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Low code and case management discussion with @TIBCO

I’m speaking on a webinar sponsored by TIBCO on November 9th, along with Roger King (TIBCO’s senior director of product management and strategy, and Austin Powers impressionist extraordinaire) and Nicolas Marzon (TIBCO’s director of strategic enablement group). From their registration page:

Supercharge your digital transformation – When low code meets case management

While digital transformation is likely on your company’s agenda, the demand for ever more enterprise apps is not slowing down. How can you both transform and meet this development need?

Process-centric applications that run your business involve content, events, decisions, and automation. Knowledge workers benefit from environments that integrate all of these capabilities in a case management paradigm, which combines automation with human reasoning. And new low-code development platforms will let your business users configure their own case management apps to meet their situational or strategic needs.

This is not a structured presentation or TIBCO demo: instead, I’ll kick off with a couple of level-setting slides on case management and low code platforms, then lead a discussion with Roger and Nicolas on a variety of issues facing us with low code and case management. Some of the things on my list of potential topics:

What are the business and technology drivers pushing us towards low code?
How do we reconcile citizen developers’ situational applications with a broader architecture and design vision?
How are low code platforms and their developers supported by a center of excellence without squashing innovation?
How do we handle governance of low code apps to make sure that they don’t do anything that might negatively impact privacy or performance?
What sort of organizational links do we need to bring together microservices developers and low code platforms?

If you have some other topics that you’d like to hear us discuss, please add them as comments below and I’ll try to work them in. Sign up for the webinar at the registration link above and join in on November 9th.

I’m also working on a couple of white papers for them on case management and low code, which is coming up in pretty much every business and technical discussion that I have these days. At least one of those papers will be available by the time of the webinar, with the other available shortly after.

Citizen development with @FlowForma and @JohnRRymer

I attended a webinar today sponsored by FlowForma and featuring John Rymer of Forrester talking about low-code platforms and citizen developers. Rymer made a distinction between three classes of citizen developers, or rather, people who can benefit from rapid application development using low-code tools: line-of-business developers, business developers, and power users. I would argue that LOB developers are not really citizen developers even though they can benefit greatly from using low-code tools, since they are typically professional developers who use a variety of technical platforms: as Rymer later stated, there are low-code platforms for professional developers, and ones for business developers. I like Gartner’s definition of citizen developer instead, which highlights the non-professional developer aspect:

A citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT. In the past, end-user application development has typically been limited to single-user or workgroup solutions built with tools like Microsoft Excel and Access. However, today, end users can build departmental, enterprise and even public applications using shared services, fourth-generation language (4GL)-style development platforms and cloud computing services.

That being said, things are a bit murky still in the low-code market, and Rymer does well to distinguish between the two types of low-code platforms:

Those for professional developers who are looking for rapid application development platforms to speed their delivery cycle: although they could create the applications using traditional coding techniques, it just takes too long. Low-code BPM products in this segment, according to Rymer, include Appian, Bizagi and PNMSoft, and marry fast visual development with flexibility and deployment control.
Those for business developers and power users – what I consider to be the true citizen developers – who are not capable of developing applications using more technical tools, and possibly would end up a bit confused even with the low-code platforms that are targeted at professional developers. The business developer low-code platforms are visual tools but have less flexibility and many fewer options to provide a simpler “no-code” experience. In the BPM space, Rymer includes FlowForma, KiSSFLOW and Nintex in this category: these products also tend to self-identify as “workflow” rather than full BPM suites.

Regardless of the platform, the key is that all of these types of developers need to be moved off unmanaged tools such as Microsoft Excel, and onto low-code platforms where their work can be properly supported, managed and reused.

Neil Young, FlowForma’s CEO (no, not THAT Neil Young Winking smile ) took over to talk about how their product approaches the business developer/power user market, and some of their customer success stories. Their tool, based on Microsoft Office 365, combines forms, simple workflows, document generation and collaboration in a platform that allows people to get up to speed in day or two and start creating their own applications.

