We are really pleased to see InfoCapture ( AKA Business Process Manager ) make huge leaps forwards with the new release of Claromentis 6.1

In this short post I just want to highlight the new flowchart representation of workflows. This has been something customers have discussed and prioritized, but it was a challenge to decide the best way forwards – because the workflow of any ticket in BPM reacts to so many factors – principally the available statuses, the permissions of the user viewing the ticket, and the values of various fields in the e-form.

The solution has two parts – firstly a project landing page that now allows any decription of the process to be added – for example a video explaining the workflows, or an image of a graphical representation of the chart.

Secondly the ticket itself will present a dynamic, real time view of the previous status, and all possible next statuses.

This is a great pleasure to use and a significant evolution of Business Process Manager as we continue to drive our products forwards.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process, Workflow Services BPM

When it comes to famous statements about business models, Peter Drucker would be right up there with his often quoted emphasis on – “who is your customer, what does the customer value, and how can we deliver value at an appropriate cost?”

With all the changes during 2010 in both our own expanding company and the wider internet world in general, it is interesting to apply this to ourselves here at Claromentis.

What we are seeing is that because we now :

• Offer true SAAS deployment as an option, as well as perpetual licence models
• Have a framework with entirely optional modules as entry points
• Have a well established custom application team

This means we have seen a growing engagement with a whole new audience – younger technical companies and start ups that need to offer a corporate web based software solution not for themselves at all, but as an integrated part of their offering to their own clients.

So it does seem that we have two clear sets of customers that both embrace the Claromentis framework with equal enthusiasm, but with very different values and requirements :

• Smaller companies and start ups look to us to deliver solution that is in itself ­a significant part of their sales offering

• Larger companies are looking for efficiency gains, collaboration, innovation, Enterprise 2.0 and internal process automation.

It is fascinating to work with these two very different audiences, and to ensure that our business model delivers what they both value at an appropriate cost. Our new financial year is underway as of 1st April, and it is exciting and challenging to have such diverse requirements from our customers.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, The Framework business model, intranet development, intranet software, software, web applications

Following on from Phil’s great post on our intranet analytics available in Claromentis 6.1 I wanted to share a screen shot.

Intranet Analytics

The highlights for me are :

• Really a familiar interface that users will easily be able to absorb and use
• Powerful business information, with summaries by object type in the intranet
• Most popular tabs for each object type – including automatic scrolling from tab to tab to add animation
• Analytics summaries on metrics that are very familiar to anyone working on public sites – Unique users, Page views, average time on site, average page views per day
• Importantly – the ability to compare any date range with any range in the past.

This is a very information rich system that will give Intranet Managers and teams a huge amount of useful information on the way their system is being used.

Thanks to Darren at  one of our Platinum customers for helping us understand what metrics are the most useful to our users!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Services intranet analytics, intranet software

As we set our strategy and roadmap for the coming financial year, starting April  – it already seems clear that one element will be to build on our  strong reputation for helping businesses to best use web based software to meet their goals.

Our extensive code base includes information management, process management and custom applications. However in addition to software we also offer wide ranging advice and consultancy.

This is based on our expertise and pragmatic experience over the last 13 years of working with such a wide range of companies at different levels of their own understanding of what web based software can offer them, and how  it can change or enhance their business models.

Under these circumstances it is interesting to us to try to define what world  class intranet consultancy might look like.

Clear elements would include:

• A determined focus on clarity.
• Expert staff sharing knowledge and experiences.
• A focus on the business models of our customers not on our software and processes – these are a means to the end.
• Honesty – recommending products from best in class suppliers of point solution where these are clearly appropriate and can be integrated.
• Risk sharing – through prototypes and innovative delivery of complex solutions.
• Cultural and global sensitivity
• Removing all barriers – so we can focus on getting to the goals : whatever the platform needed, whatever the functionality, via any deployment model, on any device.

It will be an exciting year for our staff and clients as we continue to refine our intranet consultancy – keeping world class standards as our ultimate goal.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Process, Solutions intranet consultancy

Our meetings and workshops are often focused on quantifying where value lies in our client projects – what combination of Claromentis applications and custom development is going to make the most difference to the business, and add value to the platform as experienced by the user.

The discussion process – normally involving several key staff from the business and our own client team – is always fascinating and enjoyable. The client will be looking to understand the impact of configuration, the value standard projects bring – and then comparing potential e-form processes with custom development. These kinds of meetings are genuinely fascinating and enjoyable.

Sometimes however leveraged value is added from something that to all of us seemed to be a relatively simple addition to an intranet application or process. This happened to us recently when we were in the situation of being an internal customer  – as we now refer to this – we were looking to use our own project application to manage all of our work around the world – including all core and custom projects – development, design and testing teams co-operating on a huge range of projects.

As the scope of this became clear, we realized that we needed an intelligent filter – a method to look at the tasks facing groups of users – such as the design team – and to further filter that by the status of the tasks. Only then could the application really add value to us, rather than just be a neat way of organising our projects. Without such a filter loading hundreds of tasks into our application would just produce confusion through information overload.

We went ahead and improved the Intranet project management application to provide this filter – and the impact on our project delivery has been significant – making a material difference to our business.

