Recent posts about application development

The use of predictive analytics has enabled colleges and universities to perform critical planning for things like enrollment and student retention, and also to understand trends that impact academics and student services. 

With the right mix of data points, schools are better equipped to make smart choices that will impact every aspect of the educational lifecycle. At a time when higher education administrators are anxious about enrollments and operational expenses, being able to predict how to allocate resources and funding can be a major benefit to surviving the first school year after COVID-19. 

Using data to make predictions is nothing new for innovative colleges. In fact, it’s becoming an increasingly useful tool for admissions planning and to help schools avoid the coming enrollment cliff. But in the midst of preparations to resume classes in the fall after months of dealing with the effects of COVID-19, many schools are wondering if anything is predictable in today’s environment. 

Trends among prospective and current students are in a constant state of change, which means that predictive models that worked in the past are no longer usable. With so many unknowns facing colleges and universities, it can sometimes seem that admissions, operations, and IT leaders are increasingly having to make decisions in the dark. Predictive analytics, however, can shed light on a challenging situation.

Benefit from predictive analytics  

To benefit from predictions, schools have to integrate vast amounts of data from various repositories, and then make decisions about how to allocate their organizational attention and resources. Armed with that information, they can make informed decisions that reduce operational friction and improve the acceleration and implementation of actions that impact goal-driven outcomes.  

Some critics are suggesting that predictive analytics are ill-equipped to support the current needs of colleges and universities. The argument is that available data about student intentions and needs have changed so much over the past few months that it can’t paint an accurate picture of what’s to come.  

But the whole purpose of using data to make decisions is predicated on when the data is used. And data changes continuously, so predictions are always based on new information that is informed by changing behaviors. At times of massive change, predictive analytics is probably at its most effective, and colleges and universities are going to benefit from using it as they plan for the fall of 2020 and beyond. 

Let's consider the promise of predictive analytics and look at what schools have been able to do with it:

• Create programs and frameworks that make student success a primary element of the school’s mission
• Enable a discipline of adaptability and flexibility that enable schools to meet changing needs as they arise
• Deploy technology effectively to solve operational issues
• Maintain quality as a core component of all student-directed efforts

Improve student outreach and retention

Even with so much change happening as a result of COVID-19, colleges and universities are on a never-ending cycle of recruiting, enrolling, and retaining students.  Irrespective of how those students are going to learn, be it through online classes, on-campus, or some hybrid version of the two, schools need to identify students who will be a good fit, convert them into students, and then retain them for the duration of their college experience. That process starts with data.

Communicating with prospective students has always been heavily informed by data. For starters, schools won’t be able to host as many students on-site, as travel restrictions are delaying or even canceling traditional recruiting events. That means that digital communication will become a particularly important channel for marketing efforts, and those efforts will need to be highly targeted to get the attention of prospects who have many options in front of them. 

Schools are able to reach potential students through paid digital media ads, direct mail, email nurturing, and other online formats. These efforts will likely provide schools with even more accurate data about students’ intentions because these channels also give them an avenue to collect data as well. As that collection of information grows, it starts to inform decision-making and creates the ability to start making predictions. 

Some examples of data sets that schools will be able to collect through direct communication include things like:

• Geographic interest: understanding where pockets of interested students live will help schools maximize their marketing spend by investing heavily in these areas. Conversely, they can reduce spending on areas where there is little interest.
• Financial aid: schools can ascertain the potential for students to fund their educations and the resulting financial aid requirements that need to be provided for students. This will be a huge benefit to economic planning.
• Hiring: admissions departments will be able to make predictions about the number of incoming students  which can be used by HR teams to scale up or down as needed. 

Similarly, as current students spend more time away from campus due to sheltering-in-place, it’s critical that schools maintain communication with them. Keeping students informed of upcoming changes and guiding them through an uncertain future will help them stay connected. It also is an important aspect of student retention.

Research has shown that when students are having their needs met and have actionable ways to achieve their goals, retention rates rise significantly and they stay on the path to completion. With data about students’ patterns, backgrounds, and behaviors, schools are identify specific areas where they can support a student who is at risk. Some of these include:

• Predict when a student is likely to drop out. When students’ grades decline or they continually take less demanding workloads, they may be on a path to leaving school. Intervention through academic counseling, tutoring, or other academic services can keep a student academically engaged and feeling connected to their school.
• Identify students who are facing financial challenges. When tuition bills are habitually late or if a student has a complex web of financial aid sources, algorithms can alert students to alternative sources of funding. Or there could be a process that signals the financial aid office to contact the student to initiate a meeting to explore options to fund their school experience.
• Alert when a student may be facing a mental or physical health risk. Health services information can be pulled together to identify students who may be at risk for certain types of health issues. Student services organizations can be marshaled to help the students take part in counseling and other medical and social services to ensure wellness. 