The discussion at the end had an interesting bit on the changing role of business analysts, who typically fall into the power user category from Rymer’s earlier categorization, although I see a lot of these who have transferred from IT groups are are really business developers. In the past, BAs work has been focused on creating written requirements, whereas low-code platforms allow them to create a working prototype as part of the requirements. There was a question from an attendee on how to identify citizen developers within your business: Rymer said to look for people who are now solving problems with spreadsheets or databases, who are probably operational managers. When I do a walkthrough at an enterprise client, I always look for the spreadsheets being used in the general workflow: these identify areas for process/system improvement, and also pinpoint the problem-solvers who are creating these tools and could easily become citizen developers.

If you’re interested in listening to a replay, FlowForma will likely have that up on their site within a day or so. Update: unfortunately, the original registration link disappeared from their site, and they don’t seem to have a replay video published..

Young gave me a full Flowforma product briefing several months ago, showing how forms and workflows are created, what their in-process collaboration looks like, and document generation. I’m not a Sharepoint or Office 365 expert, so not sure how much of this is native functionality versus their additions. At that time, and again in this webinar, he discussed the three categories of problems that they solve: everyday processes, “dark” processes, and collaborative decisions. There’s definitely an overlap with many of the low-code case management tools, in part due to the strong content management capabilities. I’ve attached my snaps from the briefing below; although they’re a few months out of date, they give an idea of the platform capabilities. You can sign up with them for a 30-day trial if you want to try it out.

Financial decisions in DMN with @JanPurchase

Trisotech and their partner Lux Magi held a webinar today on the role of decision modeling and management in financial services firms. Jan Purchase of Lux Magi, co-author (with James Taylor) of Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN, gave us a look at why decision management is important for financial services. One of the key places for applying decision management is in compliance, which is all about decision-making: assessing risks, applying regulations, sharing data, and ensuring that rules are applied in a uniform manner. There are a lot of other areas where decision management can be applied, and potentially automated where this is a high volume/speed of transactions with a non-zero cost of errors. Decision management lets you make decisions explicit: it separates them from other business software to increase transparency and agility, and makes it easier for business people to understand what decisions are being applied and how that links to overall business goals. In particular, if decisions are automated with a decision management system, business people can quickly make changes to decision-making when compliance regulations change, with a much smaller IT involvement that would be required to modify legacy business systems.

There is a great deal of value in modeling decisions even if they are embedded within business systems and won’t be automated using a decision management system: decision models provide a way for business people to specify how systems should behave based on business data. Luckily, there is now a standard for decision modeling: Decision Model and Notation (DMN). This notation allows a decision to be modeled as a Decision Requirements Diagram (DRD) of the sub-decisions and knowledge sources that are required to reach that decision, and the possible paths to take in order to reach the decision. Within each of the decision nodes in the DRD, a definition of the decision can be specified using a decision table or the Friendly Enough Expression Language (FEEL), which may then be linked to an automated decision management system.

We then saw what a decision model looks like in Trisotech’s DMN Modeler, which allows for a standard DRD to be created, then augmented with additional information such as decision makers and owners. Purchase walked us through a number of the features of DMN as well as specific features of Trisotech’s tool, including analysis of decisions relative to Bruce Silver’s Method and Style best practices, and decision animation.

If you know a bit about DMN already but want to understand some of the practical aspects of working with it in financial services, I assume that a replay of the webinar will be available at the original registration link or the Lux Magi event page.

International BPM conference 2018 headed down under

The international BPM conference for academics and researchers is headed back to Australia next year, September 9-14 in Sydney, hosted by the University of New South Wales. I’ve attended the conference a few times, and always come away at least a little bit smarter, and having met more great BPM enthusiasts. I was even invited to give a keynote one year, which was a great honour.

This year, the conference has a new program structure with three tracks:

Foundations
Engineering
Management

You can read more about the tracks here, particularly that each track invites papers based on different research methods. Although many of us who work in industry or as analysts don’t do the type of research that would allow participation in the Foundations or Engineering tracks, the Management track welcomes papers based on empirical observation. The call for papers for all tracks is open now until March.

Citrix Productivity Panel – the future of work

I had a random request from Citrix to come out to a panel event that they were holding in downtown Toronto — not sure what media lists I’m on, but fun to check out to events I wouldn’t normally attend.

