Just a quick note to give you this link to a blog post on Google's site where we talk about the development of our Lombardi Blueprint product. That product represents a real leap in capability in terms of process mapping, documentation and modeling... the ease of use and business value it provides is pretty cool. And it really couldn't have been done as efficiently without Google's "Google Widget Toolkit" (GWT). So the blog post is on the GWT blog. Since the post went up, a ton of developers looking at using GWT have hit the Blueprint site, and we're really pleased and proud to be the poster child for this AJAX-y technology... which we hope (obviously) becomes somewhat of a standard.
Alex Moffat, the lead engineer on the Blueprint product line, wrote the post and I like how he sums up the business goals for the product:
The challenge handed to us was to create a tool that the average business user could use to document and manage their business processes. It had to be easy to use, encourage collaboration between team members, and provide a shared repository for all of a company's process documentation. Workflow functionality had to be on par with our competitors: Microsoft Visio, IDS Scheer's ARIS, IBM's WebSphere Business Modeler, and other desktop modeling tools. But we also wanted wiki & shared whiteboard capabilities to store information. Editing should use the drag and drop interaction users of desktop apps are familiar with. We ended up with some additional features that really set us apart:
- An intuitive map view as a high level visualization of a process
- Automatic workflow diagram generation
- PowerPoint generation for easily presenting the process
- Online chat functionality
I think this shows how achieving business goals is more and more becoming inextricably linked to the technology addressing those goals. This application simply could not have been developed even five years ago, without an investment 20-50x of today's cost... which obviously means that the economics wouldn't support it. As it is, Blueprint is licensed at the ridiculously low price of FREE for the Personal Edition, and only $50 per month for the team account!
We're doing the same thing with the more traditional behind-the-firewall BPMS integration platforms, today. They are getting simpler to use and this is changing the game of what types of enterprise process applications can be built because they are changing the game on who can build them!
Business Process Management is about knocking down the traditional development skills while retaining the important, traditional development patterns. Blueprint is one aspect of this, and traditional BPMS's, like our own Teamworks, is another angle of attack.
Business process management is not about one or two simple, specific things. It is about the pervasive shift of responsibility over all process-related elements (documentation, compliance, execution, improvement) from IT to the line of business. We're happy to be pushing the envelope on how we deliver all this capability. And thanks again to Google for creating a great framework for us to leverage.
Again, here's the link to the blog post Lombardi Blueprint, Built With GWT.
Technorati Tags: Google, Microsoft, Lombardi Blueprint, Visio, WebSphere
