Yesterday Lombardi announced availability of Blueprint, its on-line process modeling tool designed for business people, and offered on a SaaS basis. Lombardi also announced process definition packages to accelerate the development and deployment of processes.

I decided to hold off on this blog post this until I actually had a chance to check this out. Lombardi is claiming it’s one of the easiest modeling tools on the market. I’ve used the SaaS modeling tools from TIBCO, and Intalio, and I’ve looked at some Visio based tools. I wanted to check into this one. So here’s my first impression.

My initial question when I logged in was “where is the BPMN pallet?” I was expecting to see all the BPMN shapes up there to drag and drop. Instead, Blueprint offers two views. One is the business level discovery view which essentially has milestones and activities (business level ideas). To add decision points and loop backs, etc, you right click on a line to choose a shape. I wondered if Lombardi had read the Israeli pilots manual. There was a story (I admit I don’t know if it’s actually urban legend because I have not verified it) that a panel tried to determine best practices by the best Israeli fighter pilots. What made them so successful? The pilots only agreed to talk after they were promised there would be no recriminations. But the answer was that when they got into a combat scenario, they shut down most of the control panel to only focus on what was relevant to finding and shooting the enemy. This is the approach that Lombardi has taken. Not a lot on the pallet to get confused by, but you can go deeper by right clicking.

In the discovery view you add things like business owners, process experts, inputs and outputs, any problems (which can also be color codes), and documentation. In other words it’s the initial business view. From there, you can simply change views to the Process Diagram and get the full BPMN diagram with swim lanes. There is also a documentation view. It is fairly easy to link to sub processes and go back and forth between linked processes. I found this to be a major differentiator from other tools I’ve tried.

Lombardi also announced packages, which are built around things you would do with Blueprint. These are service offerings that include Lombardi’s BPM methodology. They announced a Process Inventory Package, a three week service offering where they will inventory all the processes in a certain area of the business to increase productivity. There is also a Process Assessment package, a 3 day service which focuses on a certain area of the business with the goal of understanding which of the detailed processes impact key KPIs and SLAs. There is also a two-week Process Analysis to detail a BPM process. These are all fixed priced service offerings.

You can go online and check Blueprint out for free, which allows you to model a few processes. The full version will allow you to import Visio diagrams, of course model more processes, export diagrams to PowerPoint, print them, provide a shared repository, and integrate with Teamworks to automate the processes.

Posted by bethgb in BPM • Industry News • SaaS • Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently had an experience that made me acutely aware of the importance of the second "S" in Software as a Service (SaaS). When you do not own or control the software used for business operations, it is critically important to evaluate the service levels that are provided.

This was my experience. We use a service called Free Online Surveys for our surveys. We had a user induced error and required a restoration of the backup of the data. I sent an email immediately. There was NO TELEPHONE number on the Free Online Survey site. However, there was a link to the parent company Problem Free. This site had both a UK telephone number and a toll free US number. No one answered either number. It was past 6:00 pm in the UK, so I waited until morning.

The next morning I checked my email and voice mail very early to see if they responded. They had not. I started searching for alternative telephone numbers but my searches kept coming up with either "no business found" or the Problem Free website. This did not not engender much confidence, but I didn't give up. I was, afterall, desperate. After over an hour I finally found a name match with a different telephone number. I was lucky - some one answered the phone. But get this one - it was the owner's MOTHER! My guess is that he started the business while still living at home and somehow this number still existed on a site. His mother was kind enough to give me the owner's home telephone number. Luckily he was home when I called, and I was successful in getting the problem resolved - FOR AN EXORBITANT PRICE!!!

So this is a cautionary tale. You really don't want to depend on getting someone's home number from their mother to respond to technical issues of your SaaS application. I strongly recommend that before you decide on a service, check out the company's support services. Do they have a telephone number you can call? Do they answer the telephone? What do they charge for technical support?

Forewarned is forearmed. We are currently evaluating other services. And you can bet we will focus on support. I suggest you do the same. Ultimately, it is as important as the software itself.

Posted by bethgb in SaaS | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)