bpmNEXT 2014 Wednesday Afternoon 1: Mo’ Models

Denis Gagne of Trisotech was back after lunch at bpmNEXT demonstrating socializing process change with their BPMN web modeler. He showed their process animation feature, which allows you to follow the flow through a process and see what happens at each step, and view rich media that has been attached at any given step to explain that step. He showed a process for an Amazon order, where each step had a slideshow or video attached to show the actual work that was being performed at that step; the tool supports YouTube, Slideshare, Dropbox and a few others natively, plus any URL as an attachment to any element in the process. The animated process can be referenced by a URL, allowing it to be easily distributed and socialized. This provides a way for people to learn more about the process, and can be used as an employee training tool or a customer experience enhancement. Even without the rich media enhancements, the process animation can be used to debug processes and find BPMN logical errors (e.g., deadlocks, orphan branches) by allowing the designer to walk through the process and see how the tokens are processed through the model – most modeling tools only check that the BPMN is syntactically correct, not for more complex logical errors that can result in unexpected and unwanted scenarios. Note that this is different from process simulation (which they also offer), which is typically used to estimate performance based on aggregate instances.

Bruce Silver took a break from moderating to do a demo together with Stephan Fischli and Antonio Palumbo of itp commerce on wizard-based generation of “good BPMN” that they’ve done through their BPMessentials collaboration for BPMN training and certification. Bruce’s book BPMN Method and Style as well as his courses attempt to teach good BPMN, where the process logic is evident from the printed diagram in spite of things that can tend to confuse a reader, such as hierarchical modeling forms. He uses a top-down methodology where you identify the start and end states of a process instance, then decompose the process into 6-10 steps where each is an activity aligned with the process instance (i.e., no multi-instance activities), and enumerate the possible end states of each activity if there is more than one so that end states within subprocesses can be matched to gateways that immediately follow the subprocesses. This all takes a bit of a developer’s mindset that’s typically not seen in business analysts who might be creating BPMN models, meaning that we can still end up with spaghetti process models even in BPMN. Bruce walked through an order-to-cash scenario, then Stephan and Antonio took over to demonstrate how their tool creates a BPMN model based on a wizard that walks through the steps of the BPMN method and style: first the process start and (one or more) end states; then a list of the major steps, where each is named, the end states enumerated and (optionally) the performer identified; then the activity-end state pairs are listed so that the user can specify the target (following step), which effectively creates the process flow diagram; then, each activity can be expanded as a subprocess by listing the child activities and the end states; finally, the message flows and lanes are specified by stating which activities have incoming and outgoing message flows. The wizard then creates the BPMN process model in the itp commerce Visio tool where all of the style rules are enforced. Without doubt, this creates better BPMN, although specifying a branching process model via a list of activities and end states might not be much more obvious than creating the process model directly. I know that the itp commerce and some other BPMN modeling tools can also run a check on a BPMN model to check for violations of the style rules; I assume that detecting and fixing the rule violations from a model is just another way of achieving the same goal.

Last up before the afternoon break was Gero Decker of Signavio to demonstrate combining process modeling and enterprise architecture. Signavio’s only product is their process modeler – used to model, collaborate, publish and implement models – which means that they typically deal with process designers and process centers of excellence. However, they are finding that they are now running into EA modelers as they start to move into process architecture and governance, and application owners for application lifecycle management. EA modelers have to deal with the issues of whether to use a unified tool with a single object repository for all modeling and unified model governance, or multiple best of breed tools where metamodels can be synchronized and may be slaved between tools. Signavio is pushing the second alternative, where their tool integrated with or overlays other tools such as SAP Solution Manager and leanIX. Signavio has added ArchiMate open standard enterprise architecture model types to their tool for EA modeling, creating linkages and tracing from ArchiMate objects to BPMN models. Gero demonstrated what the ArchiMate models look like in Signavio, then how processes in leanIX can be directly linked to Signavio process models as well as having applications from the EA portfolio available as performers to specify in a Signavio process model. Creating of process models in Signavio that use applications from the portfolio then show up (via automated synchronization) in leanIX as references to that application. He also showed an integration with Effektif for approving changes to the process model in Signavio, comparing the before and after versions of the flow, since there is a pluggable connector to Signavio from Effektif processes. Connections to other tools could be built using the Signavio REST API. Nice integration between process models and application portfolio models in separate tools, as well as the model approval workflow.

