lot of automated classification built in, so that content can be automatically found, classified and managed according to policies and usage.
Content storage management using their Archive product, which includes media staging and access control (including geographic constraints) based on policies.

A good overview of the product suite, but I’m still left with the feeling that this is a huge grab-bag of partially integrated components based on a variety of acquisitions over the years. They are definitely making progress in bringing them together, and the sort of use cases that Elwood showed us will help customers to understand the range of capabilities that OpenText can provide. As long as the products are individually capable and moving towards a common vision in terms of architecture, integration and user experience, there is an advantage to dealing with a single vendor for an array of related information management functionality: after all, that’s the same reason that many enterprises buy IBM products, in spite of an equally fragmented product acquisition and development strategy.

Smart Process Apps with Kofax and Forrester

Kofax sponsored a webinar this week (replay here) featuring Andy Bartels of Forrester Research speaking about Smart Process Applications (SPA): a term introduced by Forrester to describe collaborative, process-based packaged applications for human-centric work. In their terms: “a new generation of applications to help make human-centric, collaborative business activities be more effective”, with the goal to “help people be smarter in executing critical business activities”. You can check out their report on this from last year; the name is still struggling to gain acceptance, but vendors such as Kofax and OpenText (for whom I did a webinar and white paper on this topic last month) are helping to push it as a slice of the ECM/BPM/CM market where they have product offerings [by CM, I mean case management, including advanced CM (ACM), adaptive CM (also ACM), production CM (PCM) and dynamic CM (DCM), the latter term preferred by Forrester].

Forrester makes the distinction between transactional process apps and SPAs: transactional process apps tend to have standardized processes and little collaboration, whereas SPAs have a greater degree of collaboration as well as decision-making by the participants. If that was all, then this would just fall into the case management category – probably production case management – but an important focus of SPAs is that they are packaged applications for a specific activity: contract lifecycle management, customer support, procurement and the like. Bartels described them as filling in the gaps between the transactional apps, rather than using email and spreadsheets to bridge those gaps. He kept referring to these apps as “making people smarter”, which I think is a slightly awkward way of saying that they provide informational context for human decision-making, providing the right information to people at the right time to do their work.

He pointed out that BPM/DCM platforms provide an application development environment for companies to build their own SPAs, and that companies can then keep that app to themselves as a competitive differentiator, give it back to the vendor to incorporate into the base product, or sell it themselves (possibly in conjunction with the vendor). I think that a lot of these apps will come from the vendors directly, possibly via code developed for customer projects.

Martyn Christian of Kofax took the second part of the webinar to talk about Kofax solutions that fit into the Smart Process Apps envelope: capture of content as it moves from systems to engagement to systems of record is definitely their sweet spot. He overlaid their technology portfolio on Forrester’s “jigsaw” graphic to show that they offer something in all five pieces, although they are really pushing a platform for building SPAs, not the fully packaged SPAs that we’re seeing from some other vendors that are starting from a more comprehensive platform. That being said, Kofax is offering a customer onboarding SPA for capturing information at the point of origination, automating NIGO (not in good order) resolution and integrating with line of business and ECM systems; this sort of capture-focused SPA, or what they call “First Mile Solutions” is what we’re likely to see from Kofax in the future, especially as they continue to integrate the functionality of the Singularity (BPM/CM) and Altasoft (BI/analytics) acquisitions.

Forrester has a brand new Wave for SPAs; you can get this from the Kofax site here (registration required), plus a copy of a Forrester market analysis of multichannel capture, BPM and SPA, commissioned by Kofax. I’m sure that many of the other vendors in the Wave will have the report available as well, and it’s an interesting group of vendors: some horizontal BPM/ECM vendors, Salesforce, and a supply chain software vendor. This category is still such a mixed bag, and it does have the feeling of Forrester running a clustering algorithm on characteristics of existing solutions to see what they had in common, then “creating” the SPA category to describe them. Whether this is a true market category or just a speed bump on the way to a new age of applications and their development platforms remains to be seen.

Stick A (Open Source) Fork In It: camunda BPM Splits From Activiti

At the end of 2012, I had a few hints that things at Alfresco’s Activiti BPM group was undergoing some amount of transition: Tom Baeyens, the original architect and developer of Activiti (now CEO of the Effektif cloud BPM startup announced last week), was no longer leading the Activiti project and had decided to leave Alfresco after less than three years; and camunda, one of the biggest Activiti contributors (besides Alfresco) as well as a major implementation consulting partner, was making noises that Activiti might be too tightly tied to Alfresco’s requirements for document-centric workflow rather than the more general BPM platform that Activiti started as. I’m not in a position to judge how Alfresco was controlling the direction and release cycle of Activiti, who was making the biggest contribution to the open source efforts, or what was said behind closed doors, but obviously things reached a breaking point, and this week camunda announced that they are forking a new open source project from Activiti, to be known as camunda BPM.

