Intalio|n3 Designer
Intalio|n³ Designer is an integrated process development
environment that allows business analysts and IT professionals
to import existing business processes from any process
modeling software or directly model new business processes,
then extend them into executable and manageable processes
that are integrated with existing IT systems and user
interfaces.
Designed upon three main requirements: unity,
visibility, and agility.
Intalio|n³ Designer offers a single tool for
all process stakeholders that covers the entire process
life cycle and reaches upon all existing process assets,
increasing visibility and agility in the management
of end-to-end business processes.
Unity
A Single Tool for All
Process Stakeholders
How to support the collaborative development of business
processes.
A Single Tool for the Entire Process Life Cycle
How to preserve the integrity of business processes
over their entire life cycles.
A Single Tool for All Process Assets
How to leverage existing corporate assets.
Visibility
Visibility for All Process
Stakeholders
How to present multiple role-specific views on the
same business process.
Visibility over the Entire
Process Life Cycle
How to present the revision history of changing business
processes.
Visibility over All Process
Participants
How to present global views on end-to-end business
processes.
Agility
Agility to Accomodate
Diversified Skillsets
How to leverage existing workforce training investments.
Agility to Accomodate Changing
Business Processes
How to manage the continuous improvement of business
processes.
Agility to Accomodate Changing
Economic and Technical Environments
How to manage the continuous adaption of processes
to their environments.
A Single Tool for All Process Stakeholders
Most alternative BPM solutions offer a collection
of tools for the development, deployment, and maintenance
of executable processes. Such an approach raises two
major challenges. First, such tools have usually been
designed by software engineers—for software
engineers—and are rarely used by business analysts.
Second, since most alternative BPM solutions that are currently available on the market have been developed through the aggregation of existing products, it is not rare to find solutions that require software engineers and system administrators to use more than five tools before an executable business process can actually be deployed in production. This results into worsening the divide between business analysts and IT professionals, as well as significant development, deployment, and maintenance costs.
Intalio|n³ Designer
takes an innovative approach to this problem by offering
a single tool that is used by business analysts, software
engineers, and system administrators for supporting
the modeling of business-level processes, their binding
onto external systems and user interfaces, and their
deployment onto Intalio|n³ Server respectively.
As a result, all process stakeholders benefit from
having a common working environment that fosters cross-functional
communication and preserves the integrity of business
processes over their entire life cycle.
As radical as this approach might sound, it proves
itself very effective when properly implemented. One
critical success factor is the clear understanding
that different process stakeholders have different
priorities and execute upon them by leveraging different
skillsets. For adressing such a requirement, Intalio|n³
Designer supports the notion of user profile
that allows business analysts, software engineers,
and system administrators to get different views on
the same process.
Furthermore, because organizations have diverse interpretations for the concept of 'business analyst' or 'software engineer', and constantly define new roles such as 'process engineer' or 'enterprise architect' that usually cross the boundaries of the areas that are covered by more traditional roles, user profiles within Intalio|n³ Designer are fully customizable, while a given user can play multiple roles at the same time. As a result, all process stakeholders get presented the information they need to fulfill their tasks through the entire process of managing end-to-end business processes.
Benefits
A Single Tool for the Entire Process Life Cycle
As they offer different tools for different users,
alternative BPM solutions also offer different tools
for the multiple steps that a process life cycle is
made of, from modeling, to binding, then deployment.
Such tools usually present themselves through different
look-and-feels and specific metaphors for the graphical
representation of executable business processes, making
their learning curve usually much steeper than originally
expected. Most importantly, such a tight binding between
a specific process life cycle and a product architecture
is based on the assumption that all companies should
blindly adhere to the same process life cycle, in
a perfectly static way.
Unfortunately, this is one area where one size does
not fit all. Requirements such as the ability to change
the definition of a running process on the fly or
the collaborative development of business processes
across multiple functional units and over an extended
value chain call for a more flexible process life-cycle
that can be customized and extended to address the
specific requirements that are key to the success
of any BPM project. Ideally, the process of managing
business processes, also refered to as process life
cycle process, should be a first-class process that
can be managed by the business process management
system itself, very much like any other process. This
is precisely the approach adopted by Intalio|n³
Designer, and it is implemented at two main
levels.
First, Intalio|n³ Designer incorporates all the functionalities that are required for discovering, modeling, binding, and deploying business processes. Existing business processes are discovered either by importing business-level process models that have been already defined with one of the most popular business process modeling tools including Casewise Corporate Modeler, IDS Scheer ARIS, Microsoft Visio, MEGA Process, Popkin System Architect, and Proforma ProVision, or by using the process modeling component of Intalio|n³ Designer—Intalio|n³ Designer > Process Modeler—to support the conduction of interviews with line-of-business managers and business users.