The premise is that it was a panel of one millennial, one gen X and one boomer discussing how their attitudes towards work and technology:

Anna Fitzpatrick, Senior Millennial Correspondent
Dr. Mary Donohue, Founder & CEO Donohue Learning Technologies
Charles Harnick, Mediator & Arbitrator

This was moderated by Michael Murphy, VP & Country Manager, Citrix Canada.

Donohue is a social scientist, and she started with the definitions of these age divisions (I fall on the cusp of boomer and gen X, although I act like a millennial).

The focus is really on how technology enables different business models (Citrix is, after all, a technology company), and we heard from the panelists about how Twitter, mobile phones and other technologies have levelled the playing field for small businesses regardless of age, gender, race, location and other factors: it’s now possible for your services to compete with bigger companies.

Harnick (a former Ontario Attorney General and politician) commented on how it’s necessary to invest in the education of the workforce: training people to be able to do the work required, mentoring, and taking advantage of the different skills that a non-traditional degree can bring to a traditional workplace.

Donohue talked about the necessity for developing soft skills, since “everything else can be replaced by AI”, which might be a somewhat naive view of AI capabilities. Harnick agreed that although STEM education is critical, there has to be more than just the technological skills for success — entry-level jobs are disappearing in the face of automation in many different industries.

Fitzpatrick talked about the gig lifestyle for work, and admitted that although it’s more easily enabled by technology, a lot of millennials don’t really want to be working several precarious gigs, but would prefer to have full-time regular employment.

Donohue had some really interesting comments on how you have to understand someone’s generation and their abilities with different communication media in order to really understand how to communicate with them and what they are getting out of things that you communicate with them. I don’t agree with her characterization purely along generational lines, since in my experience, older generations who are disrupted from their status quo will adapt quickly to newer communication modes.

There was a discussion on internet security and privacy, and different views that different generations have about the issues and practices. Again, I don’t think that security practices are necessarily generational, but much more about an individual’s experience; privacy is a different story, with a bigger intentional digital footprint being left (in general) by younger generations, although the unintentional footprint of everyone who uses social media is fast catching up. An audience member commented on how security and privacy education needs to start in high school or earlier; I suspect that while the younger generation needs some lessons on privacy, the older needs to hone their security skills.

This was pretty lightweight on both the social science and technology, although Donohue had some points worth considering and I’ll be checking out her TEDx talk.

ABBYY Technology Summit 2017

Welcome back after a nice long summer break!

Last year, I gave the keynote at ABBYY’s Technology Summit, and I’m headed back to San Diego this year to just do the analyst stuff: attend briefings and hang out at the conference sessions. This will give me a chance to do more writing than when I’m presenting; last year, I only had time to blog about one session at ABBYY’s conference.

You can find out more about the summit and register to attend here, and more about ABBYY and their intelligent capture products here. Looks like some interesting sessions, including those on improving capture and recognition with machine learning.

Readers may have noticed that I’ve severely curtailed my conference travel in the past year or two. Large conferences just aren’t good value for my time, especially for vendors that have a wide variety of products outside my area of interest: when I attend a conference, I’m giving up billable time to be there so need to gain useful information or make valuable contacts to make it worth my while. I will almost always attend a client’s conference even if I’m not speaking, or a smaller conference that looks interesting, or one in an interesting location. As described on my Legal page, a vendor must cover my travel expenses to have me attend their conference but doesn’t provide any other remuneration unless I’m also giving a presentation at the conference.

Insurance case management: SoluSoft and OpenText

It’s the last session of the last morning at OpenText Enterprise World 2017 — so might be my last post from here if I skip out on the one session that I have bookmarked for late this afternoon — and I’m sitting in on Mike Kremer of OpenText and Kiran Thakrar of SoluSoft showing SoluSoft’s Active Client Management for Insurance, built on OpenText’s Process Suite and case management. SoluSoft originally built this capability on earlier OpenText products (Global 360) but have moved to the new low-code platform. Their app can be used out of the box, or can be configured to suit a particular environment.

The goal of Active Client Management for Insurance is to provide a 360 view of the client, including data from a variety of sources (typically systems of record for policy administration or claims), content from any repository, open tasks and pending actions, checklists and ad hoc notes. It includes the entire customer lifecycle, from onboarding and underwriting, through policy administration and claims; basically, it’s user work management and CRM in one.