This is big news in the world of open source BPM. There are a few players already – Activiti, BonitaSoft, jBPM and Processmaker, to name a few – and it’s not clear that there’s enough demand for open source BPM software to warrant another entrant. Also, there has to be some hard feelings between the parties here, and this is a small community where you can’t really afford to make enemies, because you never know who you’re going to end up working with in years to come. This parting of the ways is described as “sad” by both camunda in their announcement post and by Joram Barrez (current Activiti ~~lead~~ core developer) in his post, and puts Activiti and camunda in direct competition for both existing Activiti users and future business. Signavio, whose process modeler is deeply integrated with camunda BPM, issued a press release stating that the camunda BPM fork will be good for Signavio customers, and including a nice quote from Tom Baeyens; keep in mind that Signavio just provided the funding for Baeyens’ new startup. It’s like the Peyton Place of BPM.

Leaving the personal (and personnel) aspects aside, camunda BPM is offering some significant additional capabilities beyond what is available in Activiti, mostly through open-sourcing their previously proprietary Activiti add-ons. I had a briefing a couple of weeks ago with Jakob Freund, camunda’s CEO, to get caught up on what they’re doing. camunda is about 20 people now, founded 4-1/2 years ago and completely self-funded. That makes them a bit small for launching an enterprise software product – including the implementation and support aspects – but also not driven to unreasonable growth since they have no external investors to please. Having once grown a consulting company to about twice that size without external funding, I can understand the advantages of maintaining the organic growth: control to pick the projects and products that you want to build, and to hand-pick a great team.

camunda BPM, as with Activiti (and jBPM, for that matter) are not claiming to be zero-code BPM suites – some would argue that even those claiming to be, aren’t – but are BPM engines and capabilities intended to be embedded within line-of-business enterprise applications. They see the zero-coding market as being general tooling for non-strategic processes, and likely served equally well or better by outsourcing or cloud solutions (Effektif, anyone?); instead, camunda targets situations where IT is a competitive differentiator, and BPM is just part of the functionality within a larger application. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing for the non-technical business analyst here: BPMN is used as a bridge for business-IT alignment, and camunda is bringing their previously proprietary BPMN round-tripping capabilities into the new open source project. Their BPMN plugin for Eclipse provides an easy-to-use modeler for business analysts, or round-tripping with Signavio, Adonis and other modeling tools; camunda blogged back in June 2012 about how to integrate several different BPMN modelers with camunda BPM, although they have a definite preference for Signavio.

camunda BPM is a complete open source BPM stack under an Apache License (except for Eclipse, the framework for the designer/developer UI, which uses the Eclipse Public License). The Community (open source) edition will always be the most up-to-date edition – note that some commercial open source vendors relegate their community edition to being a version behind the commercial edition in order to drive revenue – with the Enterprise (commercial) edition lagging slightly to undergo further testing and integrations. The only capabilities available exclusively in the Enterprise edition are WebSphere Application Server (WAS) integration and Cockpit Pro, a monitoring/administration tool, although there is a Cockpit Light capability in the Community edition. You can see a Community-Enterprise feature comparison here, and a more complete list here. Unless you’re tied to WAS from the start, or need quite a bit of support, the Community edition is likely enough to get you up and running initially, allowing for an easier transition from open source to commercial.

However, the question is not really whether camunda has some great contributions to make to the Activiti code base (they do), but whether they can sustain and build an open source fork of Activiti. They have some good people internally to provide vision – Daniel Meyer for the core process engine architecture, Bernd Rücker for a technical consulting/product management view, Jakob Freund for the business aspects of BPM – and a development team experienced with the Activiti and camunda code bases. They have showed significant leadership in the Activiti open source community and development, so are likely capable of running a camunda BPM open source community, but need to make sure that they dedicate enough resource to it to keep it vital. There is a German camunda community already, but that’s not the same as an open source community, and also is only in German, so they have some work to do there.

And then there’s the existing Activiti and camunda users. Existing camunda customers probably won’t be freaked out about the fork since the contributions important to them were being made by camunda anyway, but existing Activiti users (and prospects) aren’t just going to fall into camunda’s lap: they might be weighing the additional functionality against the bigger company, stable brand and existing community behind Activiti. Given some of the new UI features being rolled into Activiti from the Alfresco team, it’s fair to say that Alfresco will continue to innovate Activiti, and attempt to maintain their solid standing in the open source BPM market. There’s likely a small window for existing Acitiviti users to shift to camunda BPM if they want to: right now, the engine is identical and the migration will be trivial, but I expect that within six months, both sides will make enough changes to their respective projects that it will become a more significant effort. In other words, if you’re on Activiti or camunda now and are thinking of switching, do it now.

camunda could be ruffling a few feathers by declaring an open source fork rather than just rolling their proprietary offerings into the Activiti project; they might have been able to become a stronger influencer within the project by doing that, counteracting any (perceived) document-centric influence from Alfresco. Again, I’m not internal to either of the companies nor part of the Activiti open source community, so that’s just speculation.

