I’m currently working with ARIS Business Designer v7.1 with a client and it’s a welcome refresh from previous versions but it struck me that I didn’t really need to find my way around a lot of things to use it. The interface was clean enough and there’s a few new features which I can take advantage of if I need them. Admittedly I’ve used a lot of tools over the years but ease of use boils down to just one thing;
If you can’t model a process as quickly as you can in Visio then there’s something wrong
Bit of a sweeping statement I know but really, Visio has been around 20-odd years so you have little excuse for creating cumbersome and complex process mapping/ analysis tools that a business user cannot get to grips with in 10 minutes or less. Considering there’s around 4m users of Visio who actively use it as a process mapping tool why are they not migrating quicker to the advantages that a BPA or even a BPM tool can bring ? I’m not saying replicate the Visio front end entirely but replicate how comfortable it is for a business user to navigate around and pull together maps quickly.
With the amount of money thrown at R&D to create wonderful new features you’d expect all the vendors to have hit that sweet-spot but sadly this isn’t the case.
Do we really need business process tools to be as complex as the BPM language we insist on using ?
And if you respond to this post supporting your own software and how slick it is be prepared to put your money where your mouth is, you could be asked to attend a BPM Smackdown….
