Some of you may have already noticed that the Claromentis website has had a bit of a revamp. Well today is the official announcement along with our newly designed blog to go with it. It would be great to hear what you think.

This is the phase one launch as there are still many tasks to be completed including a new media room and updating a lot of the old content. You should find however a drastic change to the whole look and feel of the site and our main product pages.

The aim is to bring clarity to our message and reflect who we are and what we do through the site. This phase one launch is a great start and we are looking forward to bringing some new features to it soon. Click the here to go to the website and have a look for yourself.

Intranet-Extranet

A short description of our custom web application development

All comments welcome!

Custom Development, Services custom development, development

A short summary of our products in the Intranet, Business Process, Quality management and Document Management space – and the fact that customers are increasingly selecting more than one product line to create an embracing web platform for their businesses.

All comments welcome!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Content, Prod-Document, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Process, Prod-Quality, Products, Solutions products

In this short video Nigel tries to define Claromentis

We welcome comments and questions – thanks!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Solutions Claromentis, video

Recently we’ve developed an attractive way to read a policy online. Some of the blog reader might be familiar with ‘Bookshelf’ one of application from Quality Management Product that allows you to create and publish policies & procedures online (as web pages).

Bookshelf user can now choose from standard available themes, read in full screen, changing font-size in real-time, ease of navigation.

Intranet-Extranet, Products Design, quality management software, user interface

I was reviewing a business process management based home page that we delivered for a client today, and an article I had been reading by Lynda Gratton at the London Business School really hit home.

Basically Linda was discussing that in some ways modern technology is replacing the job description of middle managers – since it can provide reports and summary information for instant review – which used to some extent be exactly the role of middle managers.

I can certainly agree that a BPM landing page, and of course the processes themselves – do indeed provide exactly the reports, summaries and graphical components that are suitable for executive review – and they are always available and always up to date.

BPM Home Page

As the image shows –

•    Key processes are summarized – how many issues, how many I reported, how many assigned to me for action
•    Fast access to the reports for each individual process
•    Graphical summaries – Incidents per month and a pie chart in this case of issues according to current status

Live data feeds are also possible, as well as any customer graphs required.

All of this information is of course presented through the permission engine, so each user sees the most important processes that they have access to.

When combined with the notification functionality that it provides, I can indeed understand that this page is providing a significant amount of information that before such technology was available would have certainly required a significant amount of time to prepare and analyze – and that would have been the contribution of middle management.

My own perspective is that deciding what processes to implement in an organisation, and making sure that the value is delivered over long enough to make a real difference does certainly require the skills of a management team. Designing informative and beautiful presentation layers is our job but understanding the clients business rests reassuringly with our clients management teams.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process BPM, Business Process Management, Intranet Components

We regularly post  about our permissions that enable rights to be allocated according to any combination of Groups, Roles, Extranet areas and individual users – as well as special permissions such as the public.

We have frequent workshops and implementation discussions around these concepts as we work with new customers to map these ideas onto their organizations and objectives. To elaborate using groups and roles – we will have many customers where groups and sub groups map to some kind of departmental or functional structure and roles cut across this matrix to provide a cross functional equivalence – “I am in a different department but I too am an engineer or a manager” would be simple examples.

As Claromentis continues to establish a strong solution in Business Process Management we are now intersecting this permission model with the concept of Business Process Owners : people responsible for implementing a process that cuts across this two dimensional layer with a form based workflow that touches many – and unpredictable – individual users as the process continues from end to end, across groups and roles according to the status and requests of the relevant process.

For any one process organizational groups, users and functions are given various rights at various stages in a process, and according to who requested the start of the process and to whom it is currently assigned.

We are currently implementing 8 processes for a global company and during a call today I was reminded as to what a challenge this is for any company to successfully implement. Such processes can indeed be effectively implemented using our BPM technology – but the company still has to establish the process and deal with all of the reasons that make such cross-company processes difficult to maintain. This cultural and organizational challenge for any business, large or small – is a subject that is well summarized by Brad Power at the HBR.

We greatly enjoy the collaborative nature of working with companies to analyze and implement such cross matrix processes – and have the greatest respect for companies that have the vision and staying power to ensure that once implemented  they are sustainable through all of the political, external and internal challenges that any business faces.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process BPM, permissions