Meanwhile, Alfresco remains officially silent on the whole business. Given that they had advance warning about this, that’s a pretty serious PR mistake.

IBMConnect (Lotusphere) 2013 Highlights: Product Updates, Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce

A couple of weeks ago, IBM had two analyst calls about the announcements this week at IBM Connect 2013; since I’m not at the conference, I wrote most of this at that time but only published today due to embargo restrictions. It’s the 20th anniversary of Lotusphere, although the conference is no longer branded as Lotusphere since the “smarter workforce” and “smarter commerce” streams are beyond just products with a Lotus heritage or brand.

The first briefing featured Jeff Schick, who heads up social software at IBM. He discussed new software and cloud services to put social business capabilities in the hands of C-level executives in HR and marketing, covering the dual goals of managing corporate intranets and talent, and managing external marketing campaigns. The catchphrases are “Activate the Workforce” and “Delight Customers”, enabled by IBM social business solutions for Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce, built on the social integration capabilities of IBM WebSphere Portal.

Specific product releases coming up in the next several weeks:

IBM Connections v4.5, with FileNet ECM now available as a native service: documents and their processes (processes within FileNet, I assume, not within IBM BPM) can be integrated into a Connections community, exposing FileNet functionality such as metadata and foldering through Connections, and providing fully integrated social capabilities such as tagging, commenting and liking, making content a first-class social citizen. This is hot. It will not include records management or Case Manager: it appears that these functions would be available on the FileNet side, but not exposed (at this time) through Connections. Quickr customers are being offered a migration path to IBM Connections Content Manager, which is a bundled FileNet repository that can be upgraded to the full ECM suite if you wanted to use it outside the Connections context. Connections can also integrate with SharePoint and Outlook, so is an option even if you’re a Microsoft customer in those areas.
IBM Notes 9 Social Edition, competing against Outlook 2013 with social-enabled email, activity Streams and other social capabilities.
IBM Docs for web-based collaboration, now available on-premise as well as in the cloud. This competes against Office 365 and Google Docs, but offers better collaboration than O365 (which requires passing control of a document between collaborators) and better rendering/conversion of Office documents than GDocs. IBM Docs is integrated with Connections for social features and sharing, in the same sort of way as Content Manager.
IBM Sametime replaces their existing meeting service in the cloud, including iOS and Android support. It uses the Polycom framework for video and audio support.
Deployment of all of this can be public cloud, private cloud, on-premise (not really sure of the distinction there) or a hybrid of these. Their SmartCloud for Social Business provides for the cloud deployment and adds wiki, blogs and other social authoring functionality. SmartCloud has Safe Harbor certification, making it a bit mire immune to government snooping, and can be private-labeled, with two telelcom companies already using this to provide these capabilities to their customers.

Everything is focused on mobile: mobile meetings, chat, Connections including Content Manager access, Docs and more.

Jonathan Ferrar, who heads up strategy for the Smarter Workforce business area, gave us an update on what they’re providing to support attracting, empowering and motivating employees. They have just completed their acquisition of Kenexa, and offer a portfolio of HR and workforce management products that includes behavioral sciences plus the entire platform for social business that Schick talked about, including analytics, collaboration and content management.

There are three main functional areas related to workforce management: attract (including recruitment, hiring, onboarding), empower (including learning and intranet content such as benefits and procedures), and motivate (including surveys, assessments and talent management). An integrated employee and HR portal uses existing IBM portal technology to expose Kennexa functionality and social features. There are also workforce analytics to monitor, provide insight and predict based on demographic, qualitative and social data, using both Cognos for dashboards and SPSS for analysis. There’s also some features related to outsourcing but not a lot of details; I was left with the impression that this was a strong capability of Kennexa prior to the acquisition.

I don’t know a lot about HR systems, although I’m seeing a huge potential to integrate this with operational systems such as BPM to drive analytics from the operational systems to the HR systems (e.g., employee performance measures), and even some from HR to the operational systems (e.g., learning management to push training to people at the point in their work when they need the training).

