The Lombardi User Experience Team is looking for customers to help us make our products even better. We have several new features under development for both our Blueprint and Teamworks products, and we’d like to know what you think. The UX team focuses on how people interact with our software, and the information we collect is translated directly in to product design improvements - so your feedback really makes a difference!

Please contact us if you are a current Blueprint or Teamworks customer and are willing to participate in a product usability study. Most sessions last between 30 and 60 minutes and can be done remotely using Web conferencing software. During the sessions, you will be shown aspects of the product and asked to provide feedback. Your comments are valuable ways we ensure we’re building tools that fit your needs.

We frequently get asked about the design process here at Lombardi. First off, it’s helpful to understand a little bit about our team, which consists of folks with very diverse backgrounds in user interface and visual design, human factors and engineering. Having such a broad mix of skills enables us to come at a design problem from many different angles and explore a variety of options very quickly. We practice an iterative approach that includes rapid prototyping and end user testing. Sometimes our solutions may seem obvious – but they are usually the result of multiple iterations and variations. A perfect example of this is the new insert or “+” sign that was recently added to Blueprint.

For those of you who have been using the product for a while, you’ll remember that our first design for adding items to the process diagram was very Visio-like, with drag and drop capabilities from an application menu:

Read the rest of this entry »

We just wanted to check in and report on the first day of our annual Driven User Conference here in sunny Austin, TX.

The day began with CEO Rod Favaron’s keynote, which was all about how we are now at “the end of the beginning.” The secret is out about BPM, attention and visibility are soaring to new heights, and we are now entering a new phase of adoption and maturity.

A big part of this progression is the move from Project to Program to Culture, as Rod put it — in the early days of course it was all about getting your first BPM project up and running successfully, and then it became all about growing that project into a full-fledged program. But the next phase that Lombardi customers and partners are moving into right now is one in which BPM begins to truly impact the culture of any and every part of the organization that it touches, indeed the organization as a whole. This is the true value proposition of BPM ultimately — the idea that BPM becomes part of your DNA, that process becomes an integral part of what your company does every day.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I’m proud to announce the availability of the Summer ‘08 release of Blueprint! In the Spring ‘08 release, we delivered what we feel is the best process diagramming tool on the market, online or off. Over the last two months we’ve focused on improving the “other half” of process documentation — the standards and procedures, narratives, and data that make up the details that live behind the picture of the process. Let’s take a look at the improvements in depth:

• Rich Wiki Editing Of Process Documentation: Blueprint now provides a rich, wiki-style experience for filling out the details of your process. You can link to external documents, embed images, and format your documentation any way you please. Already have something written up in Microsoft Word? No problem. Just paste it in and we’ll leverage what you’ve already done.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently we had the pleasure of announcing that the Finnish Sales Division of the Nordic and Baltic telecommunications service provider, TeliaSonera, is deploying Teamworks and Blueprint. The news was picked up by KMWorld.

This should be a very interesting deployment that we’ll review later after their initial playback and first round of results.

The company will use Lombardi to support sales of business services in Finland, as well as its activation and provisioning and other core business processes. We expect to be able to help them increase their service levels and improve customer satisfaction by designing and automating their business processes so they can be easily controlled and managed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Its been a week since SAP’s big BPM announcement. Not exactly an earth-shattering announcement. My summary - at some point in the future (2 years?), SAP-only shops will be able to more easily configure internal SAP application workflows. This is a SAP application workflow band-aid, not a viable BPM offering. I am not alone in this assessment - the reviews have ranged from unimpressed to downright negative.

Honestly, this is no surprise. The big software vendors - I call them Stackers - have been and continue to pursue the promise of BPM half-heartedly. Actually, they have done everything in their power to bury BPM deep in what they view as their real markets. You can’t blame them - BPM ain’t in their DNA. And it is really hard to change your DNA.

SAP wants you to buy applications from them. BPM to them is just some integration and workflow between their applications. Always has and always will be - no matter what the Netweaver BPM roadmap says. Not to get too cheeky, but SAP does not have the best reputation in this sense - see their public spat with Waste Management about non-delivery of promised functionality.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently we sat down with Rachel Aukes, a member of the Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems Continuous Improvement Team. Rachel, who plays an active role in the use of BPM at Wells Fargo, shared how Wells Fargo got started with BPM. In February, Wells Fargo received the Global Award for Excellence in BPM and workflow.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Rachel Aukes: Our BPM program came about as a solution to organizational level needs - in fact we selected our BPM solution (Teamworks) and began to implement it before deciding on a specific project. We were challenged with increasingly complex, paper-intensive processes that had a large number of manual steps and handoffs. That was obviously inefficient and meant there was room for errors (such as bad typing, misplaced files, etc.). The idea of what BPM offers became prevalent in 2006 when most of our development staff was focused on maintaining our legacy systems while building our future systems of record. This effort was strategically important to our company; however, the business had immediate tactical needs that must continue to be met. We asked ourselves what we should do to best support our business partners, and we determined that BPM was a good solution for this. We haven’t looked back.

Read the rest of this entry »

The selection process for choosing a BPM vendor can be pretty daunting. BPM is a rapidly evolving space, and there seems to be a different philosophy on process at the core of each vendor’s solution set. Usually the first step an organization takes is to read some of the research that’s out there. While Gartner and Forrester do provide world-class research on our corner of the software world, I think it’s also worth mentioning another place to look for an in-depth look at the major players in business process management.

Bruce Silver’s recently published BPMS report provides one of the most thoughtfully composed product rankings in BPM. I would also like to quote and commend him on his methodology for the research, which I think is an admirable approach:

Read the rest of this entry »

Process People will be conducting a series of periodic interview sessions with Lombardi customers to provide useful insight into the BPM issues that they faced at their company, guidance for how to overcome obstacles, and to share the lessons learned during their process improvement journey. These real-world interviews will be posted regularly, so be sure and check back frequently. . .

In this Process People interview, we welcome Jeremy Kraybill, CIO for Boundless Network.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Jeremy Kraybill: At Boundless Network, we were undergoing a business process re-engineering project at our business. We initially set out to document and analyze manual process changes that would reduce our company’s cash cycle and help us scale our back office. After the first couple weeks of the project, we realized that there were a whole set of business processes held in individuals’ heads that we could benefit from automating. Nobody at the company had previous BPM experience, but after looking at the first BPM vendor’s demo we knew that a BPM solution had great potential for our business pains. After a 3-month evaluation process we selected a BPM solution and have been very happy with the decision and how the implementations went.

Read the rest of this entry »