I’ve blogged before about workflow having the potential to be the “killer app” filling the gaps between more standard ERP style business applications. We are involved in two projects with two different products in two different companies which give us a chance to explore the practicalities of that belief, add some real value to those clients, but also compare and contrast two different approaches. They also show us the concept of simpler is better.
One of the projects involves aspects of a printing company’s sales and procurement processes. We are using a product called HighOrbit, which is a more traditional workflow product, but which provides solutions that can be deployed over the web. Building the applications starts from the process workflow itself, and works out towards the touch points, external applications and form based data elements that the workflow will require. The approach has been taken on board wholeheartedly by the business in question, and their MD, a very smart man, wonders why more businesses don’t take this approach to their systems.
The second example is a new client we have been introduced to by Sig Rinde with Thingamy. This client wants to provide support and advice to an International client base for their technology products. Sig’s approach is very different. He decries working from the process, and wants us to look at the assets and things of value within the existing process as the starting point. Actually he even starts at the tags used to categorise an object rather than the object itself. He wants us to break down the existing hierarchies and departmental barriers and focus on the basic elements. If some of the hierarchy is really necessary, we can re-introduce it later.
Which approach is best? Probably because of my technical background, which goes back to relational database design, I’m more in tune with Sig’s object oriented approach, which feels more like the data analysis and normalisation I used to do when I did program design long ago. However both solutions have some key ingredients in common, which are at the heart of why either approach is working so well.
In both cases our approach involves Andreas Pfeiffer’s “New Laws of Digital Technology”, which are:
- More features isn’t better, it’s worse
- You can’t make things easier by adding to them
- Confusion is the ultimate deal breaker
- Only features that provide a good user experience will be used
- Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small proportion of users
- Unused features are useless, they slow you down and diminish ease of use
- Users do not want to think about technology, what really counts is what is does for them
- Forget about the killer feature: welcome to the age of the killer user experience
- Less is difficult, that’s why less is more
These are exactly the reasons why we ended up exploring the workflow route, rather than using workflow like capabilities in some of the client’s existing CRM and ERP systems to tackle the business problem in hand. We could have used particular functions, options and workarounds, and built some extra functionality in, guess what, Excel! However, we would have presented the end user with two many options at each step. That solution would have required a level of training, as well as management to make sure the procedures were properly policed. With the workflow solution, we can make sure the process language is absolutely specific to that client, and that the actual choices are limited to just those steps we want to be available at each stage. We remove the need for any significant training, as well as removing all of the policing.
The other characteristic is that both of these products allow us to change the workflows as often as we like, because there is no complex coding to be done. We can prototype the solution required with the client, or in a matter of hours following the analysis. But the prototype becomes the production solution. This aspect maps in to Sig’s philosophy of extreme business modelling. It means that the solution can be easily adapted as the business changes and evolves. I guess we need to call our part extreme consulting - someone has probably already trademarked that phrase.
We spent an excellent afternoon session today with Sig setting up the demo for the potential client that Sig and David W are visiting today. Sig and I will both be blogging the results as we go, so expect some more on this topic soon.
Powered By Qumana