In the second briefing, we heard from Larry Bowden, VP of Web Experience software at IBM, covering the website building and user experience sides of Smarter Commerce and Social Business. He started out the the same “smarter workforce/exceptional customer experience” catchphrases as we heard on the earlier call, then went on to highlight some of their customers recognized for exceptional web experience awards in 2012. Web experience includes the smarter workforce (employee engagement, workplace social portal) and smarter commerce (web presence and brand marketing, buy, sell, market) areas, but also can include direct business uses (e.g., online banking, claims), engaging a broad variety of constituents (e.g., e-government), and customer self-service. The core of the IBM customer experience suite, however, is on the buy, market, sell and service capabilities under their Smarter Commerce umbrella. They are working at putting the web marketing/commerce capabilities directly into the hands of business users (although if this is anything similar to how most vendors put BPMS capabilities directly into the hands of business users, I wouldn’t be too worried if I were a web developer), including both web content management/analytics and campaign management.

The Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce solutions are built on the IBM Social Business Platform, as we heard from Schick earlier, which includes WebSphere Portal, Web Content Manager, Connections, Notes & Domino Social Edition, Sametime, Social Analytics Suite, ECM, Web Experience Factory and Forms. That’s nine products just in the platform, then the Customer Experience Suite and Employee Experience Suite solutions built on top of that. Whew. There are other products that come in at the higher level, such as Worklight for mobile enablement.

There’s been a refresh on all of their web experience capabilities, resulting in a new IBM Web Experience “Next”, providing for faster content creation, social content rendering and multi-channel publishing. This is not so much a product as the list of everything across their product base that is being updated, and a more consistent user interface.

There’s a new digital asset management system for rich media management (part of a WCM Rich Media Edition?), although that’s currently in tech preview rather than released.

They’ve also done some PureSystems updates that make it faster to deploy and optimized complex configurations of the multiple IBM products required to support these capabilities – arguably, they should have spent some time on refactoring and reducing the number of products, rather than working out how to make bigger and better hardware to support these patterns.

As always after an IBM briefing, I’m left with a sense of almost overwhelming complexity in the number — and possible combinations — of products that make up these integrated solutions. Powerful: yes. But expect some rough edges in the integration.

Going Paperless On A Small Scale

Earlier this week, I linked to the Paperless 2013 website, a vendor-sponsored initiative that encourages businesses to cut paper, ostensibly for environmental reasons. The products featured by the sponsor vendors – Google Drive, HelloFax, Manilla, HelloSign, Expensify, Xero and Fujitsu ScanSnap – can certainly assist with this, although I run a completely paperless office using only one of those (Google Drive), and that one only in a secondary role. The interesting part was a conversation that ensued with another small business owner, although she was primarily interested in going paperless with personal documents (which I have also done), which made me realize that most small businesses are a bit clueless about how to go about this in a secure and legal fashion. I’ve been involved in large-scale document scanning projects since the 1980s, and I’ve gathered a lot of ideas about how to do this on a scale suitable for organizations of any size, so I thought that I’d lay out a plan suitable for small businesses.

Keep in mind that although I run a single person business, it’s incorporated, so I have the same paperwork requirements as any other private company: invoicing, payroll, government filings, income tax and all. I also do some amount of document collaboration with other small businesses, as well as for some non-profits with which I’m involved.

Here’s how I keep paperless:

If I receive a document in electronic form, I leave it in electronic form unless I absolutely need to print it.
If I generate a document, I leave it in electronic form unless I need to physically sign it (such as a contract) or take it to a client meeting (since many of my clients have not embraced the paperless way). This is not just Microsoft Office documents, but any document including things such as invoices, which I generate from my accounting software (QuickBooks) directly as a PDF and email to clients: I keep a copy of the PDF invoice, but it is never in paper form in my office. Services such as Freshbooks pride themselves on offering electronic invoicing, but you don’t need to switch if you’re happy with what you have, just install a good PDF generator and send it via email.
If something is in paper form but I can get the electronic version instead, I do. Although my bank doesn’t provide electronic bank statements for commercial accounts, many other banks and service providers do. Most of my monthly expenses receipts, including travel and telecommunications, arrive in PDF, since most airlines, hotels and car rentals will email a receipt to you if you ask. My most common question at a client site when they hand me a huge printed document or presentation is “can I get that in electronic form”?”
As a last resort, if I receive something in paper form (or have to print it in order to sign it), I scan it and shred the paper as soon as possible. This is the crux of most document imaging projects, but in reality is a fairly minor part these days if you do most of your communication electronically and can keep paper out of the mix altogether. Yes, it’s legal (more on that below). Since my volume is very low, I use an inexpensive Epson scanner that I picked up at Costco, and the software that came with it. That’s fine for a few pages a day, but anything more than 10 pages at a time gets tedious because it doesn’t have a sheet feeder. I would highly recommend a sheet feeder if you have a backlog of paper to convert, or if you regularly receive large paper documents. For smaller receipts when I’m travelling, I snap a photo with my iPhone, back it up to the cloud, then destroy the paper document.
I use automated backup to replicate everything offsite. This eliminates the risk of losing documents, and allows me to access documents from my netbook when I’m travelling.
I use online backup/sync services for shared content management when I collaborate on a project with other small firms and independents. Even if I were working with people in the same office, I would use the same methods since there’s no need to own your own servers.
I manually maintain retention policies on the electronic documents, and delete them appropriately. In Canada, that means I need to keep all corporate and tax-related documents for six years past the end of the fiscal year: I just deleted my 2006 files and shredded the paper files, since that was the last year that I kept any paper records. For any files with a retention policy, I keep them in dated folders so that I can quickly purge them without having to search through files; this means a bit of electronic reorganization at the year end, but it takes only a few minutes.

