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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 ConnectedWorld: Smart Cities, Smart Homes

We’re on to the afternoon breakout sessions at the second (last) day of Bosch ConnectedWorld, starting with the smart city initiatives in Monaco. Their goal is to improve the quality of life for citizens and visitors in this city-state that has both the highest population density and the highest per capita income; this is being addressed through capturing and combining data from a number of different connected components, and integrating with higher-level rules and processes. This manifests in a number of different areas, from energy to transportation to waste management. There were not a lot of specifics, but they appear to be fairly early in the process so haven’t designed, much less deployed, much yet; they are starting with an initiative to add smart sensors wherever possible to enable future smart city capabilities.

We moved from smart cities to smart homes with Bernhard Dörstel from Busch-Jaeger Elektro (a division of ABB), discussing trends in smart homes and shift from home automation as an oddity to mass market. For non-residential buildings, the KNX standard provides guidelines for automated devices, but that standard hasn’t been fully adopted for home automation, which has different concerns and functions than non-residential. That inhibits broad acceptance of these systems, so that they remain “toys” for the financially well-off rather than a part of every home. One trend that is likely to change this adoption is the demographic shift to an older population: selling the (now) middle-aged consumer on the security and control benefits of home automation while they are in their prime earning years and living in a home that they own. Although not explicitly stated, those consumers are also positioned to take greater advantage of smart home technology as they grow older, since it can be used to help them to live independently in their own homes for a longer period of time.

We have a break now, then a short panel discussion and closing remarks, so this is likely the last post from Bosch ConnectedWorld. It was great to have the chance to attend and see how BPM and rules are being used within the context of the internet of things.

Smart Energy At Bosch ConnectedWorld

I was a bit late to the start of the breakout track focused on smart energy solutions, and missed some of the presentation by Cordelia Thielitz of Bosch Energy Storage Solutions group, but I was able to see some of the her case studies for renewable energy usage, such as the use of PV (photovoltaic) combined with scheduling to allow the PV to be used during times of peak prices, reverting to the grid when the cost is lower. Although I think that it is less common in Europe, time-of-use pricing is very common in North America; in Toronto, where I live, the off-peak electricity price for households is only 55% of the peak price, so timing the use of locally-generated energy to avoid the peak can result in a significant cost savings.

The second speaker in this track was Thomas Schäfer of Stromnetz Berlin, which operates the power grid and electricity delivery networks for the city. They are adding technology to improve the performance of the energy grid, starting with adding online measurement of network stations and allowing remote control of these stations, which enables faster switchover in times of power outages so that customers spend less time in the dark. The new technologies also can reduce latency of new connections and service changes, as well as reduce costs, allowing them to remain competitive in a deregulated energy market.

The final speaker in the energy track was Roberto Greening of Bosch SI, showcasing their Virtual Power Plant (VPP) vision that will allow for the monitoring and control of distributed energy providers. Traditionally, the energy grid was made up of a small number of large power plants (fossil fuel/nuclear) that generate an expected amount of electricity onto a common transport and delivery infrastructure. As new plants come online — including sources such as wind power that can be highly variable — the grid needs to get smarter in order to completely understand generation, traffic and consumption. In fact, in Germany, wind and PV sources don’t feed into the high tension transport grid, they feed directly into the distribution network, so the location of the monitoring and measurement needs to change as well. In the last couple of years, things have changed even more: wind and solar increased significantly, nuclear power stations were taking offline, consumers produced their own energy back to the grid, and electricity needed to flow from the distribution network back up to the high tension network for long-range transport. What’s needed is intelligent energy management across this complex, heterogenous network of plants, networks and consumers

Bosch SI ConnectedWorld Day 2 Keynotes

Day 2 of Bosch SI’s ConnectedWorld conference in Berlin started with a keynote by Dr. Volkmar Denner, Chairman of Robert Bosch (the parent company of Bosch SI and many other subsidiaries). He had a strong message about Bosch’s commitment to continue expanding their repertoire of IP-connected devices. As a major manufacturer of sensors and other enablers for smart technology in automotive, industrial and home applications, they have had to build a lot of the infrastructure required for created smart devices and systems, including the software stack of BPM and BRM, interfaced with device management. As with most new technologies, however, it’s more than just the technology: it’s about new business models that take advantage of that technology, and solutions created to serve those business models. Consider car-sharing, a business model enabled by on-vehicle connectivity technology: although the technology is relatively straightforward, the business model is completely disruptive to the rental car market as well as car sales and leasing. Denner spoke about a number of other emerging technologies and how they are enabling further disruption in the transportation/mobility market by considering multi-modal solutions, including electric bikes and cars that require models for shared charging stations.