bpmNEXT 2014: BPMN MIWG Demo

The BPMN Model Interchange Working Group is all about (as you might guess from the name) interchanging BPMN models between different vendors’ products: something that OMG promised with the BPMN standard, but which never actually worked out of the box due to contradictions in the standard and misinterpretations by some vendors. To finish off Wednesday morning at bpmNEXT, we have a live demo involving 12 different tools with participants in different locations, with Denis Gagne of Trisotech (who chairs the working group) and Falko Menge of camunda (who heads up the test automation subgroup) on the stage, a few others here on the sidelines, some at the OMG meeting in Reston, and some in their offices in France and Poland.

To start, different lanes of the process were designed by four different people on IBM Blueworks Live, Activiti, camunda and W4; each then exported their process models and saved to Dropbox. Denis switched back and forth between the different screens (they were all on a Google Hangout) to show us what was happening as the proceeded, and we could see the notifications from Dropbox as the different files were added. In the second stage, Bonitasoft was used to augment the Blueworks Live model, itp-commerce edited the Activiti model, and Signavio edited the camunda model. In the third stage, ADONIS was used to merge together the lanes created in several of the models (I lost track of which ones) into a single process model, and Yaoqiang used to merge the Signavio and camunda models. Then, the Trisiotech Visio BPMN modeler was used to assemble the ADONIS and Yaoqiang models into the final model with multiple pools. At the end, the final model was imported into a number of different tools: the Trisotech web modeler, the Oracle BPM modeler, the bpmn.io environment from camunda, and directly into to the W4 execution engine (without passing through a modeling environment). Wow.

The files exchanged were BPMN XML files, and the only limitations of which tool to use when was that some only support a single pool so had to be used at the earlier stages where each tool was only modeling a single lane or pool. This is how BPMN was supposed to work, but the MIWG has found some number of inconsistencies with the standard and also some issues with the vendors’ tools that had to be corrected.

They have developed a number of test cases that cover the descriptive and analytic classes within BPMN, and automated tools to test the outcome of different vendors’ modelers. Over 20 BPMN modelers have been tested for import, export and roundtrip capabilities; if you’re a BPMS vendor supporting BPMN 2.0 (or claiming to), you should be on this list because there are a lot of us who just aren’t going to write our own XSLT to translate your models into something that can be read by another tool. If you’re a process designer using a BPMS, shame your vendor into participating because it creates a more flexible and inclusive environment for your design and modeling efforts.

This is hugely valuable work that they’re doing in the working group; note that you don’t have to be an OMG member to get involved, and the BPMN MIWG would love to have others join in to help make this work even better.

We’re off for lunch and a break now, then back for six more sessions this afternoon. Did I mention how awesome bpmNEXT is?

bpmNEXT 2014 Wednesday Morning: Cloud, Synthetic APIs and Models

I’m not going to say anything about last night, but it’s a bit of a subdued crowed here this morning at bpmNEXT. Smile