The result: I have no paper files in my office, except for a small pile in my in-tray waiting to be scanned. No filing cabinets, no boxes of documents in storage. As an added bonus, I have offsite backup, which most people with paper files don’t.

Quelling the nay-sayers:

“I don’t like to read on a screen”. Get a bigger/better screen, or dual monitors, and a tablet for taking it with you. Cheaper in the long run.
“It’s not secure”. Back everything up offsite, not just locally, in case of a physical disaster (fire/flood/theft). I use Jungle Disk (a division of RackSpace), which encrypts my data on the desktop, then uploads it to an encrypted Amazon S3 bucket. I hold the key, not them, so they can’t decrypt my data. My backup runs automatically, so I don’t need to do anything to make this happen.
“It’s too hard to create electronic documents”. Get a good PDF printer/document assembly application. I use CutePDF Pro, which allows me not only to generate PDFs from any application that can print, but also to assemble multiple PDFs into a single document, rearrange pages and other functions. This is useful when I need to append a timesheet to an invoice before sending to a client, or to concatenate all of my expense receipts to attach to a monthly expense report.
“I can find things easier in my filing system”. Easier than searching through full-text documents? I don’t think so, unless you have a really trivial number of files. Learn how to use search capabilities of your desktop environment (built into Windows, for example), install a third-party search utility, or (if your company is large enough) use a shared content management system.
“I need to keep these paper documents for legal/regulatory reasons”. Probably not. Most government taxation bodies have long accepted digital copies (scans of paper, or original digital documentation such as an invoice received as a PDF) in place of paper – what they refer to as “electronic record keeping”. You can see the Canada Revenue Agency’s take on this at http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/bsnss/tpcs/kprc/menu-eng.html, and similar policies exist for the IRS and other agencies. The Canada Labour Code has similar requirements for human resources records. You may need to research for your type of documents in your jurisdiction, but electronic record-keeping is most likely allowed.

If you’re starting from ground zero of a paper explosion, this might seem a bit daunting. Keep in mind that you can do this on a day-forward basis, since many of your old paper files can be shredded as they pass their 6th birthday: just go paperless starting today (or from the beginning of your fiscal year) and let the old paper cycle out over time. If you really love it and want to get ambitious, you can start doing some back scanning, but it may not be worth it. When I started in 2007, I was already keeping everything electronically that originated that way, but added in scanning of expense receipts (my biggest single paper volume) and government documents, which was not a big change. I still didn’t start scanning contracts for another few years, since they’re big and I don’t have a sheet feeder, but eventually went back and scanned all of the old ones just to clean out the last of the paper files.

A lot of these ideas, of course, are not limited to small business, but form the core of any ECM initiative. Things get more complex when you add in automated business processes to move those documents around between people, but the basic concepts, motivations and nay-saying are the same.

BPM in the Great White North: OpenText BPM Seminar

When a conference or seminar pitches up in my own backyard, I try to make the time to attend, and this morning I attended a morning seminar given by OpenText in Toronto. I’m not currently scheduled to make it to their big Enterprise World conference next month in Orlando, so this was a good chance for an update. We were at the CMA Ontario offices, which offers co-working/training space for hire; the VP of corporate services of CMA gave a quick intro to state that they’re a recent OpenText content services customer and are interested in helping to start up an OpenText user group. I expect that the biggest challenge will be the breadth of products under the OpenText umbrella due to the several acquisitions that they’ve made over the past few years, which I think makes OpenText the only vendor with more BPM products than IBM.

OpenText is Canada’s largest software company with about 5,000 employees. I know, you didn’t even know that OpenText is Canadian, just like Justin Bieber, Keanu Reeves, Alanis Morissette and Jim Carrey. Beauty, eh?