Our project plan with a filter

All of our projects are indeed now in our project application, and anyone finds it a simple process to see  the upcoming tasks for themselves, their team, or any other group of users – directly from within Atlas – which is our own Claromentis intranet.

We are already engaging in workshops to extend this concept and the application further – we would like to see all our projects being stored as separate projects within a programme for example, so that we can grant our clients direct access to each project while maintaining security and integrity across all of our clients. These projects would then transparently build into a master view for all users according to their permissions, appearing to be one Gantt chart for example when in fact the system is generating the Gantt chart on the fly for each user.

Our experience with introducing filters has been enormously successful, we must be one of the happiest customers we have ever worked with. Simple enhancements can indeed produce extraordinary value.

Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet intranet project manager, intranet software, intranet software discussions

We have been reviewing many of our recent projects – combinations of intranet projects, business process management, document management and custom web application development – and getting feedback from those customers on the difference our projects have made to their business.

I do feel that the most measurable value comes from creating a web application within our framework that meets a clear business need, embedded within the portal and leveraging our interfaces and code base.

Measurable Value

Using our prototype process and our API means that we can ensure that the client will receive exactly what they need with minimum risk, modest budgets and over a reasonable time frame.

The fact that we have such a significant code base that can deliver the basics for any corporate application does enable a refreshingly ‘can-do’ approach for even the most complex requirement.

This is a great differentiator for our company – to have a code library at our disposal that already offers :

• Information Management ( content and document management )
• Process Management
• A visual interface engine
• Permissions
• Localization to any language
• Active directory integration
• Cross platform ( Windows and Linux ) and any database ( Oracle, MySQL and MSSQL )
• All browsers
• A component Library
• A significant number of relevant applications

Means that we can in just several weeks build on this to add exactly the web based application our customers need.

To have staff that are available to whiteboard ideas, talk over requirements and in general engage with customers to mature their often early stage ideas is also extremely important when thinking about how a company obtains value in their interaction with Claromentis.

All this was brought home to me when one of our designers said ‘its really unusual to work for a company when a whole team is working to make sure the customer gets exactly what they want’

I would only add that we do this even before the customer actually knows what they want to any level of detail.  We enjoy this whole process, and I think that sense of fun and engagement really comes across when we discuss web applications with our customers.

Of course that fun only comes with years of hard work that provides us with a real confidence when listening to the most complex needs – but in the end I suppose this lines up with most businesses not just web software – whatever you do you need stuff, people and processes – and the more confidence you have in all of those and their ability to deliver, the more you can relax and listen to the customer.

Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet custom development, intranet value

As I mentioned in my last post we are frequently asked to compare the cost of deployment of a range of our software in perpetual license models and Software as a Service.

So I went back over a number of recent quotations for projects we have been involved in around the world, and here is the comparison based on medium size deployments – looking at total costs to date for years 1, 2 and 3.

Comparison of SaaS and Perpetual deployment costs over 1-3 years

Unsurprisingly in year 1 – and I included all services as supplied in both sets of figures – Perpetual is significntly more expensive. After all the customer is paying for perpetual licenses of the software.

However after 2 years the situation is almost equal, and by the end of year 3 the SaaS model is significantly more expensive.

I these figures the cost of hardware IT skills are not at all factored back into the equation – and since when we deploy SaaS solutions we are of course supplying both cloud based infrastructure and all the IT support – it is hardly surprising that after some time the total cost of SaaS does overtake the perpetual license model.

It is also reasonable to argue that the complete flexibility, stop at any time, scale up and down side of SaaS should come at a price. Nevertheless we see a rapidly growing percentage of our new clients opting for SaaS solutions, and we do understand why.

Our job is to offer our customers choice, advice and pricing transparency to help them make the decision in an informed way.

I hope that sharing these general figures over time is of interest!

Intranet-Extranet, Products cost, perpetual, SAAS, software

I am often asked by potential clients to provide information on how project funds can realistically be allocated across the spectrum of software licenses, services, support and custom design and development.

I think one of the best ways to think about this is to take an example small project and a very large one. So I did this for two recent projects – one a very standard example of a standard Claromentis Intranet product led engagement with a UK company of less than 50 staff, the other a recent deployment in the United States for an unlimited user system with a very significant custom development to provide specific sales related functionality, integration with third party systems and reporting through an Extranet.

Small Project Analysis

What we see with this project is that

• There are only 3 areas of spending – Software, Services and Support
• Software is 75% of the project spend
• Services and Support equally share the remaining 25%

Large Project Analysis

Large Project Financial Analysis

By contrast a large project has significant spending on Development and Design, as well as international travel and general expenses.

• Software licenses are one third of the spend
• Development and design are equal, totaling half of the project

Clearly these are just two examples, but comparing these to our license records for many projects does show that simple projects have a larger proportion of costs related to software licenses, and adding 25% for support and services give a good approximation to the total budget.

However when estimating budgets for larger deployments with more complex and custom requirements half of the project costs are concerned with the delivery of the custom functionality.

In my next post I will be comparing the customer costs for deploying intranets and custom frameworks through our cloud based SAAS offering, compared with a perpetual license model. I will be comparing these costs over a 2 year period.

Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Products, Services, Solutions, The Framework cost, graph, intranet software

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