The solution is built on the core of Process Suite, using the full entity modeling AppWorks-style low-code development. It also includes process intelligence for analytics, Capture Center for document capture, and Streamserve for customer communication management. Above all of these OpenText building blocks, SoluSoft has built a client management solution accelerator that (I believe) they can use for a variety of vertical applications; below the OpenText layer is a service bus integration to line of business systems. For insurance, they’ve created a number of business processes and request types corresponding to different parts of the business, such as processing a new application, amending a policy, or initiating a claim; each of these can be configured for the specific customer’s terminology, or disabled if they don’t require specific functions. It’s not completely clear, however, how much of the functionality of other insurance systems might be replaced by this rather than augmented: clearly, the core policy administration system stays as the system of record, but an underwriting or claims system workflow might be replaced by this functionality. Having done this a few times with clients that use systems such as Guidewire, I have to say that this is a non-trivial architectural exercise to decide what parts of the flow happen where, and how to properly interact with other systems.

At the heart is a generic capture-driven workflow: scan, capture, index, data entry, process, approve, review, fulfill. The names of these can be aliased for different vertical applications — their example is that “processing” becomes “underwriting” — and steps can be skipped for a specific request type. Actions that can be performed at any of these work steps are configured using checklists. Ad hoc processes can be attached to steps in this master flow, either a single-step task or a more complex flow, and be executed before, after or in parallel to the pre-defined work step. Ad hoc processes can be created at runtime, and secondary request processes created for certain case types. The ability to make any of these configuration changes is restricted by role security. Relationships between clients, policies, brokers, claims, etc. are managed using folders for customers, policies and advisers, driven by entity modeling in Process Suite (AppWorks Low Code); this ability to establish relationships between all of these types of entities is critical for providing the complete view of the customer. They also have integrated iHub analytics for showing case statistics and workload analysis, as well as more complex analysis of risk or profitability for specific customer groups or policy types.

Although SoluSoft built some of this in custom code. a lot of the application is built directly in the OpenText low code development environment provided by Process Suite. This means that it’s fast to configure or even do some basic customizations, with the caveats that I mentioned earlier about deciding on where some parts of the workflow might happen when you have existing LOB systems that already do that. It also provides them with native mobile support through AppWorks, rather than having to build a separate mobile application.

We saw the version focused on insurance, but they also have flavors for pensions, financial services, government, healthcare and education. However, it appears that there is an existing legacy of the Global 360-based application, and it’s not clear how long it will take for this new AppWorks version to make its way into the market.

Getting started with OpenText case management

I had a demo from Simon English at the OpenText Enterprise World expo earlier this week, and now he and Kelli Smith are giving a session on their dynamic case management offering. English started by defining case management:

Management of dynamic, unstructured processes
Processes are driven by events or human interactions to support faster, more accurate decisions
Decisions are tied to content and the case directs that content to the right conclusion

In their terms, a case is a transaction that is “opened” and “closed” over a period of time: resolve a problem, settle a claim, or fulfill a request. There may be many different types of participants required to complete the case, and a variety of content and data involved.

Similar to the approach of other vendors, OpenText equates “case management” with “vertical application development” to a certain extent, and getting to case handling quickly needs a blueprint to quick-start solution development. To that end, they provide an accelerator as part of Process Suite that includes a pre-defined case model and entities to provide a starting point for developing a case management application, particularly incident management or service requests. Essentially, it’s a sample app/template, albeit a well-structured one that can easily be modified for actual solutions; they have no illusions that this is going to be an out-of-the-box solution for anyone, but rather a guide for people creating new case management applications so that they don’t need to start from scratch.

If you refer back to the more complete description of AppWorks Low Code that I gave in the previous post, they have defined entities, forms, layouts and a case lifecycle that fit a wide variety of request-style case management applications.

Smith then gave us a demonstration of People Center — similar to what we saw her do on the main stage on Tuesday — and discussed how they used the case management accelerator as a starting point for developing the People Center application. They used some parts of the template pretty much as is — such as the request creation form — but made it specific to HR management and extended the capabilities to suit, including a dashboard specific to each role. Checklists and options are specific to the HR application, but as discussed in previous posts, those will persist through an upgrade of the underlying People Center application.

