Intalio|n3 Director
Intalio|n³
Director is a process portal enabler that allows
employees, customers, and partners to seamlessly direct
the execution of business processes and perform business
activity monitoring tasks through any existing workforce
software, including groupware systems, workflow engines,
and enterprise information portals.
Intalio|n³ Director is designed upon three main requirements: productivity, interactivity, and extensibility. Intalio|n³ Director offers a productive, interactive, and extensible environment that allows all process stakeholders to direct the execution of business processes over the entire life cycle, without disruption to existing workflow processes.
Productivity...
for All Process Stakeholders
Supports the differentiated workflows of multiple
process stakeholders.
over the Entire Process Life Cycle
Supports workflow processes over the entire process
life cycle.
without Disruption
Supports existing groupware and workflow interfaces.
Interactivity...
with Granularity
Supports local updates to web pages.
with Responsiveness
Supports live updates to web pages.
with Security
Supports user single sign-on and distributed entitlement.
Extensibility...
Widgets
Alloqa design of reusable user interface components.
Portlets
Allows binding of user interface components to business
processes.
Workspaces
Allows aggregating multiple user interface components
into process desktops.
Productivity for All Process Stakeholders
Most alternative BPM solutions provide different tools and user interfaces for allowing process stakeholders to direct the execution of deployed business processes, ranging from web-based user interfaces for work management to client-server applications for process administration purposes.
The main problem with such an approach is that the boundaries between process interaction and process administration cannot be statically defined, especially with respect to exception handling. This lack of flexibility invariably results into productivity losses that cannot be overcome without the development of custom user interfaces, therefore losing the benefits offered by a process-oriented approach.
For this reason, Intalio|n³
is architected in such a way that all steps in the
process life cycle that follow the deployment of a
business process are handled through a common web-based
user interface—Intalio|n³
Director—that can be used by all process
stakeholders and focuses on their core responsibilities
with respect to the operation of deployed business
processes
Business User: Workflow
Interactions.
Process Owner: Business
Activity Monitoring.
Business Analyst:
Business Process Analysis.
System Administrator:
Process Control.
From a practical standpoint, Intalio|n³
Director presents itself as a set of customizable
and extensible workspaces that can be either exposed
through an existing enterprise portal, including BEA
WebLogic Portal and IBM WebSphere Portal, or served
directly to any web browser. Furthermore, workflow
interactions such as task management can also be served
through an existing groupware system, including IBM
Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange Server.
Benefit
Productivity over the Entire Process Life Cycle
Because a given process stakeholder might play multiple roles in the direction of a deployed business process over its operation life cycle, Intalio|n³ Director allows multiple workspaces to be accessed from the very same user interface. This enables a user to create a new instance for a given business process by entering some information through standard or custom forms, monitor its execution through graphical snapshots of the end-to-end process that visually depict its current state in a real-time fashion, proceed to manual exception handling, control the process instance by putting it on hold if some additional input is required, and finally conduct in-depth process analysis over a single process instance or any collection of running or completed process instances.
With such a scenario, productivity gains can be found
at two levels: from an operation standpoint, process
stakeholders benefit from a true process desktop that
gives them the ability to direct the execution of
deployed business processes over their entire operation
life cycle, without ever losing sight of the big picture;
from a development, deployment, and maintenance standpoint,
all user interfaces described above are automatically
generated by Intalio|n³
Director from the mere definition of an executable
process and the drag-and-drop design of custom forms
and reports, therefore dramatically reducing design-to-production
costs for business processes that cannot be properly
executed without extensive human interventions.
Benefits
Productivity without Disruption
Most alternative BPM solutions provide standalone user interfaces for supporting workflow interactions, business activity monitoring, and process control. Even though there are some benefits to this approach, such as the reduced footprint of the overall solution, it usually comes at a prohibitive cost from a workflow process reengineering standpoint. The reason for this is quite simple: process stakeholders have developed significant expertise with existing user interfaces, and the cost of migrating from one user interface to an other, usually going through the reengineering of the end-user workflow process, can compromise on and by itself the success of any BPM project, as it did compromise the success of many ERP and CRM projects in the past.
Intalio|n³ Director
supports the deployment of user interfaces in a stand-alone
fashion as well. Nevertheless, it also supports their
deployment as part of an existing enterprise portal,
leveraging its underlying authentication, authorization,
customization, and content aggregation capabilities.
Furthermore, Intalio|n³ Director has the unique ability to leverage existing groupware systems and workflow engines for work management purposes. As a result, the deployment of Intalio|n³ can be done without any disruption from an end-user standpoint, leading to increased productivity and lower workflow process reengineering costs.
Benefits
Interactivity Interactivity with Granularity
Most web-based user interfaces offer interactivity at the page level, but rarely down to the widget level. As a result, business users who are used to rich user interfaces offered by desktop environments such as Microsoft Windows or Mac OS usually do not consider web-based user interfaces as true productivity applications.
