One of the trends I detected at the Brainstorm BPM Conference in San Francisco this week is an effort to make BPM more engaging to users via Web 2.0 and Ajax. This dovetails with Ismael’s suggestions about how to make BPM cool again.
Adobe is now all over Flex and Flash technology to turn what we used to call “forms” into animated, engaging end user experiences (online or off) for, say, the applicant for a loan or potential purchaser of some good or service. In Adobe’s conception, engagement is focused at the requester of a business process (e.g. customer), and the BPMS hooks the output of that end user experience into the fulfillment of the request.
Pega just came out with a new release that features Ajax widgets to give process task participants a more engaging user interface, such as dynamic screens that lead the user to provide just the information required, without annoying roundtrips to the web server. Lombardi also emphasizes engaging task participants through its “coach” user interface paradigm.
While IT architects may debate the merits of the BPMS plumbing, business users evaluate technology based on things they can see on the screen, and Adobe, Pega, and Lombardi are going to ride that wave.
Bruce,
Great post. I think that the vendors that focus on the visual side of things will be most successful, for three reasons:
1)
Salesmen and customers like pretty UIs and they easily fool users into believing that there is substance underneath. If beauty is more than skin deep then the initial impressions will hold.
2)
In a previous life as a development team leader in a professional services group the team spent longer producing and reworking BPM UIs than writing the process. As an example of the work breakdown:
– Process design – 4 weeks
– Legacy integration – 16 weeks
– UI – 20 weeks
And there were great people on the team. The issue was attempting to coodinate the workflow, UI and integration. If BPM products can provide compelling UIs out of the box, this piece will become little more than a simple customization.
3)
BPM is often about high-volume efficiencies. Making the UI work better for end users is going to show a far higher ROI.
Maybe a sexy UI will make BPM cool again!
[...] Our friend Bruce Silver from BPMS Watch recently wrote about the fact that Web 2.0 and AJAX should be used for making BPM more engaging. I could not agree more with him, and in fact Intalio was the first BPM vendor to provide a Web 2.0 user interface, back in February. [...]
Magnetic Grid for Web 2.0 Form Editor…
Our friend Bruce Silver from BPMS Watch recently wrote about the fact that Web 2.0 and AJAX should be used for making BPM more engaging. I could not agree more with him, and in fact Intalio was the first BPM vendor to provide a Web 2.0 user interface, …
[...] It is with a twinge of sadness that I read the blog conversation between Bruce Silver and Ismael Ghalimi about making BPM cool again. [...]