The promise of open clouds: Faster innovation, faster delivery

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The potential for low-code/no-code platforms is enormous. Low-code increases the productivity of IT developers — sometimes by several orders of magnitude. And no-code empowers experts and subject matter experts primarily on the business or operations side (as opposed to IT) to become “citizen developers.”

But as I explained in a previous article, low-code and no-code platforms are not a panacea; they face challenges.

Given the broad spectrum of low-code and no-code platforms, how should enterprises find the best options for their specific needs? And what are the use cases for using multiple low-code/no-code platforms?

I will address these questions in a series of articles to help you navigate this transformational landscape while avoiding the pitfalls. Specifically, I will be looking at low-code/no-code related to intelligent business process management (BPM), intelligent databases, automated integration, and a number of other areas.

In this first installment, I will be focusing on low-code/no-code in the context of intelligent BPM, or iBPM.

What is iBPM?

iBPM’s core value proposition is the collaboration and orchestration of people, applications, connected devices, and trading partners to achieve and continuously improve business objectives. Intelligence and automation are two essential conjuncts for BPM. Intelligence for BPM comes in many forms: digitizing business rules, intelligent virtual assistants, and increasingly process mining. A BPM solution will involve fully automated robotic process automation sub-processes for repetitive tasks that do not need human intervention and automated tasks assigned to human participants. Thus, increasingly RPA is becoming part of the complete intelligent BPM platform.

Here is a simple order-to-cash process example:

Some tasks will be performed by humans — for instance, approving the orders. Others could involve automation with RPA — for example, receiving the goods. There will also be tasks accessing systems of record — for instance, preparing and paying the invoice.

An iBPM platform will model, execute, monitor, and improve the end-to-end process. Other terms are also often used to denote end-to-end processes. These include “workflow” and “case management.”

Intelligent BPM is much more than technology. At its core, it is a transformational management discipline that helps organizations achieve their strategic goals. Automation is a crucial component of iBPM solutions. As a discipline, BPM drives the operations of enterprises. It includes several iterative phases from design to execution to monitoring and continuous improvement.

There is a remarkably close affinity between low-code/no-code and BPM. As far as back in 2005 or earlier, BPM suites were touted as platforms for model-driven development, which is akin to what we now call low-code/no-code. What were the “models?” Well, check the next section on how low-code/no-code manifests itself in iBPM platforms.

Low-code/No-code in iBPM

Low-code/no-code iBPM platforms handle:

1. Modeling the workflow or the process
2. The user experience or screens for the human participants, and
3. The process analytics dashboards — for continuous improvement.

There are other components of a complete iBPM low-code/no-code platform — such as the decisioning (aka business rules), integration, and data model — but I won’t be getting to those in this post.

The following is a simple purchase request process model from BizAgi, using shapes from the BPMN graphical notation for business processes (the de-facto standard):

The swim lanes represent the participants in the process. The rectangular shapes are tasks or activities. The diamond shape is for a decision, and the circles represent the start and end of the process. There are many other shapes in the BPMN standard, but these three are the most common.

If human participants, such as Boss, Requester, etc, are involved in a particular workflow, the low-code/no-code BPM modeling also supports the creation of UI forms to enable that interaction, and these are pretty easy to model. This “drag and drop” paradigm of building user experience is common and similar across all low-code/no-code platforms that support Web or mobile applications. The following figure illustrates a simple user experience designer from KissFlow. There will be elements such as buttons, input fields, drop-downs, images, etc., that a non-technical developer can use to create the user experience. The elements are then connected to the properties or fields in the business process being modeled and automated.

The interface builder of the iBPM platform is robust enough to allow the designer to build a user experience — preferably without any code.

Once the application is deployed, the various participants can then monitor the performance of the activities through interactive analytics. These are actionable analytics dashboards, which means that if there is a bottleneck or issue, the stakeholder can take action, such as escalating or re-assigning a task. The analytics dashboards will typically have pre-built analytics that also support low-code/no-code customization. Here is an example of an actionable business process analytics dashboard from Nintex:

iBPM Low Code/No Code Recommendations

Why is it important for organizations to be able to model, automate, monitor, and improve their business processes without coding? An organization is a collection of business processes for production, marketing, sales, service, and support functions. So any optimizations and improvements of the most critical processes will enhance the bottom line: cost savings, revenue generation, and compliance. These are called operational excellence (OE) improvements. iBPM low-code/no-code platforms are an enabling technology for OE.

Here are my recommendations for iBPM low-code/no-code.

Prioritize your improvements: There will typically be many mission-critical and support processes that need improvement. By balancing the complexity of implementation with business value, you will identify the low-hanging fruit. (For more details, check out this explanation of four intelligent automation methodologies). The result will be a list of automation and OE business processes that you can optimize through an iBPM low-code/no-code platform.