We started the day with Tom Baeyens of Effektif talking about cloud workflow simplified. I reviewed Effektif in January at the time of launch and liked the simple and accessible capabilities that it offers; Tom’s premise is that BPM is just as useful as email, and it needs to be just as simple to use as email so that we are not reliant on a handful of power users inside an organization to make them work. To do this, we need to strip out features rather than add features, and reduce the barriers to trying it out by offering it in the cloud. Inspired by Trello (simple task management) and IFTTT (simple cloud integration, which basically boils down every process to a trigger and an action), Effektif brings personal DIY workflow to the enterprise that also provides a bridge to enterprise process management through layers of functionality. Individual users can get started building their own simple workflows to automate their day-to-day tasks, then more technical resources can add functionality to turn these into fully-integrated business processes. Tom gave a demo of Effektif, starting with creating a checklist of items to be completed, with the ability to add comments, include participants and add attachments to the case. There have been a few changes since my review: you can use Markdown to format comments (I think that understanding of Markdown is very uncommon in business and may not be well-adopted as, for example, a TinyMCE formatted text field); cases can now to started by a form as well as manually or via email; and Google Drive support is emerging to support usage patterns such as storing an email attachment when the email is used to instantiate the case. He also talked about some roadmap items, such as migrating case instances from one version of a process definition to another.

Next up was Stefan Andreasen of Kapow (now part of Kofax) on automation of manual processes with synthetic APIs – I’m happy for the opportunity to see this because I missed seeing anything about Kapow during my too-short trip to the Kofax Transform conference a couple of weeks ago. He walked through a scenario of a Ferrari sales dealership who looks up SEC filings to see who sold their stock options lately (hence has some ready cash to spend on a Ferrari), and narrow that down with Bloomberg data on age, salary and region to find some pre-qualified sales leads, then load them into Salesforce. Manually, this would be an overwhelming task, but Kapow can create synthetic APIs on top of each of these sites/apps to allow for data extraction and manipulation, then run those on a pre-set schedule. He started with a “Kapplet” (applications for business analysts) that extracts the SEC filing data, allows easy manual filtering by criteria such as filing amount and age, then select records for committal to Salesforce. The idea is that there are data sources out there that people don’t think of as data sources, and many web applications that don’t easily integrated with each other, so people end up manually copying and pasting (or re-keying) information from one screen to another; Kapow provides the modern-day equivalent to screen-scraping that taps into the presentation logic and data (not the physical layout or style, hence less likely to break when the website changes) of any web app to add an API using a graphical visual flow/rules editor. Building by example, elements on a web page are visually tagged as being list items (requiring a loop), data elements to extract, and much more. It can automate a number of other things as well: Stefan showed how a local directory of cryptically-named files can be renamed to the actual titles based on table of contents HTML document; this is very common for conference proceedings, and I have hundreds of file sets like this that I would love to rename. The synthetic APIs are exposed as REST services, and can be bundled into Kapplets so that the functionality is exposed through an application that is useable by non-technical users. Just as Tom Baeyens talked about lowering the barriers for BPM inside enterprises in the previous demo, Kapow is lowering the bar for application integration to service the unmet needs.

It would be great if Tom and Stefan put their heads together and lunch and whipped up an Effektif-Kapow demo, it seems like a natural fit.

Next was Scott Menter of BP Logix on a successor to flowcharts, namely their Process Director GANTT chart-style process interface – he said that he felt like he was talking about German Shepherds to a conference of cat-lovers – as a different way to represent processes that is less complex to build and modify than a flow diagram, and also provides better information on the temporal aspects and dependencies such as when a process will complete and the impacts of delays. Rather than a “successor” model such as a flow chart, that models what comes after what, a GANTT chart is a “predecessor” model, that models the preconditions for each task. A subtle but important difference when the temporal dependencies are critical. Although you could map between the two model types on some level, BP Logix has a completely different model designer and execution engine, optimized for a process timeline. One cool thing about it is that it incorporates past experience: the time required to do a task in the past is overlaid on the process timeline, and predictions made for how well this process is doing based on current instance performance and past performance, including tasks that are far in the future. In other words, predictive analytics are baked right into each process since it is a temporal model, not an add-on such as you would have in a process based on a flow model.

