process – Page 29

bpmNEXT 2014 Tuesday Session: It’s All About Mobile

I’ll blog this year the same as last year’s bpmNEXT demos, with each session of multiple demos in a single post. The posts are a bit long, but they are usually grouped into themes so it works better that way.

First up was Brian Reale of Colosa (makers of ProcessMaker open source BPM and ProcessMapper) on self-organizing groups, ad hoc work and expectations of simplicity. This is a topic that I’m really interested in, since I’ve been presenting on worker incentives with collaborative work, which includes some of the same issues as self-organization. One of his keys points is about the effort required to start using a typicial BPMS, and how that differs from design time (where there is typically a large degree of effort required and very little organic adoption) to runtime (where there is much less effort and is the main target of ROI). What they are trying to do is increase adoption by reducing the effort required at design time by providing more ad hoc capabilities, with a resultant lower ROI but also lower cost. The result is FormSlider, an app environment for ad hoc workflow of structured data with minimal setup, which is what Brian demonstrated (still in alpha). He demoed the tablet interface for a loan application that allows for mobile capture of a client requesting a loan, including pictures and signatures, which then interfaces with ProcessMaker or other back-ends. More interestingly, he showed how an easily-setup app can be used for mobile data capture that hte user can then route to whomever they want (possibly limited to a selection list) with a few other fields such as due date and priority. There’s some informational context, such as seeing how long it is taking each of the possible participants to process cases, and also allows for routing to be round-trip or one-way. The standard user interface is pretty simple: My Cases for things that I’m working on, an Inbox for new things, and a simple forms interface for working on items. There’s an historical view of cases, showing the participants and their responses. He demoed a simple flow going through a round-trip from the initiator through two people and back to the initiator; this can be used for adding a collaborative workflow on top of existing pre-defined processes and systems, taking the place of emailing around for approvals and other simple collaboration. He finished up the demo in ProcessMaker showing us how an app and forms are created and deployed in a few minutes, including how potential users and groups are associated with the forms as they are designed. They have email and forum connectors for ProcessMaker and will be using the same methods with FormSlider for providing people with ways to be notified about work but also to interact with it directly.

Next up was Romeo Elias of Interneer on extending enterprise software using mobile apps by using BPM, addressing the issue that many companies have of not having skilled mobile app developers, but there being no commercial apps available for their needs. Their Intellect BPMS has mobile app capabilities, and allows custom mobile apps to be built quickly that can connect directly to the back-end processes. Since BPMS’ are often being used as full application development platforms, this is not that much of a stretch: the BPM platform already has a lot of the integration and other capabilities, and Interneer’s platform is intended to be used mostly in a drag-and-drop model-driven development environment. Romeo demonstrated creating a new application template that consisted of laying out a UI form for the mobile app using the full web interface (there could also have been a process attached, but the point of his demo was to show the mobile UI), then using it as an app on a tablet interface. The design interface on the web provides the ability to specify sidebar content as well as multiple pages (shown as tabs in the designer). The resultant app – immediately available as soon as it is created in the designer – is a native mobile app, not viewed through a mobile browser, so can take advantage of device-specific features as well as cache data offline. The app was a mobile data capture/reporting application that connected to a database; he demonstrated adding records to the table that include text (free text and restricted using a selection list) and a photo field, with any new records stored locally if connectivity is lost.

