Get connected: Software AG unveils first social BPM platform
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 3/5/2009 3:05:00 PM
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With its new product called AlignSpace, SoftwareAG plans to create the largest social network of business process management (BPM) professionals. The platform will enable collaboration between all project participants in a business process environment. Data, documents, and services produced within this environment are made available and reusable within or across company borders. Leading social networks also can be plugged in.
AlignSpace establishes a platform within enterprises to drive collaboration for accelerated business process discovery, modeling, and management.
“The advantage of AlignSpace is in business-to-business and business-to-IT alignment. True collaboration among virtual teams of experts will lead to smooth cooperation on BPM projects across enterprise borders”, says Dr. Peter Kuerpick, chief product officer, Software AG.
AlignSpace functionality breaks out in these four areas:
Social networking: Members can easily invite and connect with colleagues involved in process projects throughout their organization and beyond. Once connected, members can keep tabs on process projects and colleagues by monitoring a tunable event stream that highlights significant activities.
Collaborative process design: Members of AlignSpace can interactively and collaboratively discover, document and create process models that can be exported and run within BPM engines. Once any stage of a process has been documented, it can be modeled by simply dragging the stage to a process canvas. Members can simultaneously work on virtually every part of a process project.
Universal translation of BPM models: AlignSpace allows members to import and export all popular BPM formats. They can import a process, work on it, and then export it in other popular formats for execution.
Marketplace: Software AG supports a marketplace where members can share, or offer for sale, value-added expertise and products that support individual and shared project goals. This includes a search for expertise in specific disciplines, in specific geographical regions, and in specific products.
“AlignSpace has vastly improved the design phase of new processes,” says Ivo Totev, chief marketing officer, Software AG. “Previously, collaboration involved phone calls, meetings, exchanging PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets that were never synchronized for all decision-makers. AlignSpace now assures that a process represents a holistic view of the organization. Process-improvement projects will be faster to implement, more closely aligned with business visions, endorsed by all stakeholders, and supported by the collective knowledge of the community.”