Students may not be interested in predictive data, but what colleges and universities do with that data is critical to students’ success. By employing predictive intelligence and analytics, schools can help students do more than simply navigate the four or more years of college. They have the tools for a meaningful experience that keeps them engaged through graduation.

No matter their size, private/public designation, endowment, or geography, all colleges and universities are experiencing major changes due to COVD-19. While large universities have received the most attention for the challenges they’re experiencing, it’s often smaller schools that are hit hardest. 

Faced with limited budgets and fewer resources, small colleges are already dealing with the challenges of meeting enrollment demands, effectively servicing students and being nimble enough to adapt to change. With major disruptions for all schools because of COVID-19, smaller schools have to make moves to be prepared for navigating uncertain territory. 

There is no question that smaller schools are an essential part of higher education. They usually have better student-to-faculty ratios, offer specialized academic tracks and are better options for students who want to be part of a smaller environment. 

Small liberal arts colleges emphasize a broad array of academic disciplines, while some regional schools focus more on training for professional services like fire services, nursing and other service-related professions. 

Higher education workflows address key technology needs

The changes that stem from the coronavirus have thrown everyone for a loop. Schools are having to build solutions immediately to address current needs and they are developing plans for an uncertain future. The major difference between big and small schools in the current education landscape comes down to technology and how it’s applied to solve these problems. 

However, budget restrictions of smaller schools prevent massive student relationship management systems and armies of software developers that spin up solutions as needed. While scale of technology may always be an issue, the approach to problem-solving can be addressed by schools of any size. Workflow can be the defining factor for schools being agile because workflow is foundational to how problems are solved, irrespective of the technology that’s used.

Establishing a workflow & process management foundation

Effective workflow, however, is more than just a series of tactical activities. It aligns with user intent and is applied to the unique technology functionality required of a college’s students, faculty and other stakeholders. 

It also helps to create behaviors that maximize usage and deliver meaning to users. This is especially important when higher education is changing behaviors for things like online learning, applying for financial aid, hiring and offering new types of student services. 

A workflow foundation will also help when even those new solutions change as schools change regulations to adapt to new governmental and health and safety requirements.

The three most critical aspects of aligning workflow, technology and university needs are ease of use, solution context, and communication. Effective workflow ensures that all these elements are met so that users have not just a more efficient experience, but one they can begin to rely on to consistently meet their needs irrespective of the rate and type of change they will experience in the short- and near-term. Let’s look more closely at how these factors can support the needs of smaller schools:

Workflow & process management simplifies digital experiences

Process Director provides a great example of how ease of use can translate into effective solutions. It enables the creation of sophisticated, low-code digital applications that take into account the necessary data and workflow sources on the back-end, and considers how users on the front-end will actually use the app. 

By being able to create simple apps that integrate relevant information, including smart forms and processes, students can get the information they need and take action on things like class scheduling, financial aid, and other relevant events. The teams who build the apps benefit from Process Director’s agile approach to adapt as needed to increase adoption and productivity. 

While Process Director is easy to use for those who need to build applications rapidly and continuously meet changing needs.

Workflow & process management provides context for data

Small college IT teams use Process Director to optimize the use of data so that the applications they create help students engage and complete tasks with limited disruption to their schedules. 

Process Director helps direct the way that organizations surface and orient data through interactive forms and workspaces. Just as human interaction is complex, Process Director looks at the workflows in applications not as a linear phenomenon, but as a continuously shared collection of usable elements that allow for context-based structural changes, last moment decisions, and individualized attention depending on each circumstance.

The case management approach inherent in Process Director also helps greatly when delivering applications that integrate historical data on students (transcripts, payments, scholarships). With navigable data that can be filtered for omission or inclusion depending on the situation, applications can adapt as the students’ situations change and evolve.

This approach supplies students with applications that provide them with what they need when they need it, all without forcing them to search outside the context of the case to find answers.

The Importance of Communication

Students and faculty are being bombarded with emails, texts, direct messages and a host of other types of communication in order to get the information they need. However, that information can go unnoticed if it doesn’t fit with how they are accustomed to consuming news and alerts. Schools need to ensure that students see important messages, but also create ways for students to communicate back with them.

With capabilities that facilitate connecting and communicating across departments, Process Director can help schools collect applications, forms and data sources into a collective portal that delivers all student’s actionable needs into a single interface. That reduces response time and enhances the kind of communication students need in order to adapt to changes, stay on top of opportunities and always be current about how they can interact with their school.

Final thoughts

No school, irrespective of size, can meet the demands of the post-COVID-19 world on an application-by-application basis. Small schools that want to align their goals and processes to student behaviors will need to apply change through the use of smart workflow and processes. 

To serve these needs, Process Director provides digitally transformative and contextual education workflow solutions, facilitates efficient distribution of information and streamlines the monitoring and management of information.