Today’s session was likely aimed at OpenText’s base of content management customers, and Gerry Gibney, their senior strategist for financial services, introduced their offerings in the BPM space: BPM (meaning structured BPM), dynamic case management, high volume imaging, business planning and modeling, and process-centric applications. He walked through some of their customer case studies:

Case management for loans operations at ATB Financial
Case management to manage investment fund transactions and call centers at Citi Fund Services
Process/business modeling and architecture for mainframe migration planning and frameworks at JPMC
Case management for account opening and fund administration at Rothschild Bank Luxembourg
BPM for managing customer profiles and a variety of administrative (non-customer) processes at PNC Bank
Case management for back office processing in fund management at Penson (which appears to be ceasing operations in Canada, so may cease to be a good case study)
Case management for new business processes at Chartis
BPA and BPM for underwriting compliance reviews at Geico
Business architecture modeling for insurance processes and ITIL at MetLife
Case management for insurance claims processing at American International Assurance Asia
Business architecture modeling at American Express
BPM (explicitly Metastorm) for case management at the US Social Security Administration

There were a few more, intended to show the applicability of their BPM solutions, but this does not, of course, represent implementations of a single product: it’s the legacy of Global 360, Metastorm and Proforma acquisitions for case management, structured BPM, and BPA, respectively. In some of the situations, Metastorm BPM (MBPM) has been used for case management, and undoubtedly Global360 has been used for structured BPM even though they’re positioned differently now that they share a portfolio. He finished up showing the 2010 Gartner and Forrester MQ/Wave diagrams where they’re in the top right corner; in the new Gartner iBPMS MQ, where they should play well, they’ve been relegated to the lower left, in part because of the uncertainty of their BPM roadmap.

We then heard from an OpenText (Metastorm BPM) customer, Catharine MacKenzie, who manages business systems development at the Mutual Fund Dealers Association, a regulatory body for companies that sell mutual funds in Canada. With about 120 member companies, they define rules and bylaws, perform compliance audits, handle inquiries, manage enforcement cases and disciplinary hearings, and impose penalties for non-compliance.

They started as an eDocs (Hummingbird) customer, and now use Metastorm BPM as well within their predominantly Microsoft and .NET environment. They went with BPM because there was no out of the box solution that would support their regulatory processes – they were previously managed using manual processes and Excel spreadsheets – and provide them with the ability to quickly create and maintain custom processes with a limited IT budget. Although they do have some completely custom-built systems, their preference is to build process-centric applications on the BPM platform instead in order to reduce cost and time while providing a good match to their business requirements. Starting their search in 2005, they did a proof of concept with two vendors in 2006, selected Metastorm and set up their environment. In 2007 they deployed their first product processes: compliance examinations (for audits), call logs (logging inquiries), enforcement referrals and enforcement intake. They added another process in 2008, two more in 2009, nine in 2010, three in 2011 and one in 2012. They have another five planned before the end of 2012. All in all, a pretty impressive track record for implementation.

Although they had a recommendation (likely from the partner, although that wasn’t stated) to implement purchase orders first, they wisely ignore that and went straight for the core regulatory processes. Executive review provides a lot of input into what processes are implemented and in what order, which tends to drive a more strategic direction and shows the benefits of full-on management involvement. Interestingly, the question about what process to start with always comes up with I give a general BPM presentation; I always recommend starting with something that really matters to the business since, as I’ve stated previously, no one ever justified enterprise-wide deployment of BPM by doing a proof of concept with managing expense reports. I talked to MacKenzie about this at the break and told her that I agreed with this strategy, and she unknowingly echoed my opinion that in the grander scheme of BPM, no one cares about expense reports.

She shared their lessons learned, including benefits (rapid development and deployment; built-in process auditing) and challenges (business needs to own the process, not IT; testing is difficult and time-consuming), then was joined by Jeff Vila, their business systems analyst who went through the BPM process and data flow in detail. He showed the actual process map for a few of their processes; MBPM is still using their own proprietary notation, not BPMN. They’re currently migrating to version 9; MacKenzie stated this as one of their challenges, but Vila said that there were some enhancements to the development environment in things such as form design, so they’re expecting it to be beneficial overall.

They see MBPM as a tool for people who are primarily business-oriented, although some programming experience is beneficial; in response to an audience question, Vila stated that he has a commerce background, and although he had taken a few Microsoft programming courses, the MBPM training courses probably would have been sufficient to get up to speed on most of the functionality. It doesn’t sound like they’re using the business architecture tools that OpenText offers (ProVision), although I would have thought that OpenText would be practically flinging this at their BPM and case management customers to help adoption as well as improve the quality of the BPM implementations.

Their eDocs content management is completely separate from MBPM: there is a cross-reference link between them, but that’s managed by custom code and manual processes, not through any inherent links between the products. I don’t think that eDocs is really OpenText’s main push for content management so that link may never happen at a deep product level, but it that might be something that OpenText provides as a developer add-on.