Then, business analysts can use Intalio|n³ Designer > Process Modeler to develop a gap analysis between 'as is' processes and 'should be' processes, while software engineers use the very same interface to bind business-level process models onto existing systems and user interfaces. Finally, system administrators use the same interface again to deploy executable processes onto Intalio|n³ Server.
Second, Intalio|n³ provides an advanced process repository that supports the collaborative development of executable business processes, while making the scenario described above a truly effective one. Intalio|n³ Repository offers enterprise-class services for supporting collaborative process development, including check-in/check-out, linear and hierarchical versioning, role-based access control, and indexing/searching.
This repository can be deployed on top of any existing relational database management system and file system—including a desktop's or laptop's local file system for off-line development—and can be integrated with existing source control systems such as Merant PVCS, Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, and Rational ClearCase.
In turn, all modifications made by developers to a process definition and commited into the repository they share access to are monitored by a process life cycle management process that is executed on Intalio|n³ Server and can be customized and extended as any other business process in order to address the requirements of the most advanced development environments.
Benefits
A Single Tool for All Process Assets
The notion of business process clearly predates the
concept of business process management, and business
processes can already be found at many locations:
on the shelves of line-of-business managers, in the
hard-drives of process engineers, within packaged
applications and workflow systems, or simply in the
day-to-day practices of employees, customers, and
partners.
Most alternative BPM solutions simply ignore these
fantastic assets and are designed upon the assumption
that business analysts and software engineers will
just have to re-invent them, wiping out the significant
investments that have been made over the last decade
for business process reengineering and business process
modeling.
Intalio|n³ Designer
is designed upon a different assumption: all process
assets should be leveraged and the business process
management system should serve as a global repository
for them. To address such requirements, Intalio|n³
Designer enables processes to be discovered
from the field, imported from existing process modeling
tools, and projected from existing systems within
which they are engrained.
Furthermore, Intalio|n³ Repository allows all process assets to be accessible from a single location and to be managed as part of the life cycle of end-to-end business processes. As a result, the management of business processes that are integrated with external systems and user interfaces is greatly simplified when changes are made to those external process participants.
Benefits
Visibility for All Process Stakeholders
One of the key benefits of business process management
is to help bringing business analysts and IT professionals
closer from each other. Improved communication between
them is a critical success factor for any BPM project,
and 360° visibility on end-to-end business processes—for
all process stakeholders—is paramount to help
achieving this goal.
For this purpose, Intalio|n³
Designer supports unlimited process layering
that allows multiple views of any given business process
to be layered on top of each other through the notion
of sub-process. As a result, a business process can
expose a corporate executive view, a business analyst
view, and a process engineer view, while preserving
its integrity over its entire life cycle.
Furthermore, specific views are not implemented
as a property of the tool, but rather as a customizable
configuration for it, allowing organizations to define
the layering pattern that best fit to their specific
requirements. This approach also allows both a top-down
development methodology driven by business requirements
and a bottoms-up methodology driven by technical requirements.
Benefits
Visibility over the Entire Process Life Cycle
The development of executable business processes involves
multiple process stakeholders: business analysts for
discovery and business-level modeling, software engineers
for system-level binding, and system administrators
for production deployment. Even though companies should
aim at a top-down and straight-through development
methodology driven by business requirements, the reality
of large and complex organizations calls for an iterative
development process that can support the collaborative
input of multiple stakeholders having differentiated
skillsets.
For this purpose, Intalio|n³
Designer offers visibility over the entire
process life cycle to all process stakeholders by
exposing a direct view onto a process revision history,
as captured by Intalio|n³ Repository. As a result,
developers can quickly browse from one revision to
an other, conduct iterative gap analysis, and orchestrate
the progressive deployment of executable business
processes onto production systems.
Furthermore, Intalio|n³ Designer is directly integrated to Intalio|n³ Server through Intalio|n³ Repository, allowing system administrators to define which revision of a given process definition is currently deployed in production, then make a comprehensive and accurate impact assessment for potential process updates requested by business analysts and software engineers.
Benefits
Visibility over All Process Participants
Most alternative BPM solutions offer connectivity
to external process participants such as people and
systems, but do so at the message or transaction level,
rather than at the process level. The limitation of
such an approach is that the processes that are currently
implemented within organizations, either through existing
workflow systems or within packaged applications,
must be re-discovered by business analysts and software
engineers, leading to additional development, deployment,
and maintenance costs.
In order to adress this problem, Intalio|n³
Designer features the unique ability to directly
expose existing processes and incorporate them as
process components within the context of larger end-to-end
processes. This results into horizontal process visibility
that allows processes, people, and system to be all
treated as process participants, to be represented
in a consistent fashion, and to be interleaved in
any imaginable way in order to accomodate the most
complex business and technical scenarios. At deployment
time, only native processes are deployed on Intalio|n³
Server, while being interfaced to external process
participants such as packaged applications through
Intalio|n³ Projectors.