Make sure you start with process mining: To find the top priority low-hanging fruit, you need to know the most common process paths, the bottlenecks, the variations, and improvement opportunities. In other words, you need to understand what processes your transactional data is subject to and then improve them. That is precisely the domain of process mining. Do not automate bad processes. The figure below illustrates the OE reference architecture with iBPM low-code/no-code. At the bottom, you have the systems of record that generate the transactions for specific processes. After aggregating and cleaning the transactional data, a process mining tool — such as Celonis — can then identify the most common process path and the variations and the root causes for the issues. Like data mining, process mining algorithmically “mines” and discovers the processes from the transactional data, including the variations and bottlenecks. Based on these, a iBPM low-code/no-code platform is used to improve, implement, and automate the processes, leveraging workflows with human participants and robotic process automation.

Create and fund an operational excellence competency center: iBPM low-code/no-code — and all other low-code/no-code, for that matter — is technology. As noted above, it is also a management discipline for operational excellence. For organizations that use this approach, it is a good idea to have a competency center that does three things at a minimum: balances innovation through iBPM low-code/no-code with best practices for security and reliability, enables non-technical subject matter experts to leverage iBPM low-code/no-code and become participants in development, and governs the continuous improvement from process mining to automation.

Understand the landscape and leverage experts: There is quite a bit of confusion when it comes to classifying what solutions are BPM solutions. Some analysts classify these platforms as “workflow,” “business process,” or “case management” solutions. For example, see these classification schemes:

There are also low-code/no-code development platforms that are closely affiliated with the BPM space but that might be classed into other low-code/no-code categories:

The low-code/no-code ecosystem is constantly evolving. There are hundreds of platforms — and new ones are entering the market all the time. Sometimes inexpensive and straightforward low-code/no-code tools will be sufficient for your needs. Do not pay for what you will rarely use. Also, avoid vendor lock-in. There are emerging new and innovative low-code/no-code platforms that support plug-ins and add-ons, including those that address process mapping.

Dr. Setrag Khoshafian is a cofounder at Startup Assistant and Principal and Chief Scientist at Khosh Consulting. He was previously VP of BPM Technology at Pega, Senior VP of Technology at Savvion, and CTO at Portfolio Technologies and is a member of the Cognitive World Think Tank on enterprise AI.

The promise of open clouds: Faster innovation, faster delivery

Learn how open clouds reduce latencies to client device, improve customer and device (IoT) interactions and speed up innovations from the edge to the data center.

Presented by Together Labs

“We can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” I recently said at the GamesBeat Summit in January 2021 during the “Making Friends in the Metaverse” panel.

As the metaverse — the computer-generated environment where we represent ourselves and persistently interact with each other — builds up around us, it’s crucial that more of us keep looking forward with the question: “What can we do now to ensure that this new virtual world is not only as good as our ‘real world’ but possibly even better?”

And if that “better future” doesn’t include intentionally programming for better relationships, then we’re missing the greatest human need: connection. Countless studies reinforce that we’re happier, healthier, and even live longer when we have better relationships, feel supported, and believe we belong. Loneliness, on the other hand, decreases our empathy, increases our stress, damages our body, and wears on our mental health.

In an era where books have titles such as “The Lonely Century” and research reveals that over 60% of us feel lonely on a regular basis, and where documentaries such as “The Social Dilemma” highlight the challenges our industry faces, we have an awesome responsibility to intentionally approach product design with the purpose of helping to foster authentic human connections and relationships.

The metaverse must focus on connection

Nearly every game and social media platform is dependent upon people interacting, but we know only too well that just as we can be lonely in a crowd, participation next to each other isn’t the same as connection. As Shasta Nelson, a friendship expert and author who moderated our recent panel said, “Belonging doesn’t just come by sticking a lot of people in the same place — in-person or virtually. That bond can be, and must be, developed.”

The specifics of how people meet or what they say or do is infinitely varied, but the basics of how healthy relationships form is not. Nelson, who has a TEDx talk titled “Frientimacy: The 3 Requirements of All Healthy Friendships,” compiled the social science and concluded that there are three factors that must be present for connecting in meaningful, safe, and enjoyable ways.

At Together Labs, we have taken this framework as a way to not only assess what we’ve already developed with IMVU, VCOIN, and WithMe, but to also brainstorm where we might better create more powerful connections in the future.

We must develop for positivity

The first requirement is positivity. Nelson clarifies, “Ultimately, we want relationships that make us feel happy, or that increase our positive emotions.” She quotes science that shows we need a 5:1 positive to negative experience ratio to keep our relationships healthy.

