Appian today launched Tempo, a new social/mobile capability of their BPM Suite. Sandy Kemsley has the full details here, which means I don’t need to repeat them. I just have a couple comments about it. First, it’s really well executed. Clean and smoothly integrated into the BPM environment. Second, it seems a more reasonable implementation of the social/mobile idea than is typically offered by BPM vendors. I have never really bought into the idea of “social BPM” as something distinct from regular BPM, and Appian has shown that you don’t need to reinvent BPM to add social/mobile capabilities. Tempo is not a separate product; it’s an optional user interface to regular BPM, based on a Facebook-style event stream and subscription model familiar and attractive to many users from a non-business context. Tempo lets you create and track ad-hoc tasks, sure, but that (in my view) is not really BPM. What’s important is it lets you also do real BPM, i.e. structured processes, within the same environment. From your smartphone or iPad, you can perform tasks of either type, often just by “swiping” the entry, quick and easy. BPM vendors that insist on a separate “place” for users to do ad-hoc BPM are missing the boat. Who wants that?
The hard part of BPM is the underlying architecture, the plumbing. The “user experience”, not to diminish its importance, is technically easier to engineer. And once you face up to that, you don’t have to reconceive social/mobile BPM as something radically different, needing a totally separate product,. It becomes simply an alternative user interface that lets you extend real BPM to occasional users who wouldn’t otherwise participate, and enhance the value for regular BPM users by letting them perform process activities without being chained to the workflow inbox. By making event streams and native smartphone UI a simple extension of the BPMS environment, not a whole “new new thing”, Tempo I think puts Appian in the driver’s seat in social/mobile BPM.
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[…] up, Bruce Silver weighs in with his review, in which he not only praises Tempo but takes a few shots at the approach a few other vendors have […]
Bruce,
Nice insight. It is interesting to get your opinion on what Appian did.
I totally agree with your comment that social/mobile BPM is not really something different. In fact, I would go a step further (and in fact I already did go a step further in this blog entry – http://bit.ly/e6tj3t) by saying that it is rather egotistical of BPM vendors to think that we need our own Apps for getting more social or mobile. I continue to insist that we will begin to see vendors realize that Facebook/Twitter and others are the message and notification vehicles of the present for BPM vendors just as email has been such a vehicle in the present/past. Did BPM vendors invent new email clients in order to read alerts and notifications? Of course, not. So why do we feel that this is now needed for mobile/social? My blog post may be a little tongue and cheek, but it is not that far fetched at all. The answer is simply that most of us are stuck in a rather old fashioned “follow the leader” mindset when it comes to the newer social/mobile apps. Of course, part of the motivation comes from a desire not to be left missing boxes on the RFPs. After all what happens when “Android App” appears on a Tender document and as a BPM vendor you can’t check it off – will you lose the bid to Oracle or another BPM vendor? It is definitely unfortunate (and a true innovation killer) when this type of thinking drives feature development.
-Brian Reale
http://blog.processmaker.com
Brian,
Well said. Why just make BPM tasks “Twitter-like”? Just use the real app. I like the idea.
–Bruce