Benefits
Agility to Accomodate Diversified Skillsets
Some alternative BPM solutions are sold upon the claim that executable business processes can be fully developed and put into production by business analysts on and by themselves. Even though this might be true for simple workflow processes that do not require integration with transactional systems and can be directed by business users through generic user interfaces, it does not hold for mission-critical business processes that deeply leverage existing packaged applications including ERP and CRM systems and require customized end-user interfaces.
Intalio|n³ is
not sold upon such a claim. Even though it can accomodate
the simplest scenarios described above, it is designed
to address the later first and foremost. For those,
the collaboration between business analysts, software
engineers, and system administrators is required,
and the benefits of using Intalio|n³ do not come
from reductions of the existing IT staff, but rather
from their improved contribution to the development,
deployment, and maintenance of executable business
processes, as well as the empowerment of business
analysts to drive the overall process.
For this reason, Intalio|n³
Designer is designed to fully leveraged the
diversified skillsets of different process stakeholders,
through the definition of customizable user profiles
and the implementation of customizable and extensible
process life cycle management processes. In a quite
trivial manner, this gives agility to corporations
that cannot wait for all members of their IT staff
to become J2EE and Web Services experts before becoming
process-managed organizations.
Benefits
Agility to Accomodate Changing Business Processes
Market leadership is achieved through constant innovation
and proactive anticipation of market changes. Dynamic
business processes can become a powerful driving force
in a company's quest for leadership, but they require
extreme agility in their overall management, from
design to operation and to optimization.
For this purpose, most alternative BPM solutions boast
their ability to dynamically change the definition
of business processes at runtime. Even though such
a claim holds true in most cases, it usually simply
resorts to the re-deployment of a new revision for
an already deployed business process, such a new revision
being considered by the underlying system as a brand
new process. What this means is that all pending instances
of the updated business process that were created
based on the original process definition remain deployed
according to the original process definition, while
any new process instance is created based on the updated
process definition. In other words, there is absolutely
no ability to update the definition of a running process
instance on the fly.
Nevertheless, some of the most advanced alternative
BPM solutions also claim the ability to support such
on-the-fly updating of running process instances.
Again, this claim holds true in some particular cases,
but with one major caveat: the interfaces of the original
and updated process definitions must be the same,
otherwise there would be fatal inconsistencies in
the process data held by running process instances.
While such an approach finds some applications in
the simplest cases, it cannot accomodate very-long-running
processes that can take years to complete, such as
the hire-to-fire process implemented by a human resources
department.
In order to adress such a requirement, Intalio|n³
features a unique process instance migration capability
that allows running process instances to be updated
on the fly, even when then expose different interfaces.
This allows for the disruption-free update of process
definitions and enables the deployment of very-long-running
processes which definition might evolve in the future.
Benefits
Agility to Accomodate Changing Economic and Technical Environments
Changes made to the definition of business processes
are often motivated by changes taking place in the
economic landscape and technical environment. New
products and services must be released to market in
order to cope with increasing competitive pressure,
while external systems and user interfaces have a
life cycle of their own, creating disruption in the
ongoing execution of business processes that leverage
them. This creates the issue of exception handling
that otherwise rigid process definitions usually would
not take into account.
For this reason, alternative BPM solutions usually
put strong emphasis on their ability to handle exceptions
and rely on various mechanisms allowing business users
to define alternative execution paths at runtime.
Nevertheless, all share the same limitation when dealing
with exception handling, directly related to the fact
that exception handling mechanisms are always hard-coded
within the underlying system: some solutions will
allow business users to force a transition from one
state of the process to an other, others will support
the real-time update of business rules that will drive
the process to a proper state from which execution
can be carried along, but all rely on a static way
of handling exceptions.
Furthermore, most solutions will adress this issue in a discrete fashion, meaning that the handling of an exception that occured for a given process instance will not be shared among any other instance of the same business process in the future, leaving the overall business process definition in a constant state of imperfection.
Intalio|n³ Designer
takes a process-oriented approach to the problem of
exception handling and allows customizable and extensible
exception handling processes to be defined in a generic
fashion and transparently applied at runtime. From
a practical standpoint, exception handling processes
define how alerts can be generated and escalated when
an exception occurs, then how the exception should
be handled, either automatically by the system or
manually by business users. In the case of manual
exception handling, multiple options are offered to
business users at runtime, allowing them to fix the
exception for the particular process instance that
originally triggered the exception, but also for any
other process instance that shares the same process
definition, pioneering the ground-breaking notion
of 'self-healing processes'.
Benefits