In order to overcome such limitations, Intalio|n³
Director is based on a grounbreaking presentation
technology that allows fine-grain interactivity down
to the widget level, without developers having to
bear the costs that usually come with the development
of such interactive widgets with traditional server-pages
technologies.
Benefits
Interactivity with Responsiveness
Most web-based user interfaces rely on a primitive client-server model that forces the refreshing of complete web pages anytime an action is carried by the end-user. As a result, web-based applications have a tendency to show significantly more latency than traditional desktop applications or advanced client-server applications that feature client-side data processing and caching, leading to user dissatisfaction and the common perception by end-users that web-based user applications cannot be considered as true productivity applications.
In order to overcome such limitations, Intalio|n³
Director is based on an innovative browser-web
model that supports refreshing of web-based content
down to the element level, client-side processing
of most user actions, and deployment with plain-vanilla
web browsers and off-the-shelf HTTP servers.
Benefits
Interactivity with Security
Among the main benefits that are offered by a process-oriented approach, visibility, agility, and accountability over the operation of mission-critical business processes are paramount and require the active participation of all process stakeholders. Nevertheless, they should not come at the price of inferior security over the various corporate assets that are leveraged by end-to-end business processes.
For this reason, Intalio|n³
Director offers an advanced entitlement and
role-based access control infrastructure that ensures
that process stakeholders, both internally and externally
to an organization, only have access to the information
and possible actions that they have been granted permissions
over. This infrastructure leverages existing directory
services such as LDAP and Microsoft Active Directory
for user authentication purposes, as well as the authorization
services that are offered by the leading enterprise
portals such as BEA WebLogic Portal and IBM WebSphere
Portal.
In order to reduce the level of complexity that usually
comes with the deployment of a secure portal infrastructure,
Intalio|n³ Director
leverages the security services offered by Intalio|n³
Server, including process firewalling,
single sign-on, and security policy projection. As
a result, the deployment of secure user interfaces
for the direction of mission-critical business processes
becomes a simple by-product of the deployment of any
business processes with Intalio|n³.
Benefits
Extensibility Widgets
Most alternative BPM solutions offer web-based user interfaces that are hard-coded using regular server-pages technologies such as Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) or Sun Java Server Pages (JSP). Even though such user interfaces usually support some basic level of customization, mostly from a branding standpoint, they remain static user interfaces that cannot be used for any other purpose than the one that they were originally designed for. This goes against one of the main benefits advocated by a process-oriented approach, which consists in enabling organizations to develop best-in-class processes by themselves, as opposed to buying packaged business processes from some independent software vendor.
Intalio|n³ Director
takes a radically different approach to the problem
of developing web-based user interfaces for executable
business processes: in much the same way Intalio|n³
Designer allows business analysts and software
engineers to develop complex business processes by
simply dragging-&-dropping basic process constructs
and graphically binding them to external systems,
Intalio|n³ Director
allows the very same audience to build interactive
user interfaces by simply dragging-&-dropping
standard widgets and graphically binding them to process
models.
While traditional server-pages rely on a separation
between content and presentation, they leave the work
of binding content and presentation to software engineers
in order to implement complex interactive behavior.
As a result, a significant amount of business logic
still needs to be hard-coded externally to the core
process definition, leading to additional development,
deployment, and maintenance costs.
Intalio|n³ Director
solves this problem by promoting an unprecedented
widget model that allows most of the user interface
to be actually designed by business analysts, not
only in terms of visual appearance, but also at the
interactive behavior level.
Additionally, Intalio|n³
Director offers an extensive collection of
pre-built widgets that can easily accomodate the rapid
development of the most interactive user interfaces,
including windows, grids, layouts, forms, selectors,
and charts.
Benefits
Portlets
Most alternative BPM solutions rely on a primitive model for the development and reuse of process portal components—also refered to as portlets—that offers reusability of user interface components across multiple business processes.
Nevertheless, they usually do not support
the packaging of processes and user interfaces into
components that can be reused within the context of
larger end-to-end processes, leading to additional
development, deployment, and maintenance costs.
In order to overcome such limitations, Intalio|n³
Director relies on an advanced portlet component
model that allows the packaging of multiple widgets
and business processes into portlets that can be reused
as coarse grain components by other processes and
user interfaces. Furthermore, such portlets can be
directly embedded within existing enteprise portals,
leveraging their underlying authentication, authorization,
customization, and content aggregation services.
Additionally, Intalio|n³
Director offers an extensive collection of
pre-built portlets that can easily accomodate the
rapid development of the most interactive user interfaces,
including user login, process model library, process
instance list, process instance viewer, process instance
controller, task list, task fulfillment interface,
and process analyzer, among many others.
Benefits
Workspaces
Most alternative BPM solutions provide user interfaces that are tailored for highly specific purposes, therefore limiting their scope of applicability to a diverse audience of process stakeholders, especially within the context of business processes that involve the direct participation of customers and partners.
In order to overcome such limitations, Intalio|n³
Director features a workspace model that allows
multiple portlets to be seamlessly integrated within
a single web page, enabling the development and customization
of highly interactive user interfaces that are jointly
targeted at multiple audiences.
Benefits