Learn how colleges like Cal State Stanislaus and Ogden-Weber Technical are using process director and preparing for a post-COVID reopening. 

"There's no good time for a pandemic. But for admissions, this has got to be the worst time.”
- Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University

For millions of current and incoming college students, the financial, health, and social factors surrounding COVID-19 are causing them to change their higher education plans. As a result, college admissions and IT departments are going to have to change their normal processes to adapt to the needs of a whole new wave of college students.

Consider the findings from a recent poll about incoming college freshmen: One in six high-school seniors who expected to attend a four-year college full time before the coronavirus outbreak are now planning to embark on a different path in the fall of 2020. Three out of five students who still plan on attending college are seriously concerned about their ability to afford college.

The reality of all this uncertainty creates a huge workload for college admissions officials and IT leaders who will need to develop new software applications processes to address a variety of admissions issues, including:

• Enrollment deferment 
• Changing admissions requirements
• Communication with students
• Timelines and plans for reopening campuses, which includes facilities and scheduling

These are just some of the issues that schools are dealing with, none of which can be addressed in a simple fashion. For IT departments, the key is agility. Decisions are being made by school leadership on a daily basis which impacts enrollment, admissions for the fall semester and beyond. 

Low-code development starts with data, builds with process

University data and content is currently stored in a wide variety of applications. They range from the basic (spreadsheets and graphics) to complex (some data analytics solutions and massive ERP systems). All of that data serves a purpose, and in a time when colleges are moving quickly to create new and updated admissions and enrollment processes, the data has to be able to be called into use whenever and wherever it can be most applicable. Information is important, but using it in context with other data is where schools stand to be most effective. To do this requires being able to build software apps quickly and for specific purposes.

The best way to bring new applications to productive use is to reduce development time, and when addressing the changing landscape in response to COVID-19, speed is critical. To meet this challenge, low-code development has emerged as an efficient way to create software. It is a methodology and approach that uses reusable, pre-built components of code and applies them in a drag-and-drop fashion that simplifies the coding effort and accelerates the pace at which applications are built.

Rapid application development for the post-COVID university

The promise of low-code development is attained through speed, efficiency, and the democratization of technology. Business needs can be met through rapidly-built applications that can be created by non-programmers. All of a sudden, solutions can be created and put to use by those closest to business problems. At a time when the future is difficult to plan for, this level of agility will give college IT departments their best chance at delivering solutions for these unique times.

It’s easy to think of low-code as a rip-and-replace substitute for all application development, but in this case, it’s more about enabling university administrators to iterate on their changing admissions application requirements.  It also puts people who are closest to problems in a position to create or at least initiate solutions. But much of the ability to do that corresponds to understanding admissions needs, changing academic requirements, and the available data the school can work with. Even though low-code is much easier than complex development, it still demands time, a plan, and trial-and-error. 

There is no one single system of record that can be used when changes are happening so quickly; colleges typically rely on a variety of different student information management and other types of enterprise planning apps. The key becomes, then, the ability to integrate data from those sources into custom-built apps to serve their changing needs. Speed will be critical to developing these new apps. Schools will not have time for traditional software development cycles, which means non-developers will have to be included in the process of scoping and building apps. 

Learn how colleges like Cal State Stanislaus and Ogden-Weber Technical are using process director and preparing for a post-COVID reopening. 

Changes happening now in higher education as a result of the coronavirus pandemic are undoubtedly having a major impact on students all across the country. The way they engage with classes and benefit from various services will undergo sweeping changes as social distancing becomes more normalized into every day human behavior. 

There have been hero-like efforts by many who have conceived and delivered short-term solutions; these are the people in IT who have had to integrate systems, build custom apps, and generally drive a completely new face of the university in record time. But their solutions are helping with changes that affect more than just students.

What many may not realize is this: for schools to remain viable and adhere to their mandates, they will need to change their HR practices in order to create a workforce that can deliver the next phase of higher education. To do that will require HR processes that enable them to hire, reassign, and manage the right people to deliver solutions for the new world of higher education.

Agility to meet changing HR needs in higher education

Higher education strategies for HR have typically been built around hiring that’s mapped to long-term growth plans. But in the face of COVID-19, these plans are largely thrown out the window while schools move rapidly to adapt to their new and changing needs. As a result, a new HR playbook must be created.

Some schools have established hiring freezes. Others have reduced staff who were performing outdated functions. Others recognize that they need people who can turn their campuses into innovative engines that can recreate what a university is going to be in the post-COVID world. For some, that means hiring for these roles, while for others, it means reassigning existing staff and faculty. For each of these situations, schools need to develop effective workflows for smooth transitions and ensure they have the staff they need to limit disruption.