Scott Francis and Greg Harley of BP3 presented on bringing process to the people using their Brazos mobile BPM responsive UI toolkit; at the time of last year’s bpmNEXT, they were focused on hybrid mobile apps, but now are directed towards responsible UI, that is, applications that run in a browser but behave appropriately regardless of the form factor of the device. Native apps can cause a lot of problems because of lack of mobile development and deployment skills within enterprises, but also the hurdles that many companies have to go through to deploy a mobile app that connects to their enterprise apps. Conversely, many enterprise applications already have web interfaces, so adding a new web UI that happens to be responsive and hence appropriate for mobile devices may have a much shorter adoption path, and less effort required since there’s a single application to design and deploy for any platform: no specialized mobile browser apps versus desktop browser apps. Plus, they’re giving it away for free, with plans to open source it in the future. Greg demoed a UI for an IBM BPM process in the full desktop browser version, then the same form on a phone (simulator). The same features in the full form are available in the mobile version, just resized and reformatted for the smaller screen in either orientation. He showed a bit of the form designer, although I had the sense that this would take a bit more effort than what we saw in the previous two demos but would offer quite a bit more capability. They support IBM BPM and Activiti BPM (which are the two platforms that BP3 supports in its consulting practice) and can be made to work with pretty much any BPMS that has a REST API since those APIs turn out to be surprisingly similar between different BPMS vendors. If you want to try out the Brazos UI toolkit, they have a sandbox where you can try it out running against an Activiti instance. This is quite the opposite in technology strategy from Interneer: I can understand BP3’s motivation for going with responsive UI, as well as the rapid uptake, but can also understand the challenges of a browser-based app when you have spotty connectivity (as I often do when I’m travelling), and they admittedly give up some of the device-specific capabilities.

We’re heading off to dinner, then back with a last demo (which was aborted from this session due to projector difficulties) and a keynote by Jim Sinur before we get down to the serious business of the evening drinks reception.

bpmNEXT 2014 Begins!

We’re at the lovely oceanside Asilomar conference grounds a couple of hours drive south of San Francisco for this year’s bpmNEXT conference. Last year’s inaugural conference was a great experience – I wrote 7,000+ words in two days, if that’s any indication – and this year’s lineup looks like a winner.

This conference is about what’s happening next in BPM (as you might guess by the name): no sales pitches or death by PowerPoint, but a look at the technology directions as seen through demos. It’s also a great opportunity for networking, with a lot of the well-known names in BPM here in person meeting each other face-to-face for a change.

Bruce Silver and Nathaniel Palmer, our hosts and organizers, kicked off the conference and laid out the rules: each session (except for the keynote and a multi-company interoperability demo) is strictly 30 minutes long, with 20 minutes for the demo and 10 for Q&A. Last year, Nathaniel would start to look a bit threatening when the speaker reached their deadline, and everything ran on time.

We have sessions this afternoon and into the evening focused on mobile apps and interfaces, then all day tomorrow and until early afternoon on Thursday on a variety of other BPM topics, so get ready for the firehose.

AWD Advance14: Product Strategy

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.

AWD Advance14: From Workflow To Process Flow

You can tell that a lot of DST’s customers are dragging their feet moving to new technology when there has to be a session on moving from the old-style table-driven workflows to the newer portal and graphical process design. Stephanie Brown and Elaine Garcia of DST presented the possible implementation approaches, the training and consulting services that they offer to help with this, the benefit of bringing in new team members (possibly subject matter experts from the business side) for working with the graphical design tools, and how to build the internal vision and ROI to support the journey.

They discussed a number of strategies for refactoring, some of which require moving from the table-based workflows to processes, others that can be built around existing workflows:

Redo the UI forms using the new forms tool, which provides both a nicer UI and some improved functionality, even against an older workflow.
Replace custom code with functionality that is now part of the baseline product, such as QC sampling and complex date functions.
Automating communications, such as sending an email to a client based on data values.
Managing inbound email to initiate or merge with processes.
Monitoring using the newer dashboards rather than the older BI application.

They wrapped up with a brief mention of Project Alloy, an initiative that they have for mutual fund clients to connect AWD with their TA2000 recordkeeping system. Basically, it’s a set of processes (I assume that this includes UI and other aspects, not just process flows) that embodies best practices for integrating these systems, greatly reducing time to implement.

Since the AWD10 server platform supports both old and new applications, there’s much less urgency behind moving to the new tools (which can be bad) but it also allows a more gradual – and possibly less painful – migration.

While I’m thinking of it, the DST conference organizers have put some thought into the conference logistics: generous lunch and break times, hands-on labs, and an “in case you missed it” breakout track that repeats some of the DST-delivered sessions. Plus, a higher percentage of women on stage than I have seen at any other vendor conference.

