The Process Ninja

ARIS Express Released Today - Do We Care?

The full version of ARIS Express is released today. You can download it at: http://www.ariscommunity.com/aris-express

It's advertised as the "world's first BPM tool" - I'm sure it isn't but it's a catchy strapline right enough.

The question is - do we care? Who exactly are ARIS expecting to use this product? It's obviously designed to be a visio killer, but without swimlanes it's a toothless tiger. So Visio users won't switch to it, ARIS users won't use it as they already have the full blown version and it's arguably too complex for small business owners to get their head around.

I can somewhat understand the marketing strategy - get those using visio to switch to ARIS express as it saves them some money - they'll like the product and then eventually upgrade to big boy's ARIS...and pay lots of money...or will they?

Answers on a postcard, please.

- TPN

Will ARIS Express be a Microsoft Visio Killer?

At ProcessDays 2009 I found out about a new (Free) ARIS product called ARIS Express. ARIS Express is essentially a very cut-down version of the full ARIS version designed to compete with Microsoft Visio. As a regular user of Visio I was keen to have a look at ARIS Express to see how it compares.

I should point out that ARIS Express is currently in Beta mode, so I'm not going to be too harsh on them with this review - I'm sure there is more development to come. I certainly hope so...I should also point out that I have never used ARIS so I'm an ideal guinea pig to test how easy or hard it is to switch from Visio to ARIS Express!

So, how does it stack up? Well, the interface is certainly lovely - nice colours, a small but useful array of process models. It is basic but has enough to satisfy most basic users. There is no doubt that you can create some nice looking process models with it and pick up how to use it fairly quickly. It's a little bit clunky in terms of use - for example, not being able to drag and drop shapes. The Fragments feature is nice (where you can save groups of shapes together for future use) and there are a few useful export options (although PDF export did not work for me).

Where I can see great value for ARIS Express is for small and medium businesses who do not have the capital to purchase BPM software. However, these small businesses are unlikely to ever upgrade to one of ARIS's paid solutions (surely IDS Scheer's underlying marketing strategy?) so while this is good for them I don't see IDS benefitting from it.

My main concern with ARIS Express is that if it is designed to compete with Visio then there is a certain amount of functionality that it needs to have. I can fully understand why IDS Scheer don't want to give too much away, but at this stage I don't feel that ARIS Express has quite enough functionality to compete with Visio.

The main reason for this is ARIS Express's inability to display processes in swim lanes.

Like them or lump them swim lanes are more common than a cup of tea and are a fundamental part of most organisations' process mapping. If only ARIS Express had this functionality then I really believe it would be in a position to compete.

As it stands it's a case of "close, but no cigar"...

- TPN

Process Days 2009 - Reflections & Highlights

I was lucky enough to attend Process Days 2009 this week. I attended some of the masterclasses and most of the two day conference. Overall I really enjoyed the experience - I met a lot of great process people, learned a bunch and was inspired, awed and somewhat depressed by the whole experience!

I have to say it was also a great experience to meet the guys from Leonardo Consulting - a nicer bunch of people you could not wish to meet!

At the conference there were some truely brilliant presentations (and if truth be told a few truely awful ones) but there were three presenters that really stood out for me:

- Alec Sharp. Alec is a process modelling guru and gave one of the most highly useful and practical presentations that I've ever seen. He is a brilliantly charasmatic presenter with the ability to keep everything simple (even when on the phone from Vancouver!). I'm going out to buy his book as soon as I can. In just a few slides he changed how I thought about process modelling forever.

- Professor Michael Rosemann. Prof R works at the Queensland University of Technology where he runs the http://www.bpm.fit.qut.edu.au/ - however this alone doesn't encompass all of his work - he is one of the world's best BPM gurus. He gave a few different presentations - all brilliant - and I recommend you look into some of his works and books.

- Joerg Kluckmann. Joerg is the Marketing Dude from Aris and he gave a brilliant presentation on New Generation Process Inteligence (including a fascinating presentation which included Football!) Some of the stuff that IDS Scheer are working on is really exciting. They are launching a new free Aris product (Aris Express) as well as an Aris "MashupZone". Check out the IDS Scheer website for more details.

Overall Process days was a great event and has really given me a huge amount of inspiration to keep spreading the BPM message. On the other hand I felt a little bit depressed and envious when I saw some of the big BPM initiatives that people are involved with at the moment and some of the cool software tools they are using to do it. I live in hope that I will soon get the opportunity to test myself in one of these organisations!

This is just a taster of what I experienced of Process Days 2009 and it has helped to stimulate a maelstrom of ideas in my little Ninja brain that I'll look forward to sharing with you over the coming weeks and months. Until then I encourage you to investigate some of the previous links in more detail and should you require any further details on Process Days, check out the Leonardo Consulting website.

Till then, keep spreading the BPM message.

- TPN

Will Twitter Embrace Process or will it become "The New Spam"?