The last part of the morning was Doug Johnson, OpenText director of product management, on the actual products and some of the new BPM features that have been released or are coming up soon:

Mobile BPM, apparently through HTML5
Integration with their content server (although likely not older/non-core platforms such as eDocs)
Capture Center to ingest faxed/scanned images and kick off related processes
Process intelligence into a manager view (based, perhaps, on the previous Global360 persona-based views?) for reports and analysis
Cloud deployment (not clear if this is multitenant and self-provisioning, or some sort of hosted server implementation)
Vertical applications
Social capabilities, which in part he (somewhat misleadingly) described as skills-based routing

Although not new, he spoke about the MBPM integration and automation capabilities where a developer can create reusable components and libraries that are exposed to the process designer in the graphical development environment for inclusion in processes.

He covered a bit of ProVision’s functionality in business planning and analysis, including providing governance over standard operating procedures as documented, as well as insights for future planning.

He then moved on to Case360 for dynamic case management, describing their case folder concept as well as extensive connections to multiple ECM systems (probably using CMIS, although he didn’t state that). He described how it allows users to do high-performance focused work – usually seen as more the sweet spot of structured BPM – and captures a variety of robust analytics.

These three products – Metastorm BPM for structured BPM, Case360 for case management, and ProVision for process analysis – form their BPM portfolio; unfortunately, he doesn’t make a strong distinction on the boundaries between the products (especially MBPM and Case360), and that’s the part of their strategy that they really need to get straight. I beat up IBM all the time about their failure to do the same thing with IBM BPM and FileNet, but IBM is a big company that can afford to have several BPM offerings (even if it’s confusing to the customers), while OpenText is

He then “pre-announced” OpenText Assure (I didn’t see an NDA or embargo on this session, so have included it here) which I assume is coming out at their conference next month. It appears to be a sort of high-level development environment that allows users to create their own apps, or more of an application that can be configured by business users. He showed some screens of a self-service portal for common business services, extensible apps and configurable business processes, although not completely clear what is the native environment versus what can be built with it. Built on MBPM, hence providing all the underlying capability, and soon to be available on the OpenText Cloud, Assure appears to primarily be a delivery platform for configurable vertical applications and/or templates. Someone from OpenText, feel free to jump into the comments and provide some clarification. Or invite me to Orlando so I can see for myself.

SharePoint: Today & Tomorrow

Since the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) ended up in my backyard this year, I decided to drop by for a couple of sessions. There’s a lot here that’s not all that interesting to me – more for the partners’ sales teams on how to sell more Microsoft stuff – but it’s a good opportunity for me to catch up on a few product announcements and also see some of my vendor contacts who are also Microsoft partners.

You can watch the keynotes and some other interviews online and follow the Twitter stream; this morning, we heard about how Windows 8 is going to be the biggest thing since Windows 95, and saw some of the new hardware that’s being developed to take advantage of the new features.

This afternoon in a breakout, Jared Spataro from SharePoint product management gave an update on trends and the product direction, although they are not yet ready to talk about SharePoint/Office 15 so I have the sense that there will be some more interesting stuff coming out later in the summer that we didn’t hear today. He did outline what they see as key industry trends:

Social. Well, duh, they just spend over $1B on Yammer. The next session is on enterprise social, and it’s not surprising that they’re looking at social in a business context.
Consumers, and the consumerization of IT.
Devices, and allowing their customers to work on whatever device they have. He claims that they no longer have a protectionist policy of supporting only Microsoft platforms, but maybe they should talk to their conference organizers about having something other than a Windows Phone app for the conference.
Cloud to reduce the time to value as well as support a broader audience. They intend to develop for the cloud first for SharePoint as well as all of Microsoft Office, and see cloud as a strategic platform for enterprises of all sizes in the future. They don’t necessarily see that organizations are going to move existing on-premise systems to the cloud, but that it will become the platform of choice (and completely seamless to the end user due to single sign-on) for new deployments, and they’re developing more tools for hybrid (cloud/on-premise) solutions.
Cross-organization support for collaboration outside a single enterprise, which is obviously supported by the cloud platform.

Over 65% of companies with SharePoint have deployed to their entire employee population, which is a good indication of the viral nature (which you can consider to be good or bad) adoption of SharePoint. About half of their base has updated to SharePoint 2010, although I see a lot of my clients with much older versions, and Microsoft needs to think about how to move them off those old versions so that they can start to leverage the collaboration capabilities rather than just a place to dump documents.