Bosch is doing some impressive things on their own in the IoT area, and is pushing it forward even further by partnering with ABB, Cisco and LG to develop open standards for smart home solutions. This will eventually need to address issues of data privacy and security; this has been a hot topic of discussion here since the BMW speaker yesterday stated that they own the data generated by the BMW that you bought.

We also heard from Michael Ganser of Cisco in the morning keynote; his talk was a fascinating look at some of the trends in the “internet of everything” in a hyperconnected world, and drivers for embracing that. There’s a lot of paranoia around having everything in your environment connected and monitoring, but a lot of potential benefits as well: he mentioned that 30% (or more) of traffic in some urban centers is just people looking for parking; smart parking solutions could radically reduce that by matching people with parking spots.

Looking forward to today’s sessions on smart energy grids and smart homes.

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.

Getting Connected With Bosch

I’m at Bosch Software Innovations (Bosch SI) first ConnectedWorld conference on a bit of a whim: their analyst relations included me on the standard mailer, and I responded that I could attend if they covered my travel expenses. They agreed, and here I am in Berlin — consider that also my disclaimer that Bosch has paid for my travel expenses but not for my time, so anything that I blog here is my own opinion.

The conference opened with a keynote from Dr. Rainer Kallenbach, CEO of Bosch SI. Bosch SI is the software division of Bosch that includes their internet of things (IoT) initiatives, and there’s a lot of IoT on the menu at the keynote as well as the sessions to follow. I’m a big proponent of smart devices of all sorts: beyond my smartphone, we’re playing around at home with a smart electrical switch (I confess, it currently controls the light over the cat’s daytime napping spot, but we’re considering other uses) and a smart smoke/CO alarm; I frequently use car-sharing services that have sufficient in-car connectivity to consider them as smart devices, since they track location, rental status and fuel levels. Kallenbach discussed many other home applications, including smart medication trackers to tell if someone has taken their meds and provide a reminder otherwise, smart vehicles, running shoes that monitor your runs, home security systems and more; plus smart city initiatives to improve traffic, energy, and quality of life. There are also a host of industrial and enterprise applications, such as smart machinery that sends messages to maintenance when it requires service, and smart fleet vehicles that optimize delivery routes.

Bosch SI is a fairly young division of Bosch, and created through the acquisition of a few technology players for BPM and BRM, such as the inubit acquisition just over a year ago and Visual Rules in 2008, and the development of M2M (machine-to-machine) and other related products. Questions for Kallenbach included security of internet-connected devices: there have been a few stories recently about the poor security in home-based connected devices (including in a report, however apocryphal, about a refrigerator sending spam email); the answer was pretty high level but this is obviously an area that will require close scrutiny as more devices become connected.

The second keynote was from Elmer Frickenstein, head of development of electronics at BMW, discussing IoT in the automotive industry. He started by discussing the general trend of IoT, which is to connect everything, and how Google’s recent acquisition of Nest indicates their plans to incorporate smart devices in ways that we probably can’t yet imagine. The data volume projections behind the explosion in IoT over the next five years are shockingly large, with the need for related infrastructure such as additional satellites to transmit the data. His main focus, however, was on BMW’s ConnectedDrive as the natural progression from early functionality such as in-car emergency call systems, to full communications and control systems in a vehicle. One key point is that the new BMWs now have their own SIM card to connect to the internet, hence their own IP address, providing a transport structure for them to connect for remote monitoring, but also to provide functionality such as mobile wifi hotspots for vehicle occupants. This also means that updates can be pushed to the vehicle directly, and there is an application marketplace for apps for your car: that is, the app runs on your car directly, not on your smartphone connected to your car. Think about apps that find and book parking spots for rent, or enable car-sharing, plus navigation systems with real-time traffic and weather monitoring. In the future, fully automated driving so that your car can drop you off at a meeting, then park itself? Since these apps are so closely connected with the car’s operation, the app marketplace is completely controlled and populated by BMW.

There’s a double-edged sword in all of this in-car technology: it can provide a much better driving experience as well as remote maintenance-related monitoring, but adds complexity and potential for complex system failures and security breaches. In fact, Frickenstein stated that BMW considers the data that they collect from vehicles belongs to BMW — presumably to use for vehicle health monitoring — and they consider that they have the right to sell that data to third parties. That’s going to be an extremely controversial point moving forward, especially in other countries; it’s only a short distance down that slippery slope for BMW to allow law enforcement agencies to remotely control your car, and not obvious that you have a way to opt out of this. As much as your insurance company and local police (not to mention the NSA) will love this sort of direct access to your every movement, I can imagine that a lot of people will be reluctant to risk exposing that much information and control of their vehicle to outside parties. I don’t own a car so don’t have to make that decision, but you can be sure that I will have fun with one of these new BMWs and their apps if I have the chance to drive one on loan.

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.