AWD Advance 2014: A Morning Of Strategy, Architecture And Customer Experience

I still think that DST is BPM’s best kept secret outside of their own customer base and the mutual fund industry in which they specialize: if I mention DST to most people, even other BPMS vendors, they’ve never heard of them. However, they have the most fiercely loyal customers that I’ve ever seen, in part because Midwest friendliness and generosity permeates their corporate culture and is reflected in how they care about their customers. In 2012, I think I was the first industry analyst ever to attend their annual user conference, and now they invite a few of us to speak alongside their customers and their own team here at AWD Advance. They also have a lot of fun at the conference: last night they hosted a St. Patrick’s Day bash, and tomorrow is John Vaughn’s special treat for the customers: a concert where the band is masked in mystery (even to other senior management) until the event, although he apparently dropped a hint during the keynote and the conference hashtag lit up with guesses.

Although DST has made their mark in back-office transaction processing with origins in imaging and workflow, the functionality in the current AWD10 platform is more like what Forrester calls a Smart Process Application platform: dynamic and collaborative capabilities, analytics-driven recommendations and actions, integration with transactional systems including their TA2000 shareholder recordkeeping system, correspondence management, and more. For many of their existing customers, however, AWD is part of their “business as usual”, and they’re more concerned with keeping thing running smoothly than looking at new functionality; this is starting to change as the consumer market drives toward a more mobile and social experience, but it feels like the uptake for the new functionality is much slower than DST wished it were. One advantage that they have is their huge business process outsourcing business – back in the 90s when I first visited their operation, they processed about 1/3 of all mutual fund transactions in the US, and now they handle health insurance and other verticals – which is a ready recipient for field-testing new features. I had a brief chat with Mike Hudgins, who I heard present last year on microwork, on how they’re rolling that out in the BPO.

The opening keynote for the conference featured Steve Hooley (CEO), John Vaughn (VP Business Process Solutions) and Kyle Mallot (VP Global Insights/Analytics), with a focus on insight, action and results by using big data and analytics to inform processes. They pointed out that we’ve already squeezed out a lot of the inefficiencies in the back office, and that we now need to change the game by offering better customer experiences and deepening customer relationships.

After the keynote, I attended the AWD architecture session where Richard Clark outlined their technology updates: UI standards including jQuery, CSS3 and HTML5; portal functionality and widgets, including mobile support; server updates to allow for a more cloud-like elasticity; additions to REST services; and web services for check processing functions to replace some of their eStub capabilities. A lot of technical detail intended for current system administrators and developers, with a few glimpses of the continuing refactoring of their platform.

I moved over to the product track to see Kari Moeller, Joel Koehler (who provided the screen shots below – thanks Joel!), Brian Simpson and Laura Lawrence show off some use cases for the new(er) capabilities of AWD10. They’re doing a quarterly webinar on this as well, in part to address the issue that I mention above: a lot of current customers just aren’t using the features yet, even though they’ve moved to the new platform. We saw a self-service solution developed by the DST solution consultants based on their experiences with customers, driven by those customers’ customers’ needs: 55% of customers now prefer self-service over calling into a call center (myself included), and 85% will use online functionality to manage their account or relationship. The solution that they demonstrated allows customers to directly manage certain things in their accounts by linking that customer-facing portal directly to AWD: an action on the website such as an address change or account opening kicks off an AWD process to trigger back-office actions, set a timer event for future-dated updates, generate outbound correspondence, or hold for rendezvous with inbound paper documents that require a signature. In addition to allowing customers to initiate transactions, they can also track the transaction – much like courier package delivery tracking – which can significantly reduce calls to the call center. Customers are offered recommendations of other things that they can do, based on what they’ve done in the past and what similar customers have done, bringing analytics into play. The result: a customer online experience that improves customer retention and reduces the load on the back office and call center. Win-win.

Disclosure: DST is my client, and they have paid my travel expenses to be here as well as a speaking fee for my presentation tomorrow. They have not paid me to blog (or tweet), and they have no editorial control over what I write here.