She also walked us through the case management accelerator in the development environment, showing the fairly complete set of entities, forms, layouts, action bars, lists, relationships, rules, email templates, BPM processes, roles and other objects, as well as how easy it is to modify them for your own use. For any partners in the audience, or even customer developers, this will resonate as a method of quickly creating a fully-customized application based on the template that addresses a specific vertical functionality.

OpenText Process Suite becomes AppWorks Low Code

“What was formerly known as Process Suite is AppWorks Low Code, since it has always been an application development environment and we don’t want the focus to be on a single technology within in.” – Dana Khoyi, architect of OpenText’s Process Suite

That pretty much sums up the biggest BPM positioning/branding announcement at OpenText Enterprise World 2017 this week. BPM is dead, long live low-code application development? Note that AppWorks is the name used for all OpenText developer tools; the technical developer APIs and access points, plus this low code product which is really a separate product.

Khoyi and Kelli Smith (who did the main stage People Center demo on Tuesday) led a session on the last day of Enterprise World to show how ~~Process Suite~~ AppWorks is used to create applications, starting with defining composite entities (business objects made up of multiple pieces of data), then UI constructs including forms, dashboards and lists. Because process and content are built into the environment, there are easy building blocks for content lifecycle, activity flow and history. Declarative rules are supported — triggered on conditions, events or user actions — and dropping out to a full process model for more complex flows and events. They also have a development framework for building customizable applications that persists customizations separately from the application and merges them at runtime, allowing a new version of the core application to be installed without discarding the previous customizations, although obviously you’d want to test and might require some minor retrofits.

Application development starts by defining the core entity for the application (think process or case instance class) then add properties (data fields) and building blocks: forms to edit and display those properties (as well as built-in properties such as state); lists that can be worklists or reporting artifacts; and layouts, which are essentially the application UI screens and can include the previously-created forms plus actions, breadcrumbs, and related content. Data/content security and access/update conflicts are handled automatically on the forms/layouts based on underlying security definitions. Apps that are created can be published immediately to run; these can be moved as packages between testing and production environments although it’s not clear that there’s any versioning or automation around that, so likely some manual governance is required.

Other building blocks that can be added to an application include:

A history log that maintains a complete audit trail of everything done during the instance including field-level data changes
A discussion for collaborative chat/comments on an instance
Content, which can be files/folders that are attached to the case instance using a local document store or other content store via a connector or CMIS, or a businses workspace within Content Server (using Extended ECM) which stores the content in CS and allows access from either environment while syncing properties between them.
Email templates that provide a form letter email capability for inbound/outbound email associated with the case
Three ways of managing work:

Lifecycle, which is a state machine-oriented view (i.e., milestones and the actions required to move between states) for a simple case workflow
BPM, for a full drop to the BPMN editor for complex process flows
Action flow, which is a simple sequence flow

Mobile app creation
Entity relationships

There’s a lot of stuff in here, and we didn’t see it all in this short session, but looks like a pretty robust environment for low-code development. Khoyi stated explicitly that this is becoming the development for all OpenText products, replacing the workflow capabilities in Content Server and Documentum.

OpenText Process Suite Roadmap

Usually I live-blog sessions at conferences, publishing my notes at the end of each, but here at OpenText Enterprise World 2017, I realized that I haven’t taken a look at OpenText Process Suite (formerly Cordys, from the 2013 acquisition) for a while, and needed to chew over a couple of sessions to get the whole picture. There’s some significant repositioning happening with Process Suite becoming rebranded as part of their low-code development environment AppWorks, or possibly it’s better to say that Process Suite is becoming the AppWorks developer platform: something that follows naturally from the Cordys history.

Cordys has been on my radar since 2006 when I linked to a post that Bruce Silver wrote about them, then a couple of months later I had a chance to get a more in-depth briefing. At that time, I commented on how they had a pretty complete process application development environment for creating what we were still calling mashups; now this just falls under low-code app dev. By 2008, Forrester had them classified as integration-centric BPM, although many saw that their strong human-centric capabilities defied this categorization. I had another look at Cordys in 2010 at a conference in Oslo, at which time it was positioned as a SaaS-only offering that was tightly integrated with the Google Apps Marketplace; this was possibly due to the injection of the Process Factory DNA when Jon Pyke (formerly of Staffware) joined Cordys after his time starting up Process Factory. By 2013, when OpenText acquired Cordys, it was positioned as a cloud-based platform for creating process-centric applications, although at the time I raised the issue (as did others) of having multiple competing BPM platforms within OpenText. It appears that OpenText would really like their customers to move off the old Metastorm and Global 360 implementations and onto Process Suite, but like most large enterprise vendors with a broad portfolio, they are not sunsetting any of these other products, just not spending a lot of time enhancing them.

