I’ve been interested in Effektif BPM since its launch earlier this year.
Scott Francis and Bruce Silver’s view that the tool was like the process automation bits of BlueworksLive made me more interested. BPM Tools quite often need access to data, integration or documents. Migrating all these things to the cloud can a barrier to adoption in many businesses. The idea of a lightweight process engine focused on organising humans and creating visibility seems to me like a natural slice of functionality to take into the cloud.
It’s Uncanny
I have yet to see the tool but, if the screenshots from this presentation are anything to go by, the resemblance between Effektif and the process automation pieces of Blueworks is uncanny.
Here’s a screenshot from the presentation and below it a process application that I made as a demo to a client this afternoon. Judge for yourself:
But Context is King
Bruce Silvers hopes that Effektif might bring increased focus and success to the story:
This looks to me a bit like the automation piece of IBM’s Blueworks Live – the part you don’t hear that much about – but obviously Effektif has a greater incentive than IBM does to expand its capabilities into the BPM/case mainstream.
via Scott Francis on the BP-3 Blog
But, I think that Effektif will more successful than IBM in getting traction with this collection of features for a different reason.
IBM embedded these capabilities in BlueworkLive which is essentially a process discovery tool. It’s used by process improvement teams and business analysts. Obviously, the process automation features need everyone in the organization or at least the value stream to be users of the tool. Most people didn’t buy Blueworks with this use-case in mind. They licensed it to only their six sigma black belts to provide them with the best tools available.
IBM put these features into the wrong tool.
In IBM BPM, these features would have been a powerful set of capabilities to deal with ad-hoc processes. In BlueworksLive, they are still a powerful set of capabilities but trapped in a process analysis context where they can not prosper.
People buying Effektif are looking for a BPM solution in the cloud. They are looking to empower their business users. So, hopefully, Effektif will provide a better context for the process automation features of BlueworksLive than Blueworks itself has done.
It will be interesting to see what the future brings.