My Spring 2014 BPM Conference Schedule

Last night, a friend asked me about where I’m travelling next, and when I responded “Newark, Philadelphia, San Diego, Orlando and San Francisco”, she assumed that was everything up to the end of May. Alas, that only gets me to the end of March. Here’s the conferences that I’ll be attending or presenting at over the next couple of months:

Kofax Transform, San Diego, March 9-11: I am making a joint presentation with Craig LeClair of Forrester on Planning, Designing and Implementing a Smart Process Application. I was also asked to judge their customer and partner awards, although I won’t be sticking around for the awards ceremony.
DST AWD Advance, Orlando, March 17-19: I’m presenting The Technical Side of Process Excellence, particularly around the use of configurable process-based applications for quick solution delivery.
bpmNEXT, Monterey, March 25-27: I’m attending and blogging, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post. I’ll be in San Francisco for the beginning of that week, and possibly stopping in the South Bay area at the end of the week to visit the Computer History Museum.
IBM Impact, Las Vegas, April 27-30: I’m attending the analyst event at Impact and as much of the show that I can cram in in the short time, because after almost a month without conferences, I’ll be doing two in one week.
Appian World, DC, April 30-May 2: I’m attending after a year away (recently, this always conflicts with IBM Impact).
BPM Portugal, Lisbon, May 8: I’m presenting on incentives for social enterprise, including social BPM. This will be an updated version of the presentation that I gave at the APQC conference last fall, and if you have any case studies to contribute to this, I would love to hear about them.
PegaWorld, DC, June 8-10: Again, one that I’ve missed a few times since it was conflicting with the IRM BPM conference in London, but this year they are a week apart and I’ll be there.
BPM Europe, London, June 16-18: I haven’t yet been added to the agenda for IRM’s annual BPM conference, but I’ve been there the past several years so it’s likely that I’ll be there again.

Hopefully, that’s it for the next four months, although there are always last-minute changes. Let me know if you’ll be nearby or at any of these and want to meet up. It’s a fair bet that I’ll be blogging from each of these as well.

Countdown To #bpmNEXT 2014

The conference that I was most excited to attend last year was bpmNEXT, conceived and executed by Bruce Silver and Nathaniel Palmer: “it’s like DEMO for BPM” is how Bruce original described it to me, and that’s how it turned out. I blogged almost 7,000 words about bpmNEXT and the individual sessions in two days (on an Android tablet, no less), which gives you an idea of the value that I got from it; you can read what I wrote or watch the recorded sessions from 2013 to see for yourself. Of course, a lot of the interesting bits weren’t in the sessions, but in the face-to-face interactions with the world’s BPM afficiandos, many of whom I hadn’t previously met IRL.

This year’s bpmNEXT is coming up on March 25-27, back at Asilomar – a lovely setting, although a bit of a drive from San Francisco – and you can see the list of scheduled presentations here and register here. You have until February 28 to get the early bird pricing, which includes housing and meals.

To be clear, this is an opportunity for learning, networking and collaborating, not selling to customers. Send your people in charge of strategic product direction and innovation, not your usual conference team. If you’re giving a demo, you have the chance to show off your cool new BPM stuff, whether early-stage demo or released product, and get feedback from your peers. If you’re in the audience, you’ll have your mind expanded and your creativity sparked with the mix of new ideas, and have time to discuss them and make some new business connections.

Disclosure: Bruce and Nathaniel have been kind enough to waive the conference portion of my fee, so that I pay only the housing/meals portion plus my own travel expenses. Note that this is one of the few conferences where I pay my own travel expenses to attend (I would be broke, otherwise), so you can take that as my further endorsement of bpmNEXT.

Bosch SI ConnectedWorld: Software for IoT

Following the Bosch ConnectedWorld Day 1 keynotes, we broke out to two streams of sessions: business and technology. I’m at the technology track, where we heard from Jim Morrish of Machina Research on the market evolution from M2M to IoT. He had some great examples of how the early telematics/SCADA market evolved to M2M, and is now becoming the more complex and connected IoT market that includes far more than just industrial machines and applications: corporate IT systems, published data feeds, crowdsourced and social media data, and more. Instead of end-to-end connections between hundreds or thousands of like devices, solutions now need to include millions of heterogenous devices and data sources. These changing requirements ripple through the entire software stack: from communications infrastructure and device management to the applications development and operational environments. Being able to communicate, support devices and manage the data flow are the base functionality required, whereas the application development tools are where we’re seeing the competitive differentiators between solutions. In M2M, it was all about the devices and connectivity; in IoT, those are assumed to be offered as a standard platform, and the application developer is key to to creating flexible device-agnostic applications and providing deep integration to business processes.