Twitter - love it or hate it, it's the big thing at the moment. I use it myself, but only as much as I can stand to and only for business purposes.

But recently I've noticed that all I'm getting through these days is what I call "twitter spam" - "followers" whose only updates are the same as those crappy spam e-mails we're all now so used to. Twitter is in danger of becoming the new spam. And what about cybersitting? At the moment I can (and as a test I have) registered twitter names of major corporations that don't quite get it yet (shame on them!) - how long before someone invents a little piece of software that starts registering thousands of twitter names and then puts them up for sale?

I see twitter as being like one of those kids who grew up in a commune like River Phoenix or something - a brilliant genius, but not quite living in the real world - full of innovation and creative spleandor, but not able to live with normal society. Twitter's free and easy lifestyle is about to end, I fear. With innovation comes responsibility- twitter has triumphed, but now some rules have to be put in place to protect it's users and to protect it's end goal.

Dare I say it, it's time for process.

- TPN

A bit about DST’s Automated Work Distributor (AWD) - BPM Software

Before I say anything else, I receive no payments, no special favours or anything else for mentioning BPM software sold by these guys or anyone else. I just like letting the world know about the BPM software that is out there, because process automation rocks. They did buy me a coffee, though, which was nice.

I was lucky enough to catch up with Nick Frolich (Director of Sales for DST Global Solutions) last week. Believe it or not but I was totally unaware that their product (Automated Work Distributor) even existed or who DST were. Turns out that they are the biggest supplied of BPM software to the financial service industry in the world, which makes me look pretty thick. Saying, that their clients span a multitude of different industries.They have 400 clients using AWD worldwide and have been going for 30 Years. I didn't even know they made software back then...

What 's impressive to me were a number of case studies that outlined the tangible benefits of implementing the software. Some highlights included:

• Reirement Plan saving project where AWD reduced loan processing time by 84% & reduced FTE's by 67%
• Mailroom workflow project that saved $2M over 5 years
• Life insurance project - achived 50%+ efficiency gains in processing
• Life insurance servicing project - per transaction processing costs reduced by 55% with 21% internal rate of return
• Hospital project - saved $1M by automating paper based systems

These are the kind of stats I like to see. Proof that automation of process provides tangible benefits. I'm not saying that AWD should be your chosen BPM system - that's up to you, but it's certainly a product worth looking at if you are looking at automating your business processes.

TPN

A Tale of Two (Sales) Processes - Why You Must Adapt or Die

I'd like to share with you a couple of examples of sales processes. One that works, another that doesn't. Together they beautifully demonstrate the gap that can be bridged by solid process.

First let's talk about the broken process...

Grosby are an Australian based manufacturer of shoes and slippers (owned by the evil pacific brands empire). I love their slippers having had a lovely pair of leather slippers that I bought last year. However a rather tragic washing machine incident ended the life of my beloved slippers. So, thinks I, I will simply go to the website, buy another pair and in a few days I will be reunited with my beloved slippers. But alas, the Grosby website has no option to buy online. Instead of investing in the technology to sell direct, they choose simply to sell via retailers and make less money. Go figure. Maybe this is one of the reasons they are making bugger all money.

So anyway, my next step is to look on their website to find a retailer, which I do and I trek off down Pitt St to get them. Three shops later (one of which is a women's footwear store), I find that none of them actually stock any Grosby slippers so I return to the office empty handed. In desperation I use the "contact us" option on their website and send them a long e-mail, pouring out my unbridled love for their rare, sacred slippers. I just want to buy their product!

In the midst of the global financial crisis Grosby must be doing amazingly well! Not only do they not care that the information on their website doesn't actually lead you to their product but that they are doing so well that they don't even need to respond to a poor consumer desperately wanting to give them his money!  

Now let's talk about a process that works...

When I went to buy a new pair of glasses the other week I looked at a lot of retail stores. After realising that I'd have to sell a kidney to afford anything other than a giant pair of blue plastic glasses that would make me look like a children's TV presenter from 1984 I decided to look online.

After a bit of googling for glasses I found a website called "Clearly Contacts". Turns out that they are a global company, but very cleverly they have a web prescence in every country. They have also had the smarts to market themselves online as selling multiple products. So on I go, order my glasses online and I'm done in a few minutes. Well actually I'm not because the advertising on the website gets me thinking and before I know it I've bought a 6 month supply of contact lenses too! So I complete my transaction and am happy before I realise that I have not put in the code to get a 10% first time customer discount and free fedex shipping (for orders over $200). So I e-mail their customer service who refund my 10% and upgrade my shipping within a couple of hours - no questions asked.

So what's the message here?

• Look at your sales processes - are you going the whole way?
• Cherish every customer inquiry as an opportunity to make money
• Use automation - why sell in a store when you can make more money selling online?
• If you have a website, for god's sake make sure it is accurate
• If you don't respond quickly to customers, there is a competitor who will

But the bottom line is that YOU MUST invest time and effort (and gosh, maybe even some money) to keep your processes and systems competitive. Maybe a website with information was enough in 1999, but in today's environment no-one can afford to be complacent - there is always a hungry upstart snapping at your heels.