All of these situations require some form of organizational orchestration which can be driven by effective workflow automation. At most schools, the goal is to do whatever is necessary to finish out the school year and maintain the effective delivery of classes. But forward-thinking colleges are not only delivering for the short-term. Long-term strategies can wait, but limiting disruption by deploying the right staff is a priority. But it takes more than a checklist to ensure that goals are met. 

Using workflow automation to meet immediate and long-term needs

Staffing changes involve many organizational and personal data. In order to create smooth transitions, these changes must be supported through data from HR information systems and financial applications. This enables a title change or reporting structure to become officially recognized and creates a clear view into an employee’s job description and responsibilities. It means that schools can reallocate employees where they can most be beneficial in meeting new challenges and sets up the college to be agile once a “new normal” begins to take shape. This is clearly important for the college - the HR team is able to quickly adapt as needed. But it also takes into account the issues of privacy of individual staff information.

To make this all happen requires a variety of forms, documents, requests, and decisions to be reviewed and acted on. In a normal environment, the reliance on paper forms and manual intervention for decision-making milestones might be tolerated. But with massive pressure to conserve money and be highly efficient during this time of great change, HR and IT teams have to pull together all these things into an integrated, rapidly moving set of workflows in record time. 

Many BP Logix higher education customers are already using Process Director to handle these types of issues. Schools like the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)  and Davis Applied Technology College (DATC), near Salt Lake City, cite their ability to be flexible and quickly develop new processes as major advantages of using Process Director’s workflow automation capabilities as core to their foundation.

With a limited budget and vague goals, all college HR and IT teams need to be able to innovate to hire, reassign, and perform other essential tasks related to having an efficiently operating workforce. Process Director delivers capabilities like workflow automation and lightweight application development functionality that enable higher education HR teams to do the following:

• Rapidly build processes and create forms to collect new and existing HR information housed in existing applications, and to be able to integrate that with updated information from the employees themselves.
• Create time-dependent milestones that use automated communication and workflow to ensure that the right decision-makers are included.
•  Efficient approval handling.
• Insight and visibility into all aspects of processes.

Workflow automation can intelligently apply relevant data from various applications and documents into a shareable profile of each employee. This case management approach provides clarity for all workflows that touch each employee so that important decisions that impact their working situation can be achieved faster and with greater context. Process Director also has native integration with popular HR systems like PeopleSoft and other enterprise apps which makes it easy for non-developer to build workflows with the full complement of various application modules that are relevant to employee management.

COVID-19 has clearly changed all aspects of higher education and will test the ability of university leaders to maintain the viability of their schools. When they are able to build the right school with the right people, colleges and universities will be prepared to meet the demands of the new normal. Through the application of workflow automation, colleges will be equipped to meet both the short-term changes and long-term HR demands required in our changing world.

Learn how colleges like Cal State Stanislaus and Ogden-Weber Technical are using process director and preparing for a post-COVID reopening. 

College students face a world that is far more complex than it was even 20 years ago. They must navigate more than only their academic environment; the world they’ve grown up in, and the path for a post-college life present challenges that have left many with anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. Without a doubt, this is a massive issue. Many administrators are applying innovative ways of helping students through individualized care, supported through effective approaches like case management.

Student Mental Health Trends

Emotional and mental health issues like depression and anxiety have become far more prevalent among today’s higher education students, with many feeling that these issues are among the biggest barriers to fully engaging and performing well in school. More than 16% of  students reported that depression had a negative impact on how they performed with academic and social issues, with anxiety impacting more than 24% of students. Mental illness is clearly affecting far more young people, so it’s important for schools to provide mental health support for their students and for students to have opportunities to seek the help they need.

The management of mental and behavioral health requires different processes and the coordination of many people. Effectively administering services has become more sophisticated and requires the input of a broader array of medical and university stakeholders, and more data from a variety of sources. The key is to focus these inputs and resources so they can deliver better outcomes for students in the form of treatment, medical care, intervention, or other avenues. The most effective way of achieving positive results is through applying a case management approach. This provides insights and context for each individual student who is receiving services and treatment.

Mental health case management has to incorporate strategies from multiple fields and departments across the institution. It includes social workers, psychology professionals, and medical doctors, and the information they provide about the student must be centrally collected and accessible so they can collaborate. Despite its complicated nature, best practices for behavioral health case management can be summarized by three guiding principles: individualized care, professional responsibility, and a comprehensive approach to treatment. Each of these is an umbrella under which many aspects of effective case management fall. Let’s look at these in more detail:

Individual student care: Case management takes into account that not all situations are the same. Effective case management must take each client’s unique combination of situations and needs into account. This means being able to pull relevant data from different data repositories to get a comprehensive picture of the student’s situation. It might include:

• Background: student demographics and personal information from administrative applications can provide a picture of the student’s family situation and support structure.
• Academic performance: information coming from grades, projects, and reviews may give insight into trends about where, and when, students have been both successful and unsuccessful academically.
• Medical history: university healthcare and insurance information will provide information about substance abuse, medications, or other factors that might contribute to students’ situations.

