iFlow BPM has been proving that is a solution which manages to solve systematically implementation blocking of BPM in organizations.
One of the current scenarios is the implementation need of a simple workflow. For example, billing approval or marketing actions approval.
Both of scenarios have the following characteristics in common:
- Simplicity. The request workflows are much simpler. But they are important enough to no longer be managed in an ad-hoc via email.
- Reduce budget. This kind of initiatives doesn’t have individualized budget and usually is budget to other initiative, like marketing for example.
- Urgent. The implementation need of the workflow is “for yesterday”.
The difficulties that we have found are external to users and departments that wish to implement the platform.
However, companies typically face two barriers:
- Corporate Policies – when companies hear about BPM they think of “mega platform”. What could have been a “few days project” becomes a “month project”. You need to validate the architecture, enterprise licensing, ensuring no overlap solution. Then you need to allocate a project manager, perform risk analysis and ROI. After these phases, IT department informs that resources are over allocated and only within 3 months may give any response.
- Infrastructure – the thing that the business knows is that a tactic solution that consume low resources (few billings to approve) is turned into a little monster. What if it has 10.000 billings? What’s the security level demanded? What is the information loss risk?
These two obstacles come from the fact that there’s no expertise for project types. More and more organizations implement quality management systems and processes, such as ISO 9001:2008 and CMMI v1.3. But none of these standards definitions is indicated that the analysis processes must be heavy, bureaucratic and cannot pay attention to the size and impact of the projects.
iFlow BPM has been introduced in companies and organizations as a low implementation impact platform, because it’s open source, have no licensing costs and simple technological implementation.
SaaS (Software as a Service) model allows inclusively that all the solutions be allocated externally to organizations. BPM is more than a technological solution, is a service that is consumed.
It’s precisely in this context that the budgets to iFlow BPM projects execution have been implemented, with costs being classified as a business service instead of technological cost. And it makes all sense because iFlow BPM + workflow is in fact a business solution for businesses.