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, …

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!