Professional responsibility: academic organizations are dealing with very sensitive information, so case managers and social workers need a special kind of discipline. The two most important factors in maintaining a disciplined and responsible approach is through, 1) effective documentation, and 2) patient privacy:

• Documentation: higher education health professionals and their support staff must maintain accurate, up-to-date records of their clients that are easily accessible when necessary, and can be used in processes that deliver services. While in the past that meant detailed, hand-written notes kept in a physical folder, the transition to digital patient records has facilitated more diligent documentation along with more streamlined coordination of care.
• Privacy: college and university healthcare providers have to abide by compliance mandates to protect student privacy. A case management approach can ensure guidelines so that patient information is only shared for specific needs and only with student permission. Those guidelines will be used to share information where necessary and permitted, and prevent data from getting into the wrong hands.

Comprehensive approach: successful behavioral health case management requires an understanding of all aspects of a student's life. The right case management solution will connect all relevant providers so as to better integrate clients' medical, social, educational, and vocational information and then apply that information into effective treatment. This treatment may come from university health services, or through contracted arrangements with other providers. But by coordinating through a single case management application, academic organizations have a much better way of achieving the kind of success that’s needed to address very serious problems, and help students become successful.

Case management is a powerful way to enable higher education professionals to be effective contributors to the successful delivery of student health. It also enables integration of relevant data, and timeline-driven workflows that can give professionals visibility into the best courses of action. Case management enables organizations to build and manage digital applications that coordinate the efforts of different groups, yet can connect them all to the same goals. This creates a powerful framework that helps university departments and the power of their IT stack to achieve truly powerful outcomes for students in need.

Process Director can be used to apply a case management approach for student mental health services. It allows schools to integrate data and documents from various applications into a shareable profile of students under care. This provides clarity for all workflows that touch the students during their treatment so that important decisions that impact their mental health can be achieved faster and with greater context.

Knowing all you can about customers gives you insights into how they’re using your product and how you can support them. The best-case scenario for customer intelligence is that you learn predominantly during the prospecting phase and then maintain a close relationship that allows you to continue to build your customer knowledge thereafter. When that happens, you can be strategic about developing products that you know will meet their needs, which will help you continue to sell (and upsell) while you maintain your relationship.

But the reality is that it’s difficult to understand customers and how they think. You may not always know what questions to ask, and they might not even be aware of the benefits they’re receiving (or not receiving) by using your product.

Customer journey mapping, however, can be an effective way to get inside the brains of your customers. And even better, it identifies patterns that will help you understand customer behaviors, which can help predict future actions. This will put you in a position to service the specific needs of customers throughout their entire engagement with you.

Customer journey mapping is applicable across many departments in a company because it’s an exercise that impacts so many customer-driven activities. Sales, marketing, product management, user experience (UX), and IT all benefit from insights into how customers work with their product and company. The results of mapping help you to visualize your customer’s experience from the customer’s point of view, and for all the various touch-points they have with your product and people as they seek to achieve a specific outcome.

Customer Journey Maps Deliver Key Insights

The format for a customer journey map is usually an integrated, visual representation of the customer experience. How do they use your product/service? What information and support do they need from your services and sales teams? These journey maps can take complicated information and analytics about customers and provide a unified set of data about how customers engage with your company.

The customer map is generally built from the customer’s point of view and gives vendors a powerful way to make better decisions that will benefit customers. It is a combination of behavioral data (some of which requires deeper analysis) and anecdotal feedback from customers and provides the following:

• A comprehensive understanding of a customer’s overall experience with the vendor and its product
• Identification of how impactful the vendor’s product has been in helping them address specific goals
• Awareness of potential points of frustration, or where the vendor falls short of expectations

This kind of information is hugely valuable and gives companies far better and more usable insights than the traditional tools, which usually rely on competitive analysis, sales forecasts, and general market trends.

The Dimension of Time in Customer Insights

What if you could predict how your product and service could make your customer more successful, and then use that information in your engagement? This can only be done with predictive capabilities, which is what Process Timeline was designed for.

Process Timeline enables companies to apply business process automation for creating time-aware business processes to help organizations get deeper, and more meaningful insights into customer activity. It uses machine learning to integrate information from multiple applications and data source, and then create processes that can predict actions based on behavioral norms. Applying this in the context of customer usage means that you can create a sense for how customers are using your products, how they engage with your company, and where there are gaps you might want to fill.