The remainder of the track was led by the Bosch methodology and solution architecture team — Dr. Frank Puhlmann, Veronika Brandt and Steffen Gürtler — showing us the Bosch software suite for IoT and how the components within it are assembled into a solution. Puhlmann started out by defining the platform, which includes M2M, BPM and BRM; he stressed that a key differentiator for them is being able to have a tight integration between devices and business processes. He used the example of ACME Cleaners (cue Coyote and Roadrunner), an office cleaning company that has a fleet of robot cleaners. And yes, we had a robot cleaner in the presentation room. It’s a commodity cleaner (iRobot), but integrated with a variety of other devices and processes: motion detectors and scheduling software to determine when to run, but also linked to the customer service information such as contracts. He highlighted some of their partners’ hardware involved in the test solution, including a Cisco router and Vodafone SIM M2M, plus their own motion sensors. He also showed a smartphone app that can turn the cleaner on and off, return it to its dock, and even play sounds. He demonstrated a portal that they created, allowing ACME to monitor status and to control devices remotely, but also to process related contracts and invoices. We also saw the Vodaphone portal that can be used to monitor and control the SIM card connections for each device at a more technical level. The entire stack supporting this includes a UI integrator and forms engine connecting to BPM, BRM and M2M management, and including identity management for security. The development environment is model-based, including BPMN for process models, and tightly integrated with the device management.

Brandt and Gürtler then gave a deeper technical look at the ACME Cleaners scenario implementation. In general, the M2M layer interacts with the device events, capturing information that will be used by the higher-level layers, such as area covered by any individual robot cleaner, which may impact billing amounts. The BPM and BRM layers handle customer and device registration, and invoicing according to the billing rules.

The M2M architecture has a central registry of devices that includes information such as the properties of each device, a standardized container for accessing devices, event subscription and processing, and REST APIs. Pretty much any device with an IP address can be integrated into their architecture fairly easily, even more so it if has a REST API already; the ability to control any device will be specific to what functionality that the device exposes. The BPM suite provides a model-driven environment for creating process models, while Visual Rules provides decision tables and trees for modeling rules and decisions. Bringing these together allows for both process-to-device flows — controlling the device schedule, for example — and device-to-process such as sending maintenance requests, with a common identity management layer to control security and access.

Apologies for the graphics quality: the presentation slides aren’t available yet so I’m making do with some bad shots of the projected screen using my phone, and inserting using WordPress for Android which I apparently haven’t completely figured out.

Effektif: Simple BPM In The Cloud

Ten months ago, Tom Baeyens (creator of jBPM and Activiti) briefed me on a new project that he was working on: Effektif, a cloud-based BPM service that seeks to bridge the gap between simple collaborative task lists and complex IT-driven BPMS. In October, he gave me a demo on the private beta version, with some discussion of what was coming up, and last week he demonstrated the public version that was launched today. With Caberet-inspired graphics on the landing page and a name spelling that could only have been dreamed up by a Belgian influenced by Germans 😉 the site has a minimalistic classiness but packs a lot of functionality in this first version.

We talked about his design inspirations: IFTTT and zapier, which handle data mappings transparently and perform the simplest form of integration workflow; Box and Dropbox, which provide easy content sharing; Trello and Asana, which enable micro-collaboration around individual tasks; and Wufoo, which allows anyone to build online forms. As IFTT has demonstrated, smaller-grained services and APIs are available from a number of cloud services to more easily enable integration. If you bring together ideas about workflow, ad hoc tasks, collaboration, content, forms and integration, you have the core of a BPMS; if you’re inspired by innovative startups that specialize in each of those, you have the foundation for a new generation of cloud BPM. All of this with a relatively small seed investment by Signavio and a very lean development team.

