We have had so many thousands of conversations over the last 14 years about “intranet functionality” – new clients asking us if we have this and that feature to enable them to compare us to some other potential partner in a spreadsheet, an RFP or a simple subjective decision.

As intranets evolve to become enormously powerful gateways to the digital workplace we have seen the argument shifting away from low level functionality such as ‘can I book a taxi using your system?’ to much higher level discussions that really make a difference to what a client can achieve. And that’s what we so enjoy.

When clients look for real value from a web platform they are really, it seems to me – asking some perfectly valid and basic questions about capabilities in the following areas :

• Information management – full indexing of version controlled documents, a variety of file types, record management, configurable metadata – and a world class permission system.
• News and internal communication – permission based news systems, announcements and blogs.
• Compliance – policy must reads, full auditing, audit management modules.
• Design – can the design be really, truly inspirational or just a logo and a style guide?
• Corporate social media – does the platform offer true engagement to get the users really engaged with the information.
• Business Processes – we have a lot of processes that are not the most efficient – can we move these onto the web platform and produce powerful form based workflows that help us to understand our process workloads, requirements and increase our efficiency.
• Mobile – is your offering capable of reaching out to our modern workforce with a range of needs on multiple devices.
• Deployment – do you offer truly global, cross platform, cloud or perpetual in house offerings?
• API – can we reliable and efficiently call out information to use in our own applications – for example using REST.

What we have noticed in the last couple of years is that our clients are enjoying the combination of these powerful capabilities. “It’s great to have simple business processes like recruitment that can call on document management resources, all within a permissioned process portal”. “Extensive business logic, with a corporate social media interaction available on top”. “A communication platform with commenting and Facebook style status updates and micro blogging.” “Great – Active directory integration combined with being able to log in with my Google ID.”

This is indeed powerful, and for us as a partner in these spaces really exciting. By all means start with the web platform functionality that meets your short term urgent business needs, but then add significant areas to work in a combination that is truly powerful, and makes a significant difference to your business.

The functionality discussion is moving up to truly interesting large scale areas of business needs. To me this is a natural extension of the debate, as the workplace goes digital, social and mobile and more and more fundamental business tasks and requirements are met by cross platform browser based web platforms that can grow with your business -  like Claromentis.

And by the way, in case it’s raining out there – yes you can book a taxi – you just need a very simple business process for that task – with notifications, assignments and service level agreements.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Process, The Framework

We have been using our Intranet software for managing our own training records and like our clients the advantages of using our form based workflow software – Business Process Manager – for this are considerable :

Custom Form Design

What we need to store about our training records is appropriate to us, and different to other companies. Using Business Process Manager means we design our own  form and evolve that over time, with version control.

Granular permissions

It is easy to assign managers permissions to review the training requests of their own teams, and to allow users to review just their own training records.

Custom statuses

We can set whatever statuses we need for our training records.

Notifications

In our case managers of course need to be notified when an employee submits a request – but later on in the process – on approval – so do HR and accounts.

Reporting

The in built statistics allows us to review our training attendance over time and by status.

Auditing of all data

As an ISO9001 audited company training records are  inspected ever year, and we benefit from being able to review with the external auditor the complete changes made to ever request, down to individual field level – who changed what and when.

And to think that – just like many of our new clients – we used to do this on spreadsheets on shared drives!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process intranets, training records

We really should talk more about our customer base and how Claromentis is making a real difference for so many types of businesses around the world.

As we continue to grow we in sales and marketing need to pedal faster just to keep up with our customer base and all the interesting ways they are using information management, web processes and custom applications to make a real difference in what they can accomplish and how competitive they can be.

One way we can do that faster peddling is just to post about events that generate real interest in our own internal corporate social networking about new clients – if our staff are fascinated then maybe you will be!

Internally we use both News channels and our Innovate application – and I noticed that the news today that Twilight producer Summit Entertainments LLC had selected Claromentis to become their intranet supplier generated a lot more interest – and requests from all the girls to be part of the onsite team in Hollywood – than any recent post about new clients.

This lead me to think about sectors – and taking this as an example we do have great examples of movie producers that use the Claromentis framework for their internal communications.

Let’s take two – Omnilab in Australia and our new client Summit Entertainment in California. Opposite ends of the world, and judging by my very limited experience producers of very different movie experiences.

Disclosure at this point – I am 50-something, male and really like walking my dogs. I also have limited interest in vampires.

