Designing workflow software steps as actionable messages in email or facebook messages

By brian | January 5, 2011 | Open Source

There is a definite tendancy among companies I work with to implement more and more activities in their business processes “outside” the web login.    In one of my previous posts,  I explored the primary driver behind this tendency – the worker’s attention span is already used up by too many applications.  As a result there will often be some resistance to going to another web application to perform business functions.

If this is the case, then it is natural for stake holders to look for another application to act as the host.  The natural choice is the e-mail client software.  As a result, the question I always get asked is, can this business process be automated through email?  My answer is usually something along the lines of, “yes, with our software you can implement it through email.  However, what we do is better than email because we simply use email as the dumb vehicle to transport the message but not to be the repository responsible for managing its content.”  Of course, after that explanation I usually get a blank stare for a few moments and then a “what?”

Let me explain.

Today most businesses are managing or rather mis-managing their business processes with a sloppy combination of email, excel spreadsheets, and maybe even paper forms.  The message of BPM Software is clear,  “let us take your forms and put them on the web and automatically route them to the users that are supposed to see them so that the process can progress in an automated fashion.  And by the way, if the users need any information that is stuck in your other information silos, the BPM Software will take care of fetching the information, processing it and presenting it to the user at exactly the right time and in exactly the correct format.”  Sounds great, right?

Well, actually it is great.  However, users tend to not want to learn anything new.  For that reason, most BPM Software inboxes look a lot like email clients (namely outlook).

Email is simply the defacto standard for the way we receive and respond to messages.  Try and break the standard and you are doomed to failure or so it seems.  Just look at Google Wave!

This is where most BPM Software gets clever.  By embedding actionable forms into email, we actually use email as the conduit for a structured data message.  This means that we can send a user an email alert which is actually a task through his/her email client and make it look like this example below:

Actionable Email from ProcessMaker

Now this does two things:

1) Lets the users work in a familiar environment – his/her email client

2) Gets the data out of the unstructured environment of the email and into the structured environment of workflow software.  All of the data in this message is stored as structured data in our BPM Software which means that we can use the data to drive reports, create further alerts, and generate next steps, etc.

Now we no longer have to worry about keeping a copy of the email.  Or even worse, we don’t have to worry about everyone keeping redundant useless copies of useless emails.  The only thing important about a leave absence message is the data – when? who? how long? etc.  This information has now been recorded.  And we go one step further, if this information isn’t useful to the BPM software, we can simply hand it off to the Human Resources Software so it can be properly recorded.

This brings me to my prediction of the death of email.  Email will not die because of a killer new app like Google Wave.  No, e-mail will die a slow death where other parasitic applications (like the workflow software) in this case will continue to use email as a vehicle, but a vehicle or host relatively devoid of purpose.   It is happening, just think about it.

Facebook traffic has already done a lot to reduce email traffic.  As such, applications like Facebook and Twitter are also candidates to be host carriers for the messages our bpm software and workflow software need to send.   Just look how facebook and similar apps are taking over the idea of single-sign on.

In today’s world since social and work are so intertwined, those of us who develop business apps need to get used to the idea that our software won’t be center stage.  In fact, maybe bpm software and workflow software will eventually become a pure skeleton of SOA being executed in the users prefered environment.  In other words, don’t try to build a new planet if you are making a business app, just find the biggest planet and join – even if that planet looks oddly social