When the dimension of time is applied to customer journey mapping, the major advantages are insights into what you’re doing well, and what you could be doing better in order to create an overall better experience. This includes things like:

• The quality of your interactions with customers. What things do you provide that make them most satisfied, and where are they dissatisfied? Gain insight into behavioral patterns so you know what needs to be emphasized and what needs to be fixed. 
• Where are customers prevented from achieving their business goals? Could your product or service do more to support them and relieve them from having to rely on multiple solutions or apps in order to be successful? Having an understanding of the limits of your product (at least, the limits they perceive) will guide you in building a more usable product.
• Customer decision-making. Knowing how your customer is making decisions, and who in the organization is responsible for them will make sure you’re building the right product for the right people.

Process Timeline delivers these and other insights and does it in a future context. In other words, it identifies patterns and gaps and can communicate those to your team so they can refine the processes for product development and customer communication. Armed with this kind of information, you can communicate intelligently to your customers about issues you are taking steps to resolve. You can also involve customers early in the various decisions that will impact how they engage with you in the future.

The element of time offers a strategic advantage when planning for the future. And because your future depends on happy customers, adding Process Timeline into your customer journey mapping processes will keep you tightly engaged with prepared to meet future challenges.

Automating processes is easier to do today than ever before. Most workers have an understanding of how automation impacts their work, and IT teams are automating increasing numbers of business-critical tasks. Ultimately, automation reduces operational costs and improves productivity, so it is a no-brainer as a top priority for almost any company. You can find more on how to stand up an automation initiative here.

In order to actually deliver on the automation promise, however, IT teams need to be selective about what processes they automate, and how they reconcile their automation efforts with company goals. Without a plan based on specific goals, time, money, and resources are misspent and it prevents more important processes from getting priority. That’s frustrating for the internal team members who rely on process improvement, but the real impact is felt when companies see their growth slowed while they waste time trying to implement the wrong things.

With that in mind, consider that automation works best for repetitive tasks that typically suck a lot of time from humans. Also, think about how machine learning and artificial intelligence can deliver advantages in some things that humans might typically complicate.

Your team does not have unlimited time, and the business cannot stop while you figure out your priorities. So, it’s best to start your list of automation projects where you can get the biggest potential impact, along with the highest probability of success.

Identifying which processes need automation requires focus on the part of IT and business team leaders. It’s challenging to agree on how to move forward, but with a well-formed plan, teams can create an effective priority-based list of automation projects. The first step will require exploration and discovery, which can be built with a standardized methodology for evaluating and prioritizing the right processes, and in the order, they should be automated. This approach will enable a defined set of criteria to determine which processes are good candidates for process automation.

The team tasked with this needs to explore these issues and questions:

• What are the current pain points our company faces that could be potentially solved through process automation?
• Does automation of these processes align with company goals?
• If we automate, do we get ROI, and will the cost to automate be absorbed through these savings?
• Do we have the expertise and resources available to perform the necessary tasks to automate a given process?

The answers you get from the above list is a starting point, but armed with a set of potential processes, your team now needs to get into “brass tacks” and determine if you can actually take the necessary steps to automate. When looking at your project candidates, see if they meet these criteria:

• Are prone to human error
• Operate with frequency
• Have repetitive elements
• Can be integrated with other processes or applications
• Use a structured format for data
• Can be performed in a continuous fashion (e.g., are not dependent on specific hours of the day when they run)

With these questions answered, you should be able to prioritize your list of automation projects. The next step is to create general requirements for these projects. This list of requirements should include the following:

• Executive sponsor
• Key stakeholders
• Goals
• Project milestones
• Document requirements and needs; e.g. when a document is needed, where can it be accessed from, and where will it be stored?

Your team should now be comfortable with a list of projects, prioritized in such a way that they can be achieved, and that they can show impact quickly. This strategic approach will ensure you can deliver value and save costs. These things will demonstrate true transformational change that will create a better operating model for your organization.

Process Director is an effective, proven, and comprehensive process automation solution for a variety of vertical markets. An additional advantage it delivers to customers is a unique function called Process Timeline™, which is process automation functionality for creating easily modifiable and time-aware business processes to help organizations with their process improvement.

BP Logix developed Process Timeline to help organizations improve planning for business outcomes by addressing the lack of predictability in workflows and processes. While most process automation solutions can only tell you when a particular task is late, Process Timeline uses its knowledge of an organization’s process execution history to automate and predict when each task is likely to complete, no matter how far in the future that task is scheduled to begin.

Process Timeline Features

Process Timeline offers a simple way to compose, manage, and modify business processes. Process-related data and analysis, such as process duration and critical path insights, are delivered in a continuous fashion as processes are running. Organizations recognize significant advantages through features such as:

Low-code Approach

Designed for business users, Process Timeline gives non-developers the ability to build and deploy enterprise-grade, time-aware workflows and processes, with no programming.

• Build rich, complex applications through point-and-click method.
• Intuitive graphical user interface facilitates rapid deployment and time-to-value.

Continuous Improvement

Time is essential to all business activity. Late actions, or actions that Process Timeline predicts will be late—are highlighted and identified while they are running.