Their external image could perhaps be represented like this – with every girl in our office leaping up and down about Twilight, and myself having really enjoyed Happy Feet – an animation about penguins that like to dance:

Not a lot of similarity in that external face to the world..

What I am planning to do in a future post is get both of these great movie production companies to allow me to share images of their intranets – it would be so much fun to share their internal comms with their external production!

Do Summit have dreamy girls on their intranet pages? Does Omnilab have animated cartoon figures as signposts on the intranet?? Or great sound tracks?

Does either company walk the talk when it comes to internal communication?

We shall see!!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process, Solutions film companies, hollywood

Great to have had an enjoyable day this week with our external quality management auditors, and to have been approved for another year as a high quality company under the ISO 9001 framework.

Of course it is doubly interesting to have achieved this as we use our own framework and software products to assist us in our quality control. Specifically we use

• Version control for our documents
• Policy manager for all of our policies and procedures
• We don’t use bookshelf, as we have only one brand and a reasonable number of policies that can be managed by PDF and application files
• Audit manager for all of our internal audits
• Business Process Manager for many processes that we use and our auditors need to inspect – such as complaints procedures and product change requests.

So it’s a great experience for us to be monitored and inspected as users of our own software.

I am pleased to say that we enjoyed the day – we certainly felt that our own software is very much helping us to improve our quality and our auditors agreed!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process, Prod-Quality, The Framework

With Claromentis 6.2 the ability to report graphically on the use of any business process in the company just got a lot more powerful.

The on demand, interactive and always up to date graphs provide summaries of :

User submissions into the business process

Provides information over time of the top 5 users of the process. See who is generating the most requests and provide additional assistance as needed.

The Status breakdowns of all current requests

Gives a snapshot of the current process loads by the status of each request in the process.

A status map as a snapshot

InfoCapture allows the creation of as many individual states as you need for any individual business process. The status map allows you to group these granular and precise states into meaningful sub groups that have a meaning when loking at reports – for example pending manager’ and ‘pending supervisor’ might be successive and important workflow steps, but for reoorting these can both be regarded as ‘In progress’ or ‘Awaiting Approval’

A Status breakdown over time

See the loads in the process by status groups over time. This allows you to allocate resources to make the mot impact to the efficiency of the process, especially where the InfoCapture service level agreements and business timers are engaged, and time on any state is critical.

Combined with the interactive flow charts that are already available from 6.1, these interactive graphs provide a visual representation of even the most complex of processes. They enable managers to predict loads, optimize resources and understand the requests of the users in the most proactive way so as to provide additional assistance wherever needed.

Prod-Process, Services BPM, Business Process Management

In a previous post I committed to creating a series of articles about how in my experience a web platform like Claromentis might contribute to discrete value chain components in your business.

In this second post in this series I take a quick look at Research and Development.

The significance of R&D

New products, and specifically their design and development – is important to the growth and even survival of a company. Competitive pressures or the natural evolution of buyer preferences will ensure that innovation is highly placed on the agenda of many senior level meetings.

Leveraging a web platform can greatly assist the innovation agenda. This is true both for

1. Larger corporations with significant information stores and internal resources that need to be encouraged to share diverse expertise

2. Organizations of any size that need to reach out to partners for collaborative R&D efforts.

Fundamental characteristics of R&D in a business context

Although R&D is a general phrase, the included activities for any company will often have the following characteristics :

1. The outcome is of course unknown.

If we knew what we would get as direct benefits – this would be an investment stream with well quantified budgets and predictable return on investment – rather than R&D

2. The required resources are similarly uncertain

Similarly as the project starts and evolves, the findings and progress will require resources – both human, time and material – that were not recognized at the outset. Flexibility and locating those resources are therefore significant.

3. The returns are hard to quantify

Since we do not know the results it is impossible to estimate the returns.

4. Alliances are becoming increasingly significant

The extended enterprise includes a range of interested parties, and often an agreed alliance can offer predictability and efficiencies

5. Processes and reportability are important

From the initial submission and approval of research ideas, through to quantification of outcomes – processes and reportability are extremely important.

6. Information Centric

Clearly research and development is centered on capturing, assessing and then generating new information – often comprising relevant papers, temporary project stores and of course the publication and re-use of results.

7. Team based collaboration is central to the project

By their very nature R&D projects need the timely contribution of different resources and subject matter experts, working effectively as a team as the project evolves.

What do companies spend on R&D?

Although it is immensely variable companies in general might look to spend 2- 5% of their revenue on R&D. Sectors of course vary considerably – pharmaceutical companies might expect to spend 15-20% of their prescription sales on research and development.

