Vendor Insight Appian broadens BPM participation with Appian Tempo

Transcription

1 mwd a d v i s o r s Vendor Insight Appian broadens BPM participation with Appian Tempo Neil Ward-Dutton Premium Advisory Report February 2011 This report discusses the importance of participation and social processes in process improvement and management initiatives, and within this context considers the capabilities of Appian Tempo, a new user experience environment for Appian process applications that uses social participation principles to enable a much broader level of involvement with business process applications within Appian customers organisations. This premium report is published as part of one of MWD s advisory services. You can find out more about these services at The report can also be purchased individually for internal use only via sales@mwdadvisors.com. Reprint rights are also available for purchase. Review this research in context For further insight around the best practices highlighted in this research and to discuss this in the context of your own organisation, you can schedule a private advisory session with our expert analysts by ing clientservices@mwdadvisors.com or call on +44 (0) MWD Advisors is a specialist IT advisory firm which focuses exclusively on issues concerning ITbusiness alignment. We use our significant industry experience, acknowledged expertise, and a flexible approach to advise businesses on IT architecture, integration, management, organisation and culture.

2 Appian broadens BPM participation with Appian Tempo 2 Summary Strategies to maximise participation and engagement are crucial in BPM today Appian Tempo provides a social participation environment for process applications Appian Tempo doesn t replace Appian s other supported user experience environments In scientific approaches to process improvement the chief quality criterion is the quality of a target process design; the quality of the implementation of the target process, and its successful operation, are someone else s responsibility. This disconnect can cause major difficulties in process improvement initiatives that are centred on knowledge work. Approaches which consider user acceptance as a key goal right from the start and which emphasise collaboration between as many stakeholders as possible have much higher chances of success. This means that for BPM efforts to deliver real value, they need to use tools and techniques that help promote widespread participation and engagement right throughout the improvement lifecycle including in operation. Appian Tempo provides a new user experience environment for Appian process applications that uses social participation principles to enable a much broader level of involvement with business process applications within Appian customers organisations. The Appian Tempo experience is based around the event stream concept that acts as the core user experience component of social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and it s designed to provide an environment that blends access to, and notifications about, process work with other social communication and collaboration features. Importantly, Appian Tempo isn t just an environment which people use for browsing notifications and status updates it s a place where users can take action by initiating and participating in processes and tasks. Like the rest of Appian s platform, Appian Tempo is 100% browser-based for desktop computing environments. Appian has also built native mobile Appian Tempo clients for BlackBerry, Android, iphone and ipad devices. Appian isn t deprecating its existing user environment, the Appian Portal and indeed Appian Tempo and the Appian Portal can be used by different groups for the same process application at the same time. Appian also continues to support Microsoft SharePoint as an alternative process application user environment.

3 Appian broadens BPM participation with Appian Tempo 3 Participation and the importance of social processes From physical processes to knowledge work For the vast majority of the time that process improvement has been part of the business landscape, improvement techniques were focused on processes which took big investments to get started or to change: manufacturing processes were at the heart of the picture. Not surprisingly, the people driving the process improvements took a very deliberate, scientific approach to recommending and making changes. Such an approach is essential in situations where there s a lot at stake, and in physical processes like those found in manufacturing, the costs and risks associated with suboptimal processes can be huge. The Six Sigma and Lean movements were both spawned from this environment. Over the past couple of years, though, process management thinking and tools have now well and truly broken out of the domain of physical, capital-intensive processes to be applied to the worlds of knowledge work and service improvement. Here, the challenges associated with improvement and change are different. In knowledge work, acceptance of change is everything If you re looking to improve a process centred on knowledge work like a customer service process, the cost and risk of a suboptimal change is much lower than if you re changing a manufacturing plant layout for one thing, you can probably make further changes to tweak things relatively straightforwardly. What s more, many knowledge work processes are so poorly understood that even a suboptimal improvement a kind of good enough for now change can yield massive benefits. In these kinds of processes, business agility tends to be much more of a key consideration than the cost or risk of making suboptimal changes. At the same time, in processes which are centred on knowledge work user acceptance is a hugely important consideration. In scientific approaches to process improvement the chief quality criterion is the quality of a target process design; the quality of the implementation of the target process, and its successful operation, are someone else s responsibility. This disconnect can cause major difficulties in process improvement initiatives that are centred on knowledge work, because no-one worries about organisational change management issues until after the solution has been implemented. What organisations across industries are realising is that in processes centred on knowledge work, a scientific approach to process improvement has significant limitations. Approaches which consider user acceptance as a key goal right from the start and which emphasise collaboration between as many stakeholders as possible have much higher chances of success. Getting to participation The drive towards social BPM using social collaboration tools and techniques to help discover, model, implement, roll out, and manage business process improvements is a crucial driver towards prioritising user acceptance. It s also a key factor in thinking about how process improvement applications can be deployed in a way that drives high levels of organisational awareness and participation. Against this backdrop, BPM vendors are looking to social collaboration tools and popular social networking sites for inspiration weaving social, collaborative features into the frameworks their tools and platforms use to present processes and tasks.