For the last demo of this session, Jean-Loup Comeliau of W4 on their BPMN+ product, which provides model-driven development using BPMN 2, UML 2, CMIS and other standards to generate web-based process applications without generating code: the engine interprets and executes the models directly. The BPMN modeling is pretty standard compared to other process modeling tools, but they also allow UML modeling of the data objects within the process model; I see this in more complete stack tools such as TIBCO’s, but this is less common from the smaller BPM vendors. Resources can be assigned to user tasks using various rules, and user interface forms are generated based on the activities and data models, and can be modified if required. The entire application is deployed as a web application. The data-centricity is key, since if the models change, the interface and application will automatically update to match. There is definitely a strong message here on the role of standards, and how we need more than just BPMN if we’re going to have fully model-driven application development.

We’re taking a break, and will be back for the Model Interchange Working Group demonstration with participants from around the world.

bpmNEXT 2014: Work Management And Smart Processes

Bruce Silver always makes me break the rules, and tonight I’m breaking the “everything is off the record after the bar opens” rule since he scheduled sessions after dinner and with an open bar in the back of the room. Rules, as they say, are made to be broken.

Roger King of TIBCO attempted to start this demo during the earlier session but there were problems with the fancy projector setup. He’s back now to talk about model-driven work management. TIBCO’s core customer base (like mine) is traditional enterprises such as financial services, and they’re seeing a lot of them retiring legacy enterprise apps now in favor of process-centric apps built on platforms such as TIBCO. They see specific problems with work management in very large, branch-network organizations like retail banks; by work management and resource management, they mean the way that work is distributed to and accessed by end users, one of the things that BPMN doesn’t do when you define processes. With tens of thousands of participants, just a small increment in productivity through better work management can cause a significant ROI in absolute terms, but traditionally this has been done through custom user interfaces and distribution/matching. There are a number of resource patterns that have been studied and developed, e.g., separation of duties, round robin; Roger demonstrated how these are being incorporated into TIBCO’s AMX BPM (modeled within their Business Studio product) through organizational models, where you can find the resources in the organization, groups and custom organizational units that you need to bring your business vocabulary to determining how work is distributed within your organization. The idea is that once you have this defined, you can then use very fine-grained rules for determining which person gets which piece of work, or who has access to what. This now becomes something that you can attach to an activity in a process model using simple assignments or with a resource query language that assigns it dynamically, including based on process instance variables – essential when you have 100’s or 1000’s of branches and can’t realistically administer your organizational model and work distribution methods manually. Furthermore, you need to be looking at having people go to the work rather than having work sent to the people. This is the only type of work distribution approach when you’re creating declarative processes, where configuration needs to be much more dynamic than what might be drawn in the process model.

We finished off the short opening day of bpmNEXT with a keynote by Jim Sinur, late of Gartner (but not hesitant to use the materials that he helped to create there) and now an independent analyst, on how his processes are smarter than him. Processes based on machine learning, however, can only go so far: although machines are more accurate and consistent (and never complain when you ask them to work overtime), people are better at unexpected situations. The key is to have computers and people work together within intelligent processes: let the computers work on the parts that they do best, including events, analytics standardized decisions, pre-defined processes and the resulting actions from combining all of these; exploit emerging technologies such as cognitive systems, what-if scenarios via simulation, intelligent business operations, visualization and social analytics. Intelligent agents are a big part of this, but we need to have goal-directed processes to really make this work, or abandon the concept of processes at all except for the footprints that they leave behind.

Rule-breaking done. Back tomorrow for a full day of bpmNEXT 2014.

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: The New Face Of Work

I’m spending the last session of the last day at DST’s AWD Advance conference with Arti Deshpande and Karla Floyd as they talk about how their more flexible user experience came to be. They looked at the new case management user experience, which is research-driven and requires very little training to use, and compared it to the processor workspace, which looks kind of like someone strapped the Windows API onto a green screen.

