OpenText Upgrades Metastorm BPM; Ships Smart Business Workspace 
OpenText’s Metastorm business unit is bringing smart collaboration to business process management (BPM) with updates to its Metastorm BPM suite and a novel Smart Business Workspace. The firm is also shipping an intelligent dashboard to help teams track business performance metrics and drive process improvements.
OpenText’s Metastorm business unit is bringing smart collaboration to business process management (BPM) with updates to its Metastorm BPM suite and a novel Smart Business Workspace. The firm is also shipping an intelligent dashboard to help teams track business performance metrics and drive process improvements.
Metastorm BPM 9.1 and Metastorm Smart Business Workspace 9.0 adapt social media to link together workers in a highly personal and productive way, Sandra Moran, Senior Director of Product Management for Metastorm, told IDN.
The new Business Process Intelligence dashboard aims to deliver personalized and dynamic graphical data analysis to each user, allowing teams to improve BPM decision-making during runtime operations, as well as improve the design of projects that bring beneficial changes to business, she added.
Metastorm’s latest releases feature benefits across the entire BPM lifecycle:
- Enhanced Social BPM capabilities to enable collaborative design and instant collaboration on a specific work item for faster, improved resolution
- Individual user profiles searchable by user’s skills
- Enhanced design features that support the development of more dynamic BPM applications
Moran said that Metastorm’s latest offerings “bring together some of the most useful approaches to social technologies for BPM, as well as Best Practices.” The goal, she added, is to let companies improve their ROI from BPM through the entire lifecycle, from design, deployment and on-going operations.
“Users have rising expectations, They want their business environment to be much more like what they see and use with social media-type applications for their personal life,” Moran told IDN. But that said, she quickly added “there has to be more to social BPM than simply integrating with social media.”
Driving Social BPM for Smarter, Better Collaboration
Metastorm’s latest approach embeds social capabilities directly into the business process components to give users a real-time collaboration capability. Metastorm also helps users get the most from these collaborations.
Metastorm’s Smart Business Workspace lets each user start with a blank pallet and lay it out the way they’d like to work, drop in the applications and data they need to see and integrate it all with the social or chat features. The SBW also lets users:
"Users want their business [computing] environment to be much more like what they see in their personal life."
Sandra Moran
Senior Director of Product Management
Metastorm
Easily mash up/integrate components Users can employ “widgets” to tie together a mix of data and components from Metastorm or third party applications to promote insight, decision making, planning and execution.
Accomplish simple widget design A simple-to-use tool lets non-technical users create their own widgets. Unlike mashup designers that focus on rendering views of data/dashboards, Metastorm Smart Business Workspace provides built in transaction support, governance and advanced external integration capabilities.
Metastorm’s “personal profile” and interactive Smart Business Workspaces features will impact on the entire BPM lifecycle, from design, deploy and operations, Moran told IDN. Across all phases, profiles let companies classify their users by their skills, training and even certifications. They also let workers and managers ensure the right people are on the collaboration, and will provide a customizable view for each stakeholder, she added.
“My analogy is a blueprint,” she said. “We all need to be anchored off the blueprint, but if I’m the plumber I don’t need the electrical schematic, and vice-versa. Having a right set of views appraopriate to each [member] promotes the right kinds of conversations and processes.”
Design - In the design phase, one of the most challenging aspects can be the discovery and requirements building processes, where IT and business need to work together – but don’t need to see the same view of all aspects, Moran explained. “It’s frustrating for many users that even after all their BPM technology, there can often still be mismatches and miscommunication between IT and business users,” she said. “With this release, Metastorm delivers a capability to bring these two groups together much better.”
Pre-Provisioning - For that crucial step between design and deployment, Metastorm 9 supports simulations and tests of processes, to make sure they are effective before taking them live. “You can simulate all the way down to the finest granular detail with full process analysis and even full six sigma,” she told IDN.
Operations - During operations, the profiles bring a new level of insight and productivity to live BPM, she added. “Once I have these profiles, I can be smarter about defining and routing my processes, and better leverage the skills of all my staff, “Moran said. “As an example, instead of simply routing work to the person who has the least number of items in their inbox, I can now send that to people with special skills or capabilities.”
At the larger view, Moran said the new Metastorm offerings aim to promote what she called “intelligent routing with BPM to improve collaboration in the context of work.” Other benefits from this approach are better insights into current processes, ways to identify trends in manual (or ad hoc) processes that could lead to automation, better maximize the value of workers with special talents and skills, and other ongoing improvements to a company’s BPM approach.