Indeed, we know that even if somebody is a long tenure user and is very engaged, if they have enough negative experiences, they just leave, so how do we architect a space where we’re strategically thinking through how to reduce any negative emotions such as confusion, judgment, and failure, while also designing a world where we encourage more positive emotions?

While our industry has long understood the value of positivity when it comes to users feeling excited by storylines, feeling accomplished receiving rewards, and feeling celebrated by leaderboards, we have a long way to go when thinking about how we can expand our positivity lexicon by developing storylines, features, and experiences that foster kindness, empathy, acceptance, collaboration, gratitude, and affirmation.

To that end, at IMVU, we have 25,000 greeters who help new users to connect by friending them and introducing them to others. It’s a positivity win:win as the new user feels welcomed and accepted and the volunteer feels helpful and generous.

We must develop for consistency

We all want our users to have a good time — for their sake, but also because we know that’s what leads to them coming back for more. Which leads to the second requirement: consistency.

“Building a bond is not a one-time experience, but rather is developed by ongoing interactions and shared experiences,” Nelson iterates. “It is with repetition that we form a pattern that leads to us feeling safe because we know what to expect and what we can count on.”

Most of us might call this retention. We’ve long known that we need to keep them coming back — whether that’s through cliff-hangers and surprises in our stories, familiarity in how to play the game so they can master it, and ongoing levels to challenge them. Now, our greatest challenge is to figure out how to not only entice our users to be consistent on our platforms, but to provide them opportunities to build that familiarity with each other.

Jessica Freeman, head of marketing at Minecraft, agrees. As a fellow panelist at our “Making Friends in the Metaverse” event, she said, “It’s that shared experience that I think people are craving. It used to be that kids would meet on the playground after school. But as that’s not possible now, they’re meeting up in Minecraft to connect socially and to catch up. It has become this kind of virtual recess that they need.”

She shared some powerful stories of all ages — college students building their campuses in Minecraft so they could have online graduations, people meeting in the game and eventually marrying, and grandmothers bonding with their grandchildren by playing together across the country from each other. The platforms that will win in the future will be those that provide opportunities for people to gather and meet virtually, to bond through shared experiences together, and that provide new experiences to deepen existing relationships.

We must develop for vulnerability

Lastly, for a relationship to feel meaningful, we eventually need to believe we know each other as a result of those shared experiences and repetitive interactions, which leads to the third requirement of relationships: vulnerability. This happens as you start to trust each other and disclose more about yourself.

As Shasta shares, “What we want most from each other is to feel accepted and valued, which only happens when we feel like [people] know us. We need to ultimately feel seen by each other.” Of course, in a close friendship that could mean unfiltered self-disclosure, but she says that even in a brief interaction, we want to feel noticed for who we are.

Vulnerability isn’t something we often talk about in our industry, and yet all of us who create, and provide the resources for others to create, are doing just that. Creativity — whether it’s through allowing our users to create their avatars or design new worlds — is one of the most vulnerable acts of humanity. Plus, it allows for self-expression, the very beginning of revealing who we are to others, how we want to be seen.

Imagine a metaverse where we can all be seen in safe ways. Meaghan Fitzgerald, Head of Experiences Product Marketing at Facebook Reality Labs cast the vision for our industry in our panel when she said, “There’s so much work to do so that everyone — women, minorities, people from all walks of life, and however they choose to express themselves — feels like they can be themselves.”

It has to be more than simply giving people options of how they want to be seen. She reminds us that it’s our responsibility as the makers of these worlds to practice diversity in our teams, to decrease toxicity on our platforms, and to improve the safety and reporting mechanisms that ensure we have the opportunities to be seen in ways that feel good to everyone.

At a time in our world where positivity is running low, and fear, division, and judgment are high; where routines have been disrupted and there is less consistency; where too many people say they can’t be vulnerable because they don’t feel safe being themselves or feel valued for their uniqueness — those of us who know how to create new worlds have a huge opportunity to develop exactly what we know people most need.

Technology is too-often blamed for being the cause of our disconnection and loneliness, but I’d like to believe we can also be the solution.

How can we create virtual spaces that bring people together? What is it that bonds people in real life that we can replicate? What gets in the way with developing our in-person interactions that we can possibly solve to help and not hinder us?

Indeed, the genie is out of the bottle. Now, we get to decide what it is we want to wish for. I, for one, am here to say, “I want to create a world where people feel more connected than they do now.”

The conversation “Making Friends in the Metaverse” is happening next at SXSW on March 16, 2021 with Megan Fitzgerald of Facebook Reality Labs, Jessica Freeman of Minecraft, Lauren Bigelow of Together Labs, and friendship expert, Shasta Nelson. Join us at sxsw.com.

Lauren Bigelow is Chief of Product at Together Labs.

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