• Visual task building interface that lists tasks, dependencies, and highlights potential issues.
• Process Timeline automatically generates and updates a visual interface that identifies, at a glance, how (and for how long) the process will run

Keep Processes On-Track

Process Timeline offers the earliest possible notification that some future task is predicted to be late, and can automatically take direct action, escalating or rerouting activities to account for the predicted delay.

• Process Timeline continuously evaluates processes based on past experience and current status.
• Provides accurate predictions when any future activity is likely to be delayed, offering the earliest possible opportunity for manual or automatic intervention.

Tracking and Measurement

As organizations evolve, performance analysis and awareness are critical for continuous improvement.

• Process Timeline records every action taken by every process participant (human or automated), ensuring total accountability.
• Process Timeline maps users to activities within process that are consuming the most time, so users can quickly focus process improvement efforts where they will have the most impact.
• Drill down to review historical information about any activity, or to see how different actors have performed within a given task.
• Reset analytics at any time to get a fresh perspective.

Today’s colleges and universities require comprehensive data communication to be successful in supporting the needs of students, faculty, and other stakeholders. In an ideal situation, applications connect seamlessly with one another, but in reality, different software solutions were built to solve for different needs. As a result, they weren’t necessarily designed to share data. Yet, for innovative campus IT teams, achieving harmony among all these systems can be achieved with a smart digital integration strategy.

When applications and technology systems operate together as a functioning, cohesive machine, colleges achieve optimal outcomes with their technology investments, and they’re also better equipped to meet their goals as academic institutions. Achieving that level of interoperability requires a focused effort to align tools and strategies. This includes the processes built around those applications, the methodologies for applying them, and systems and the people managing those processes. As digital transformation changes the way that academic organizations stay innovative, it’s important to know how each can advance their enterprise integration management strategies.

Preparing for Higher Education Digital Integration 

Integrating digital systems is an ongoing challenge for colleges and universities because they require such a diverse set of systems, from ERP to SIS to HRIS. Some are centrally-run systems while others are spun up at the departmental level. Campus IT teams are constantly trying to meet new technology needs that come from things like compliance mandates, the creation of new student services, developments in academic departments, and a host of other changes.

The best way to optimize a school’s technology investments and maximize the potential of its systems is to integrate applications so data can be shared. Doing so requires a foundation, one that is process-based, that will provide the framework for building new applications and connectors between and among applications.

To get started with an integration plan, schools must first identify the outcomes they desire and then map the applications that will provide the necessary data and functionality to meet those outcomes. For example, the registrar’s office could schedule classes faster if it could integrate data about facilities availability, enrollment numbers, and course requirements. In many cases, that information has to be retrieved in separate and disparate formats. A single view, delivered through integration, helps expedite scheduling.

Build Process and Workflow into Integration Requirements

Requirements can then be built, and on top of those requirements, teams can start to build processes. These processes must deliver, at a minimum, these things:

• Workflow automation: most applications will have some level of built-in workflow. The goal of processes is to ensure that workflows are connected so that real-time updates in one application are correspondingly made in applications to which it is connected. Consider how convenient it is for financial aid information to automatically populate with a students’ tuition bill so she knows, in real-time, precisely what her financial responsibility is.
• Connector flexibility: applications are upgraded from time to time, and they deploy new functionality. Make sure that processes are flexible enough to adapt to changes in existing systems, and can be applied to new technologies.
• Productivity gains: the whole point to an integration strategy is to be more productive with the technology that’s available to you. Make sure that stakeholders are actually getting better visibility into data and then able to apply that, through automation, to improving performance.

Deploying a Sustainable Digital Integration Strategy

Once goals have been identified and processes begin to be built, IT teams need to perform some important steps as part of their strategy as the initiate integration efforts:

• Develop a set of proven best practices from process thought leaders. Familiarize yourself with case studies of colleges who have done this kind of work.
• Partner with stakeholders (others in IT, department heads, users, executive sponsors, and others) to determine what their specific needs are. Learn their pain points and understand what constitutes “integration nirvana” for them.
• Establish a content governance framework so that processes adhere to a specific, but flexible, set of requirements.
• Ensure compliance for industry and institutional compliance frameworks.

A Continuous Integration Roadmap

At this point, you will have a vision and an actionable roadmap. With a tool like Process Director, you can initiate the integration process. This can be done by identifying which inputs will inform your integrations, and how that data will be incorporated into it. Typical integrations come from applications like these:

• Databases
• LDAP or directory servers
• Standard enterprise applications like CRM, marketing automation, HR systems, and others
• Specific higher education tools like student lifecycle management, financial services apps for financial aid, scheduling and logistics apps, and others
• Document Imaging Software / Scanners
• File System Monitor Application Integration
• Email Servers
• Social BPM Application and Workflow Application Integration
• SharePoint or other file-related applications

With a process-driven approach, campus IT teams will be able to dramatically reduce cost and improve efficiency. Processes allow them to handle connections among the applications and systems listed above, as well as others so there are repeatability and consistency. Insight and visibility into all aspects of processes.