Heed my words people - adapt or die.

TPN

Mr Potato Head Explains SOA & BPM

I was lucky enough to attend the Sydney BP Trends Group run by Johan Nelis a few weeks ago. The meeting was all about what SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is and how it works with BPM.

Having had no previous knowledge or involvement with SOA I was pretty keen to understand it. Not being a textbook kind of guy I am always looking for a metaphor, analogy or image to help myself to understand things and bizarrely enough when I learned about SOA and BPM my analogy was clear:

Mr Potato Head.

Why? Well SOA is all about providing flexibility. It’s all about having a modular structure of architecture that is “as flexible as the business needs it to be”. It is in contrast to the “old” IT ways of building rigid systems that are slow and costly to change. If we think about Mr Potato head as our offerring to the customer, the business decides what Mr Potato head looks like (services). Now imagine that each one of Mr Potato head’s bits (ears, eyes, hats, etc) is a business process. These processes make up the offerring or service to the customer. So the business decides what he looks like and IT plug together his individual processes out of their big box of ears, eyes, mouths, etc.

If the business decide that the want to change their offerring to the customer and hence the processes involved they simply tell IT what they want and IT go back to their big box of Mr Potato head parts and pick out a new process (ear, eye, etc!). Mr potato head now looks different as they have changed the process and the customer receives a new service or offerring from the company.

If we look at how this would have worked in the old days the business would have come to IT with their request and IT would have told them that all Mr Potato head’s parts were glued together and that to change their processes they’d have to e.g. cut off an arm, build a new one and glue it on. This would take time, money and a lot of effort.

But with our new SOA oriented business Mr Potato head can take on the world! We simply plug in our new processes to provide the business with what they need. Thus the business can respond rapidly. The Business and IT are in complete alignment.

Using your iPhone to save time and money at the supermarket - a review of Shopper by MidCentury Software

After my recent post about how to save money and reduce time spent at the supermarket I decided to have a look online at the apple web store to see if there was anything that could improve the efficiency of my shopping process (after all, a paper template is so 1985).

Lo and behold I found an app called Shopper  by MidCentury Software which is specifically designed to help make your grocery shopping experience faster, more efficient and even help you to save money (although this part of it takes a bit of work). 

Having used it yesterday I can say that this is a truly fantastic little app. It allows you to either select items from a series of "categories" or to add your own items and assign them to categories. You can even add photos and prices to the items (adding prices lets you see how much your shop will be prior to doing it so you can budget more effectively). The thing that I like most about it, however is the ability to drag and drop the categories into the same order as at your supermarket - this makes the whole process really efficient.

To summarise: if you are the person in your household who does the weekly grocery shopping and you own an iPhone, you simply must buy this application. At only $3.99 (AU) it's as cheap as chips and will save you time and money when you go to buy those chips...

Has my iPhone improved my life?

I wrote an article a few months back called "Will an iPhone improve my life" There was some heated discussion from both camps on it but in the end I decided to buy one. It has been a few months since I got it so it's time to look at what it has done to improve my life from an efficiency and process point of view:

Consolidation.  I no longer use a phone and an iPod. I can now sell my iPod and generate some cash and I am also using less electricity (which is good for the planet).

Flexibility. I can pretty much do anything from anywhere now as I have the web and e-mail at my fingertips. The web access and e-mail on my old Nokia was so painful to use I never did.

Information. Not only can I look up anything in a few seconds, my contacts are always up to date as they synchronise over some mysterious cloud thing onto my phone...

Synchronisation. The iphone syncs everything "over the cloud"  - Calendars, contacts, web bookmarks, etc. My wife also has an iphone so if she adds a contact or an event to the calendar it syncs with our mac at home and my iphone so we can be really efficient at organising our time (with 3 kids under 3 you need to be organised!)

Efficiency. Having the GPS saves heaps of time (I'm forever getting lost) and helps you to find things you need that are near by. I find my bank's ATM locator application really handy. The camera on the iphone is really good quality - I use it for taking photos of work I have drawn on whiteboards (process maps, etc.) then I simply e-mail them to my desk. People I work with seem to find this highly impressive although I don't really understand why.

I was amazed to see that there are already 25,000 applications available for the iphone. This is one of the great things about it - that people are continually developing new applications. Anything is possible it seems and already there are some fantastic apps to improve productivity.

So yes, the iPhone has improved my life - and it will continue to improve my life as new applications are developed. It's going to help me organise my time better, be more productive and keep everything in sync.

But let's not forget one very important thing: it's also bloody good fun.

Some interesting process websites to check out...

Sorry for the lack of video posts - here is an update on what is coming next and some links to interesting blogs / websites.

Oh and it's www.mavim.com not Mavin.