What Claromentis technologies are appropriate to Research and Development?

The core intranet platform, with the included extranet permissions, form the central deployment for R&D centric portals. Business Process Manager is used to implement processes, for example internal to the project or for the approval and funding of R&D efforts at the outset.

Graphing and presentations of dashboards, status and results are also important, although these can be implemented of course within the application files if this is preferred.

How can Intranets, Extranets and Process Management in a Web Platform  Contribute to R&D?

There are many ways that a web platform can contribute to R&D, I have just suggested 6 that seem to me to be particularly important.

1. Encouraging Innovation

Corporate social networking, often reaching out to staff in partner organizations, forms a powerful way to seek out and leverage relevant experience.  Informal collaboration networks encourage contributions from people who initially may not have been identified as a valuable resource based on more conventional criteria.

These weak ties can then be explored further, strengthened and leveraged as the project team matures.

Applications such as FAQ and more formal discussion boards are also important, allowing the posting of questions and voting on answers to rapidly move information forwards.

2. Extending out through Extranets to partners

Research and Development is often an effort that needs collaboration between companies – even those companies that in other projects might be competitive. The powerful permission systems of web platforms allow such sensitive collaboration to take place securely.

3. Version control of information

The natural version control of information, such as documents, lends itself to the evolution of information as a research and development project proceeds.

4. Free collaboration on information

In contrast to formal version control and ratification systems, direct and informal collaboration can speed up team based contribution to information. Historically such technical scratch pads were the natural domain of Wikis, recently we have seen Google docs as a natural evolution in this area. This is mainly because they do not require any understanding of unusual syntax and are a more natural evolution for those staff who are used to using application files like word and excel to store information.

5. Project Planning

As research projects start and evolve they need of course an element of planning and control, web based project management tools provide access to all parties, wherever they are located, to the appropriate task and project status.

6. Research Project Approval

For many organizations processing project applications for research and development is extremely important – they need to be seen to be clear and transparent in which projects are approved, or receive funding.

For example the Nottingham University Hospitals Research and Innovation Extranet www.nuhrise.org describes a very clear process for the submission and governance approval for any research project impacting their patients, staff or facilities.

Claromentis are currently working with a national Innovation Agency for their own approval of projects. The organisation was established by the government and is responsible for the National Innovation agenda. In line with one of its core functions, it is required to ensure that government investment capital in innovation is efficiently allocated. Business Process Management starting from a public facing Extranet for project submission, and with internal approval processes and proactive notification systems, is ideal for such a process.

Summary

Web based platforms are ideal for research and development projects. Permission systems allow the collaboration of various stakeholders in a secure way, and business process management allows for clarity and transparency as decisions are made.

Modern corporate social networking implementations within web platforms are also significant – allowing companies to draw in talent that might not initially have been formally identified as relevant to a particular project.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Document, Prod-Intranet, Prod-Process, Prod-Project, Solutions business centric portals, extranets, R&D, research, web platforms

Carbon Trust – a company providing specialist support in cutting carbon emissions, saving energy and commercializing low carbon technologies – came to Claromentis to find the perfect Business Process Management solution to control the use of their brand.

Top of their list was a quality product, followed by seamless integration within their existing public website and a tight deadline.

On the surface, the project seemed simple – an approval process to determine the eligibility to use the Carbon Trust branding logos. But  Carbon Trust required a process that was undemanding and self-managed, a process which would automatically identify whether or not the requester was eligible to use Carbon Trust branding logos – focusing time consuming manual intervention only on those cases where it was genuinely required.

If the application is approved, the requester receives a notification containing a download link to the appropriate set of logos for their requirement, depending on the details supplied within the application.

The only manual input required is if the application pushes the request to review – this is where a member of Carbon Trust staff must decide on the eligibility of the application.

Carbon Trust required two interfaces: a public facing form to integrate within their website, and a portal for the staff to review the applications.

Both of these were generated using completely core functionality of Business Process Manager.

In the words of the Carbon Trust project lead,

the Corporate Branding Inbox began life as reams of flip chart paper, stacks of post it notes and 2 tubs of lemon cheesecake! Claromentis then followed to take our ideas and make them into a reality that was beyond anything cheesecake thinking could imagine!

The project was implemented by Hannah Voice from the Claromentis support team who said

This project was a pleasure to work on from start to finish. The client knew what the business needed, provided well thought out workflows from their own workshops and answered all my questions with energy and a passion to get the job done under very tight deadlines. Great fun!

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

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

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

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