Their focus now is to transition from being a document-centric system to a people-centric system: making it a more personalized experience for each user, so that SharePoint provides the context, content and platform for doing their work. They’re starting to see more companies managing projects using SharePoint, not just storing documents, so are trying to better support conversations about documents rather than just the documents themselves. Bringing together search, content, workflow and social into a single platform has a lot of potential, especially considering the market penetration of SharePoint.

With just that whiff of what’s coming in SharePoint 15, he moved on to their FY2013 field sales priorities (which is what all these partners are crowded into the room to hear):

Win “enterprise social”, so that every new social experience in a customer is a Microsoft experience. They’ll be doing some social roadshows to back this up and keep the momentum going, so that they start winning a lot of the social deals.
Launch SharePoint 15, which pushes the social message broader and deeper into the enterprise.
Drive new seats with Office365, especially in the mid-market in the cloud.

They want to use social as a conversation-starter, but continue to move in with SharePoint and Office core functionality, pushing upgrades and cloud migration. They also see Yammer as something that business can do without a lot (or even any) IT support, so that they can start using social enterprise software without deploying internally. Then, as Microsoft develops stronger ties between Yammer and SharePoint (as they must), Yammer will leverage users into a social-enabled SharePoint.

We were left with quite a number of large gaps in upcoming product information, since they are not quite ready to spill on the features of the next version. Frustrating, but I understand that public companies just can’t do too much in the way of pre-announcements.

Spataro left half of the hour-long session for questions, and the first one was about the perceived weaknesses of the platform for BPM and workflow. He admitted that they have not spent a lot of energy making SharePoint a premier BPM platform, and that they’re really focused on capturing the market share while leaving some of the functionality to partners. There are a number of BPM-related ISV partners here at WPC this week, including AgilePoint, K2, Kofax, Laserfiche and OpenText, plus services partners who build process-centric solutions; Microsoft has to tread carefully so as not to provide functionality that undercuts their partners’ business, and partners are always at risk that Microsoft will decide that their business is just a bit too strategic to leave to partners. I find it hard to believe that there’s not some sort of BPM work going on within the core SharePoint platform, since process is becoming a key competency in many organizations and Microsoft is unlikely to walk away from that opportunity to develop deeper ties into their customers’ business operations and IT infrastructure. That risk, of course, is the nature of being a partner with a huge software company such as Microsoft (or IBM, SAP and many others): like sleeping with an elephant, it’s toasty-warm most of the time, but watch out when it rolls in your direction.

Mutual Fund Processing With AWD 10 And DST Vision

My history with DST started in 1994, when a mutual fund customer in Toronto hired me to conduct an evaluation of imaging and workflow systems. They were certain that they wanted DST, but we went on to evaluate and select FileNet (now IBM). In the course of that evaluation, I spent about a week each with DST and FileNet building an application, with my DST time spent here in Kansas City including a tour of their massive mutual fund transaction processing outsourcing operation. I hadn’t had a lot of interaction with DST again until recently, and obviously things have changed a lot in their technology (as well as in Kansas City).

A big chunk of DST’s core business is still with mutual fund processing companies, since they provide both the TA2000 transfer agency system (for transaction processing and shareholder recordkeeping) and AWD for the imaging, workflow, correspondence generation and other related capabilities. For those companies using TA2000, which is really a mutual fund industry standard in the US, the natural fit has been to use AWD as well since there is some deep integration between them, and DST is pushing hard to ensure that AWD 10 continues that tradition.

Their consistent message at their user conference this week is transforming business (through, of course, the implementation of AWD 10). Part of this is to treat transactions not just as independent transactions any more: many transactions represent life events such as births, deaths, marriages and divorces. How you handle the transactions related to a life event – which usually required initiating and managing transactions and tasks that the customer didn’t think of – can make or break that customer relationship, and that viewpoint can be transformational for how you run your business. This requires a case management approach to that life event, where directed dialogs (wizard interfaces) collect information that can be used to spawn additional tasks required for case completion.

They’re also enabling additional transparency by allowing financial advisors – those people and companies who actually sell the mutual funds – to participate directly in an existing AWD workflow through the DST Vision portal application. For mutual fund transactions, this is primarily to report on transactions that are not in good order (NIGO) so that the advisor can provide additional information in order to complete the transaction, usually related to transfer of assets. This presents a filtered view of the back office information, since advisors are not permitted to see all information about shareholders and transactions, and may include images of the original documents provided.

It’s difficult to tell how well the transformation message is going over with the customers, but based on the audience questions, the functionality provided by DST Vision is much more relevant to them right now. Although all of the DST full-service clients (that is, those where DST or one of their related companies are doing some or all of the processing) are operating on the AWD 10 infrastructure, that doesn’t mean that they’re using the emerging capabilities, and the self-serve mutual fund clients in the room may be slow to follow.