One design goal of Effektif is based on a 5-minute promise: users should be able to have a successful experience within 5 minutes. This is achievable, considering that the simplest thing that you can do in Effektif is create a shared task list, which is no more complex than typing in the steps and (optionally) adding participants to the list or individual tasks. However, rather than competing with popular shared task list services such as Trello and Asana, Effektif allows you to take that task list and grow it into something much more powerful: a reusable process template with BPMN flow control, multiple start event types, and automated script tasks that allow integration with common cloud services. Non-technical users that want to just create and reuse task lists never need to go beyond that paradigm or see a single BPMN diagram, since the functionality is revealed as you move from tasks to processes, but technical people can create more complex flows and add automated tasks.

Within the Effektif interface, there are two main tabs: Tasks and Processes. Tasks is for one-off collaborative task lists, whereas Processes allows you to create a process, which may be a reusable task list or a full BPMN model.

Within Tasks:

The Tasks interface is a simple list of tasks, with a default filter of “Assigned to me”. The user can also select “I’m a candidate”, “Unassigned” or “Assigned to others” as task filters.
Each task is assigned to the creator by default, but can be assigned to another user or have other users added as participants, which will cause the task to appear on their task lists.
Each task can have a description, and can have documents attached to it at any point by any participant, either through uploading or via URL. Since any URL can be added, this doesn’t have to be a “document” per se, but any link or reference. Eventually, there will be direct integration with Google Drive and Box for attachments, but for the next month or two, you have to copy and paste the URL. Although you can upload documents as attachments, this really isn’t meant as a document repository, and the intention is that most documents will reside in an external ECM (cloud or on-premise).
Each task can have subtasks, created by any participants; each of those subtasks is the same as a task, that is, it can have a description, documents and subtasks, but is nested as part of the parent task.
Any participant can add comments to a task or subtask, which appear in the activity stream alongside the task list but only in context: that is, a comment added to a subtask will only appear when that subtask is selected. Other actions, such as task creation and completion, are also shown in the activity stream.
When the subtask assignee checks Done to complete the subtask, they are prompted with the remaining subtasks in that task that are assigned to them. This does not happen when completing a top-level task, which seemed a bit inconsistent, but I probably need to play around with this functionality a bit more. In looking at how processes instances are handled, likely a task is executed as a process instance with its subtasks as activities within that instance, but that distinction probably isn’t clear to (or cared about by) a non-technical user.

Within Processes, the basic process creation looks very much like creating a task list in Tasks, except that you’re creating a reusable process template rather than a one-off task list. In its simplest form, a process is defined as a set of tasks, and a process instance is executed in the same way as a task with the process activities as subtasks. When defining a new process:

Each process has a name. By default, instances of this process will use the same name followed by a unique number.
Each process has a trigger, either manually in Effektif using the Start Process button, or by email to a unique email address generated for that process template.
The activities in the process are initially defined as a task list, where each is either a User Task or Script Task.
Each user task can have a description and be assigned to a user, similar to in the Tasks tab, but can also have a form created for that activity that includes text fields, checkboxes and drop-down selection lists. A key functionality with forms is that defining the form fields at any activity within a process creates process instance variables that can be reused at other activities in the process, including within scripts. In other words, you create the process data model implicitly by designing the UI form.
Each script task allows you to write Javascript code that will be executed in a secure NodeJS environment. Some samples are provided, plus field mapping for mapping instance variables to Javascript variables, and an inline test environment.
Optionally, the activities can be viewed as a BPMN process flow using an embedded, simplified version of the Signavio modeler: the list of tasks is just converted to process activities, and you can then draw connectors between them to define serial logic. XOR gateways can also be added, which automatically adds buttons to the previous activity to select the outbound pathway from the gateway. You can switch between the Activities (task list) and Process Flow (BPMN) views, creating tasks in either view, although I was able to cause some weird behaviors by doing that – my Secret Superpower is breaking other people’s code.
The process is published in order to allow process instances to be started from it.

To create a simple reusable task list template, you just give it a name, enter the activities as a list, and publish. If you want to enhance it later with triggers, forms and script tasks, you can come back and edit it later, and republish.

When running a process instance:

The process is started either by an email or manual trigger, which then creates a task in the assigned user’s task list for the process instance, containing the activities as subtasks. If no process flow was defined, then all activities appear as subtasks; if a flow was defined, then only the next available one is visible.
As with the ad hoc tasks, participants can create new subtasks for this process instance or its activities at execution time.
If gateways were added, then buttons will appear at the step prior to the gateway prompting which path to follow out of the gateway. I’m not sure what happens if the step prior is a script task, e.g., a call to a rules engine to provide the flow logic.

