I was looking at our own Claromentis Intranet home page ( we call ours Atlas ) and I was reminded how much useful functionality, providing real benefits, you can get from just a few inches of space. Here is a screenshot of just the top right corner of our current home page for Atlas :

Atlas Intranet - Home Page

My second thought was how much of that came from new suggestions from our own customer base.

In this case 3 out of the 4 have been provided as components resulting directly from customer feedback or live project requests. Now all of our customers – as well as ourselves –  can use these intranet components, and many other examples.

1)    A simple task manager – we developed this on the suggestion of one of our intranet customers. It is a highly effective simple task manager, which allows groups of users to share collaborative tasks and be reminded in their inbox – in this case on our home page – that they have tasks allocated to them, and what their current status is.

2)    News – these permission based news channels have long been a requirement.­

3)    Who’s in and who’s out. A simple application to dynamically let everyone know who is out today. It has been a pleasure to develop this – it runs directly from our intranet vacation planner. It even has a sense of humor – ‘everyone’s in – but it’s a Saturday!’

4)    Posting directly to Corporate Social Media – our new Innovate application for sharing status and ideas. This is a hugely popular application – allowing permission based discussion streams, follows, likes, replies and referencing anything in the intranet – so users for example can discuss a particular project task or document.

My final thought was that 3 of these applications did not even exist a few months ago, showing the accelerating pace with which Claromentis is developing. This is  thanks not just to our own developers and designers but to the growing customer base that provides continuous feedback and requests as they implement against their own particular requirements.

Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Products, The Framework Intranet Components, intranet software

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