4 Appian broadens BPM participation with Appian Tempo 4 Appian s Tempo: a social participation environment for process applications Appian Tempo provides a new user experience environment for Appian process applications that uses social participation principles to enable a much broader level of involvement with business process applications within Appian customers organisations. It s available as a native component of the Appian BPM Suite 6.5 and is available to any customers upgrading to version 6.5 (or customers of the Appian Anywhere service). Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the main Appian Tempo layout. Figure 1: The Appian Tempo user interface The Appian Tempo experience is based around the familiar event stream concept. The Appian Tempo experience is based around the event stream concept that acts as the core user experience component of social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn, but it isn t designed to be just a social networking front-end for people who use Appian process applications. Appian Tempo is designed to provide an environment that blends access to, and notifications about, process work with other social communication and collaboration features. Appian Tempo provides visibility into organizational processes, as well as the ability to take action on those processes directly through the Appian Tempo event stream as shown in figure 2.

5 Appian broadens BPM participation with Appian Tempo 5 Figure 2: Appian Tempo as a social participation environment Individuals status updates Process & report notifications, hazards External event notifications Task, process initiations The Appian Tempo experience can bring different kinds of collaborative and process-focused conversations and notifications together in one place and notification sources aren t limited to Appian applications or process participants. Event sources Events that show up in Appian Tempo event streams can come from external sources as well as from Appian process applications; in fact this capability is one of the key strengths that Appian sees for the interface. First, and most obviously, every registered Appian user can use their Appian Tempo environment to post general status updates to the entire community or to a defined user group. Second, external (non Appian) applications and systems can publish events easily to Tempo. External events are surfaced in Appian Tempo through Appian process models, via the use of BPMN event listeners which capture external events and make them available for use in process applications. Publishing Appian process application events to Appian Tempo is straightforward, and utilises the Smart Services framework that s already a key element of Appian s BPM tools. As cited in our indepth assessment of Appian s BPM technology offering 1, one of the most powerful features of Appian s design environment is the way that the rich features of the platform are made available for use within models using Smart Services: Perhaps the most compelling feature of Process Modeler is the way that the capabilities of the broad Appian suite are made available within the context of process models, creating a very powerful environment that allows extremely creative, dynamic solutions to be built with little technical expertise. Special smart services are available to process designers that expose many facilities of the suite, so that they can be programmatically invoked within running processes. 1

