Active Endpoints CTO Dr. Michael Rowley presented a brand new technology called Socrates, which allows IT to safely provide their business users with the ability to capture domain expertise into a process that can be embedded into other applications. Dr. Rowley also explained that these “guided” applications allow users to become much more consistent in the way that they do their work and as a result much more productive.

BPMN was designed for the general modeling (and documenting) the processes of businesses, and in this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Dr. Michael Rowley discussed the kinds of people who are most likely to be successful at using the constructs. He argued that general purpose concepts of BPMN process modeling are probably too much for the typical business user, but proposed that BPMN can be used ONLY if the problem is significantly narrowed down. He explained that this is the exact approach that drove the Socrates design requirements. Michael then described how Socrates narrows the scope and uses a small subset of BPMN that business users can easily manage. To further illustrate his point, he demonstrated the creation of screenflows with a subset of BPMN. Michael also briefly demonstrated some of the more sophisticated BPMN capabilities and explained why they are needed for general purpose process modeling.

In previous episodes, Michael Rowley explained how Socrates simplifies the design of screenflows through the innovative concept of guidance trees. In this episode, Michael demonstrated how Socrates also simplifies how the data is used. We saw how Socrates screenflows could call automated steps, but unlike technologies that have come before, did not require the designer to map input and output parameters to variables. This unique approach allowed the domain expert to focus on creating the guidance tree logic and delegated the complexity of data mapping to the developer instead.

In this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley debated how guidance trees offered a new paradigm for creating guided applications. He discussed what could be done with a guidance tree and explained how the metaphor simplified the design process over other approaches such as workflow and process modeling. Michael also demonstrated how the new paradigm could be leveraged in a powerful yet elegant manner to simplify the creation and manipulation of these trees. We ended the session with a very lively Q&A with the audience offering lots of comments, questions and viewpoints.

In episode 50 of CTO Tuesday Michael Rowley introduced Socrates, a new technology for creating Screenflows and demonstrated the guidance trees used to create them. In this episode, Michael postulated whether screenflows really are “business processes”. It’s not surprising to discover that the answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no. During the talk, Michael spent time diving into Socrates and how screenflows could be integrated with what would be unhesitatingly called a business processes.

CTO Tuesdays reached a significant milestone this week with its 50th episode. So to commemorate this occasion Michael Rowley unveiled a brand new product called Socrates. This innovative product was designed to enable business users and domain experts to build simple, yet powerful web applications that guide to successful outcomes. These applications can be used for troubleshooting, diagnostics, up sell promotions or refund processes. In fact Socrates is useful for any customer service situation that requires a user to ask questions and receive answers in order to reach a good resolution. So sit back and watch how Michael effortlessly puts the product through its paces during its world premiere.

What should be on your application development wish list? Find out by watching this webinar replay where guest speaker Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst with Forrester Research Inc., and Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints, explore how to dramatically increase development productivity and create better process applications by focusing on design. Mike covers the three items on the wish list:

1.      Dramatically increase development productivity

2.      Designed to help developers achieve seven qualities of great software

3.      Empower “business developers”

Mike also explains why a combination of tools and platforms is necessary when it comes to building some applications and advises how to fill your toolbox wisely. Michael presents how the ActiveVOS process automation platform easily enables IT project teams to design and deploy business process applications rapidly, dramatically increasing productivity.

Today’s telecom service providers face a perfect storm of major pressures on profitability. Against this backdrop, they are charged with protecting or improving margins, in addition to the pursuit of new revenue sources. In this ever-changing industry, improving customer service and minimizing churn are key factors in maintaining customer loyalty. But supporting these objectives and new initiatives needs a new approach. This is where BPM comes in.

In this webinar replay, MWD Advisors Research Director Neil Ward-Dutton and Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints, explain how a BPM methodology can eliminate, rather than exacerbate, complexity to deliver on corporate goals. Neil delves into how BPM can offer a SOA-based foundation for seamless, simple process development and Michael demonstrates how this can be put into practice with ActiveVOS, an easily scalable and affordable solution for process integration and automation. Application architects, developers, IT project managers and systems integrators in telecom will find this replay invaluable.

Approvals are one of the most common tasks performed by people in every organization and can range from a simple single person, sequential approval, to a complex parallel group voting process. The WS-HumanTask specification doesn’t explicitly describe how different types of approval patterns can be implemented. In this episode Michael explained how these different types of approval patterns can be supported. Michael also demonstrated how to use the ActiveVOS designer, the WS-HumanTask activity and the ActiveVOS Central task list system to show you how it’s done!

The WS-HumanTask standard doesn’t explicitly talk about how people can work together on a task or how someone can delegate another person to temporarily work on all of their tasks. However, these situations were considered during the development of WS-HumanTask specification and there are features in the standard that were designed to support them. In this week’s episode, Michael Rowley described how collaboration and delegation can be supported using the WS-HumanTask standard and demonstrated how it works using the ActiveVOS Central task list system.

In this week’s episode, Michael covered one of the most widely requested topics of the CTO Tuesdays series and discussed how to use compensating transactions for long-running business processes. In addition to comparing and contrasting transaction managers with BPMS’s, he also showed how to use compensating processes to undo work when things invariably go wrong. As always the episode ended with a lively Q&A session with great participation from the audience.

Active Endpoints and their partners and government industry experts Rick Roseburg, CEO, and Dr. Paul Bailor from Seros, provided an informative webinar about how to improve processes for government agencies. Seros provides a set of SOA foundational services that comply with the WS-* open standards, and a broad complement of consulting services. They covered the topic of determining and acting on process variability in detail, and explained how they view ActiveVOS as solving this problem effectively. Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO of ActiveVOS, went on to demonstrate ActiveVOS, the company’s BPM product, and how it supports BPMN 2.0, BPEL, and all the open standards that Seros referred to as critical to working with government agencies effectively.

In this week’s episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley did an excellent job comparing and contrasting scenarios for using ESBs and BPMSs. He provided answers to many popular questions including: if you have a service-oriented BPMS, do you also need an ESB? Are ESBs completely unnecessary? Michael explored situations where BPMS functionality is all that’s needed and where it was appropriate to use an ESB. So whether you own both of these technologies, just investigating one or the other, or looking to leverage the best attributes of each, then I’d strongly suggest watching this episode.

An important aspect of business processes is who is allowed to start them. Not everyone is allowed to initiate every kind of process, and it is not just a matter of presentation. If you aren’t allowed to start a process, there should be no way of going around the UI in order to kick it off anyway. Proper authorization should be guaranteed at runtime. In this week’s episode, Michael Rowley discusses different strategies for process authorization. He describes standard authorization features that support simple authorization tests as well as architectural patterns that can be used to support more complex authorization scenarios.

Neil-Ward Dutton, Research Director of MWD Advisors, and Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO, Active Endpoints, presented a practical webinar on the theory and practice of BPM and process automation. Neil explained the history of applications development and how the old way of developing requirements and then “throwing them over the wall” is no longer viable. Agile development is what’s needed, and breaking down the barriers between stakeholders – business users, business analysts, developers and operations personnel – must use now Agile development methods to be successful. Michael described how ActiveVOS, Active Endpoints’ BPMS, and its process automation capabilities, easily define the workflow required and immediate runtime using BPMN, BPEL and other web services open standards.