OpenText is now using the term Process Automation rather than BPM, with the message shifting to process innovation as part of digital transformation. Process automation needs to be easier (low/no-code, templates, reusability, pre-built apps), smarter (data-driven, IoT, social, sentiment, RPA, AI) and engaging (integrate as part of ecosystem, focus on customer experience). And, as I mentioned earlier, they are repositioning BPM as just part of the larger low-code application development platform, a move that we’ve been seeing from most other BPM vendors over the past few years. This is a move seen as essential for citizen developers and long-tail applications, but is often the bane of more technical developers who want to just write code that can call BPM functionality, not have a monolithic and opaque proprietary development environment. OpenText is providing both options, allowing citizen developers to use low-code methods, while technical developers can use more traditional coding techniques as required.

This week at Enterprise Week, I had the chance to sit in on a few sessions, including the BPM roadmap, low-code application development, the process automation customer market landscape, and integrating analytics with process; I also had the chance to get a couple of excellent demos on People Center (an HR app built on Process Suite) as well as using Process Suite to create other case management applications.

The release later in 2017 will expand the use cases of AppWorks from simple, isolated applications to more comprehensive apps that take advantage of the newly-integrated case and process platform. More advanced analytics will be integrated, with better dashboards and reports, and the foundations laid for IoT and predicitive analytics. By next year, there will be more pre-built applications (similar to People Center) and an applications marketplace, plus more intelligence such as sentiment analysis, cognitive input and RPA. They will also have rolled out support for the complete set of developer personas, from novice citizen developer to technical ninja. Content services are already integrated using Extended ECM for Process Server, the same type of connector that they used to add content to external applications such as SAP.

They’re working at a development style that allows for pre-built applications to be configured and extended by customers while maintaining upgradability; this is pretty critical for applications such as People Center, where you want the customers to create their own checklists and integrate to their own HRIS, but still be able to install the latest version of People Center without breaking that, and requires that guardrails be established and followed. They are also creating templates such as the current dynamic case management, which is really just sample/starter code that can be used by a partner or developer as a starting point but is not intended to be maintained by OpenText.

I ended Wednesday at a session on connecting analytics to process, which rounds out the capabilities. The OpenText Analytics Suite (from the Actuate acquisition, and including the new Magellan offering/branding) is separate from the Process Suite, but there are obvious connections between analytics and process in general: extracting insights from process data, and automating processes based on the results of analytics. The Analytics Suite includes business intelligence services (iHub) that provide enterprise-level analytics and visualization, with the optional addition of data discovery (Big Data Analytics) and text analysis (InfoFusion). The robust API capabilities in iHub allow analytics to be tied in directly to Process Suite or any other application; like process, analytics are ubiquitous and need to be easily integrated across other products and applications. Magellan, as we heard, is a pre-wired set of capabilities from the Analytics Suite that is focused around machine learning, combining data discovery, reporting and dashboarding, text analysis, large-scale data processing, and predictive analytics. This is built on Apache Spark, leveraging Hadoop, and is packaged and supported by OpenText.

We saw a demo of the general capabilities of the Analytics Suite — looked pretty nice, although I’m not the analytics geek in the family — then saw some examples of how process can be integrated with analytics. In one scenario, a low rating provided by a customer on a taxi app causes a customer service process to be kicked off to follow up on the problem with the customer, which is amazingly similar (although much more automated) as a Zipcar experience that I still talk about as an example of customer experience.

I’ll be back at Enterprise World for the last day tomorrow to see a few of the remaining BPM sessions. There’s still a lot that isn’t completely clear about high-level strategy for the complete portfolio of OpenText process-related products — such as how the document-centric workflow in Documentum are going to fit into the mix — but at least I feel like I’m starting to scratch the surface.