As I played around with Effektif, the similarities and differences between tasks, processes (templates) and process instances started to become more clear, but that’s definitely not part of the 5-minute promise.

I’m not sure of the roadmap for tenanting within the cloud environment and sharing of information; currently they are using a NoSQL database with shards by tenant to avoid bottlenecks, but it’s not clear how a “tenant” is defined or the scope of shared process templates and instances.

Other things on the roadmap:

Importing and exporting process models from the full Signavio modeler, or from other BPMN 2.0-compliant modelers, although only a small subset of activity types are supported: start, end, user task, script task, XOR gateway, plus an implied AND gateway by defining multiple paths out of a task.
Additional start event types, e.g., embeddable form, triggers from ECM systems such as triggering a workflow when a document is added to a folder.
Google Drive/Box integration for content.
Salesforce integration for content and triggers.
Common process patterns built in as wizards/templates, allowing users to deploy with simple parameterization (and learn BPMN at the same time).

Effektif is not targeting any particular industry verticals, but are positioned as a company-wide BPM platform for small companies, or as a departmental/team solution for support processes within larger companies. A good example of this is software development: both the Effektif and Signavio teams are using it for managing some aspects of their software development, release and support processes.

There will be three product editions, available directly on the website or (for the Enterprise version) through the Signavio sales force:

Collaborate, providing shared task list functionality and document sharing. Free for all users.
Team Workflow, adding process flows (BPMN modeling) and connectors to Salesforce.com, Google Drive and a few other common cloud services. The first five users are free, then paid for more than five.
Enterprise Process Management, adding advanced integration including with on-premise systems such as SAP and Oracle, plus analytics. That will be a paid offering for all users, and likely significantly more than the Team Workflow edition due to the increased functionality.

I don’t know the final pricing, since the full functionality isn’t there yet: Box, Google Drive and Salesforce integration will be released in the next month or two (currently, you still need to copy and paste the URL of a document or reference into Effektiv, and those systems can’t yet automatically trigger a workflow), and the enterprise integration and analytics will be coming later this year.

Go ahead and sign up: it only takes a minute and doesn’t require any information except your name and email address. If you want to hear more about Effektif, they are holding webinars on February 3rd (English) and 6th (German).

Social Media Meets Social Collaboration. Or Not.

My fellow Enterprise Irregular Susan Scrupski posted last month on the split between enterprise initiatives in social media (external-facing marketing) and social collaboration (mostly internal work production and knowledge sharing) – apparently the number of organizations actually integrating these efforts is near-zero. I don’t find this particular surprising, since the people involved and the purposes of the initiatives are quite different, but it doesn’t bode well for efforts to directly connect internal business processes to customers via social media. I started to incorporate themes of linking external social presence into core business processes (recorded screencast here) a couple of years ago in my presentations and writing, based on my own experiences as well as those of my clients. However, when I talk about that Zipcar/Twitter example today, I still get a lot of “wow” reactions in the audience: for most organizations, the idea that social media can be directly integrated as a near-real-time customer interaction channel seems like science fiction. And even for those that do see social media as a customer engagement channel, it often has serious limitations: as soon as you actually need to do a “transaction”, the social media team has to hand off to an operations team, usually requiring that the customer restart their interaction over again through a different channel.

Many organizations are still struggling with the idea of internal social collaboration. Although the software functionality for the social enterprise is robust, and has become integrated with line-of-business functionality such as in BPM and ERP systems, I’m still working with many traditional industries, where managers still want to know exactly how how long people spend on break, and certainly don’t trust them enough to enable on-demand collaboration features in their systems. Although, of course, the workers do collaborate: they just do it outside the systems, creating hidden business processes that provide the collaborative and dynamic aspects using (primarily) email.

This is more than just an outside-in realignment, although that’s a necessary starting point: there’s a combination of technology and corporate culture that needs to allow for the direct connection of external social media and internal social collaboration.