To start on the redesign of the processor workspace, they did quite a bit of usability evaluation, based on a number of different channels, and laid out design principles and specific goals that they were attempting to reach. They focused on 12 key screens and the navigation between them, then expanded to the conceptual redesign of 66 screens. They’re currently continuing to research and conceptualize, and doing iterative usability testing; they actively recruited usability testers from their customers in the audience during the presentation. They’ve worked with about 20 different clients on this, through active evaluations and visits but also through user forums of other sorts.

We saw a demo of the new screens, which started with a demo of the existing screens to highlight some of the problems with their usability, then moved on to the redesigned worklist grid view. The grid column order/presence is configurable by the user, and saved in their profile; the grid can be filtered by a few attributes such as how the work item was assigned to the worklist, and whether it is part of a case. Icons on the work items indicate whether there are comments or attachments, and if they are locked. For a selected work item, you can also display all relationships to that item as a tree structure, such as what cases and folders are associated with it. Reassigning work to another user allows adding a comment in the same action. Actions (such as suspending a work item) can be done from the worklist grid or from the banner of the open work item. The suspend work item action also allows adding a comment and specifying a time to reactivate it back to the worklist – combining actions into a single dialog like this is definitely a time-saver and something that they’ve obviously focused on cleaning up. Suspended items still appear in the worklist and searches but are in a lighter font until their suspense expires – this saves adding another icon or column to indicate suspense.

Comments can be previewed and pinned open by hovering over the work item icon in the worklist, and the comments for a work item can be sorted and filtered. Comments can be nested; this could cause issues for customers who are generating custom reports from the comments table in the database, at least one of whom was in the audience. (For those of you who have never worked with rigid legacy systems, know that generating reports from comment fields is actually quite common, with users being trained to enter some comments in a certain format in order to be picked up in the reports. I *know*.)

The workspace gains a movable vertical divider, allowing the space to be allocated completely to the worklist grid, or completely to the open work item; this is a significant enhancement since it allows the user to personalize their environment to optimize for what they’re working on at the time.

The delivery goal for all of this is Q4 2014, and they have future plans for more personalization and improved search. Some nice improvements here, but I predict that the comments thing is going to be a bit of a barrier for some customers.

That’s it for the conference; we’re all off to the Hard Rock Café for a private concert featuring the Barenaked Ladies, a personal favorite of mine. I’ll be quiet for a few days, then off to bpmNEXT in Monterey next week.

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: Case Management And Unpredictability

I finished off the first day at DST’s AWD Advance conference with Judith Morley’s presentation on case management, which dealt with knowledge work and the unpredictable processes that they deal with every day. She presented last year about their case management, which was pretty new and a strong theme throughout last year’s conference. As I wrote back then, AWD case management is a set of capabilities built on top of their structured BPM, not a separate tool, that manifests through a user workspace that can be enabled for specific users. These capabilities include concepts of case ownership (including team ownership), tasks within cases, task and case prioritization, and collaboration. Their roadmap for case management includes some new mobile case views, more sophisticated case templates, more automation and better reporting.

They don’t have any customers live on case management yet, but some are pretty close. The applications that they are seeing being developed (or considered) at their clients include:

  • New retirement plan onboarding
  • Mutual fund corporate actions, e.g., new fund setup, mergers
  • Transfer of assets
  • Complaints, which involve both structured process and unstructured cases
  • Securitized debt
  • Health insurance appeals and grievances at their BPO operation
  • Immigration services

The key thing for them is to get some of these customers up and running on case management to prove their capabilities and the expected benefits; without that, it’s all a bit academic.

There’s probably not really anything groundbreaking compared to any other case management products, but the fact that it’s built on the standard AWD platform means that it’s completely integrated with their structured process applications, allowing for a mix of transactional workers and knowledge workers on the same piece of work, sharing the security layer and other underlying models. For the huge amount of work that lies in the middle of the structured to unstructured process spectrum, this is essential.

That’s it for day 1 of AWD Advance 2014 – I’m off to enjoy a bit of that Florida sunshine, but I’ll be back tomorrow. Blogging may be a bit light since I’m presenting in the afternoon.

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.