6 Appian broadens BPM participation with Appian Tempo 6 Smart Services enable you to quickly integrate process applications and their management tools into the Appian Tempo environment in the following ways: Publish a notification to Appian Tempo when a process instance reaches a certain state. Publish a warning ( hazard ) when a certain threshold is reached (for example if a given task takes longer than a specified amount of time to be completed). Publish a notification to Appian Tempo when an Appian system event occurs. Because Appian has a very rich system event model, Appian Tempo can notify people about a wide variety of Appian environment issues; a typical example here would be notifying users when a given report (for example a quarterly performance report) is created. When you specify how the Appian runtime should publish notifications, you can also specify security and access constraints for those notifications, based on existing Appian organisation models (role and group definitions). In this way you can ensure that access to some events requires privileged access rights. Event views and filters Event and activity streams can represent a lot of fast-changing information, and so filtering is one of the key capabilities that an environment like Appian Tempo needs to offer users. Every Appian Tempo user can filter what s shown in their own personal view of the event stream, and can also switch between views that focus on particular areas of activity. There are six specific kinds of view provided, two of which operate on user-defined filters: Everything. This is the default view that all users receive by default when they first start using Appian Tempo. My tasks. This view only shows notifications concerning a user s open process tasks. Updates. This view only shows updates posted by Appian Tempo users. Subscribed. This personalised view shows events of types that a user has specifically subscribed to. Users can easily add event types to their subscribed list by selecting any one instance of an event of that type that appears in another view, and choosing to subscribe to it. Starred. Similar to starring in other popular platforms like GMail, starring gives a user quick access to specific event posts that they wish to watch more closely. Application-specific notifications. Process application designers can elect to have their applications expose custom event streams to Appian Tempo, in which case a view for that application appears as a standard feature in the Appian Tempo environment for all those users with the right access permissions. Within the context of an individual process application s event stream, it s easy for individuals to filter notifications so constraining what events from the given application are shown. The filters that are offered to users are actually defined by application designers using wizards in the design environment so, for example, a designer can specify that an accounting process application will publish an event to Appian Tempo when a customer invoice is created, and that users of the application can choose to filter those events based on the value of the invoice. This makes it easy for application providers to create configurable Appian Tempo views that make business sense.

7 Appian broadens BPM participation with Appian Tempo 7 Initiating actions Importantly, Appian Tempo isn t just an environment which people use for browsing notifications and status updates it s a place where users can initiate and participate in processes and tasks too. There are two pieces to this: First, administrators can configure Appian Tempo to allow users to launch process instances of certain types, depending on the user s roles and group memberships. Second, when a designer configures an Appian process application to send event notifications to Appian Tempo, they can specify a task link. When an event of that type appears in Appian Tempo, the relevant user(s) will be able to launch the associated task within the Appian process application directly from within the Appian Tempo event stream. Mobile devices are first-class citizens Appian Tempo s goal is to significantly increase organisations participation in business process environments. For this reason, Appian has worked from the start to make Appian Tempo available in the places that a wide range of stakeholders many of whom won t be direct process participants but will have an interest in process progress will be comfortable hanging out. Like the rest of Appian s platform, Appian Tempo is 100% browser-based for desktop computing environments. In addition, Appian has decided to build native mobile Appian Tempo clients for BlackBerry, Android, iphone and ipad devices. These native applications aren t designed to replicate the full desktop environment, but to complement it and make it as easy as possible for individuals on the move to keep up to date with work developments. Figure 3 provides a high-level view of the mobile experiences provided for Appian Tempo users via BlackBerry, iphone and ipad devices. Figure 3: Views of the native ipad and iphone client native applications Native Appian Tempo client applications are provided for iphone, ipad, Android and BlackBerry platforms.

8 Appian broadens BPM participation with Appian Tempo 8 Appian Tempo is just one user experience alternative Although Appian Tempo provides an environment which makes process applications more accessible to a broad range of participants and stakeholders, it might not be the right answer for every group within an organisation for example, certain very task-oriented roles may benefit from a highly structured, prescriptive user experience. For this reason Appian isn t deprecating its existing user environment, the Appian Portal and indeed the two environments can be used by different groups for the same process application at the same time. Appian also continues to support Microsoft SharePoint as an alternative process application user environment. What should you do? The difficulty of taking organisations past their first one or two BPM projects to make BPM part of the way things get done is well-documented, and one of the challenges that give rise to this difficulty relates to getting broad groups of people engaged in efforts so they can start to understand how BPM adds value to operations. With the importance of getting as many people as possible engaged with BPM efforts in mind, Appian s new Appian Tempo user experience represents a very useful complement to its existing application user environment, the Appian Portal. If you re looking for a BPM technology offering that will help you deliver applications and experiences that reach out to broad groups of users and interested parties in multiple ways, you should take the time to explore Appian Tempo.