With integrated applications, the entire student lifecycle can become far more streamlined, and university operations can be more efficient. Academic organizations can realize significant cost savings and better deployment of resources. By sharing data and functionality, colleges and universities will be able to emphasize their strengths to their stakeholders as they provide the best possible college experience for all stakeholders.

Recently, a bipartisan team of members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a bill that would promote equal access to academic opportunities, services, and materials for students with disabilities. The Accessible Instructional Materials in Higher Education Act, also known as the AIM HIGH Act, would create a commission to develop voluntary accessibility criteria for instructional materials and educational technology.

The AIM HIGH Act is the result of a collaboration between the National Federation of the Blind, the Association of American Publishers, the Software and Information Industry Association, the American Council on Education, and Educause. To successfully implement the provisions of the Act, schools will need to create processes both for implementation and to monitor compliance. Done effectively, these processes will also generate analytical insights that will help schools become better at delivering services and at meeting their institutional goals and legal mandates. The most effective tool to support these efforts is with a business process solution.

Codifying Accessibility with Processes

Accessibility takes on many different forms. As a general rule, information and communication technology is considered accessible and usable if it can be used in a similar fashion, and to the same effective results by people both with and without disabilities. Essentially, comparable access to information must be provided, taking the needs of all users and learners into account. Digital formats can complicate accessibility for not just the sightless and the hearing impaired, but also for those who are color blind, those prone to seizures, and people with physical limitations that require keyboard navigation rather than the use of a mouse. These are only some examples.

Things like what to make accessible, and how to comply with the Act will fall to individual schools to decide. Without specific guidelines, the effort could be complex, but with a process-driven approach, IT teams can frame the scope of the effort to become AIM HIGH compliant and customize to their own needs.

University IT departments can start by developing workflow standards to guide all aspects of development and implementation. Building these standards will be critical for establishing the consistency needed to be accessible in the eyes of the legislative framework, and the agility to manage the specific needs of individual cases.

IT teams can start by identifying specific categories they need to work on, including:

• Testing and data collection tools: this includes things like Web-based tests (open-ended or multiple choice), or data collection that students might employ in the course of doing academic research.
• Academic presentation material: includes electronic document templates used to create coursework-related documents or presentations. This could be a standard PowerPoint template that’s required to establish a common look and feel for presentations or requirements for using and submitting term papers in Google Documents.
• Educational materials: this covers interactive online courses, which are increasingly becoming used in higher education. This includes self-paced training courses; educational webinars; other educational presentation formats; and support materials for such activities, including electronic worksheets, required reading, and tests. It could also include a course syllabus or administrative documents and tools.

Implementing Accessibility with Process Director

Process Director has long been used in higher education to meet all manner of student and institutional needs. It can be a critical tool in helping to codify and manage the necessary processes that will help schools be successful in administering AIM HIGH and other accessibility requirements.  IT teams can use functionality in Process Director to apply a guided approach that includes:

• Discovery: it’s essential for IT teams to understand the unique needs of the issues for which they are solving. A well-prepared team will be better able to incorporate specific milestones, approvals, and decision-making into workflows if can use a process-driven approach to understanding and implementing necessary tasks.
• Awareness: this is about recognizing when to accommodate and when it’s not necessary. This may seem easy to ascertain, but for someone who has never had to consider accessing a website in a way where they have unique physical or mental abilities, it may be difficult to truly understand how to meet the needs of different users.
• UX design: make sure that the design of any digital format is built in an accessible way, and perform UX testing with the audience for which the solution is being developed.
• Visual design: this is different from UX. Visual design is about the actual placement and layout of web pages, forms, and other tools so they can be interpreted and understood.
• Development: your code should be accessible so that, irrespective of ability, it is able to be deployed in different formats.
• Workflow development: ensure that in all workflows, AIM HIGH requirements accounted for.

To successfully meet the needs of higher education inclusion, colleges and universities will need a dedicated effort that includes some level of complexity. In order to make sense of it and roll it out successfully, they will require a process-driven approach. Being compliant with legislation like AIM HIGH will be one goal of these efforts, but of far more importance will be the ability to create an inclusive learning environment for learners of all types of abilities.

Modern institutions are realizing significant advantages from low code development, an approach to building software which allows non-developers to build applications in a visual, drag-and-drop environment with components for different types of functionality. Low-code platforms have enabled the rise of a business analyst support system who can direct application priorities by abstracting the typically complex coding tasks associated with programming by using reusable components. Innovative college and university IT teams are taking advantage of low-code platforms to improve process automation and derive significant ROI from their technology investments, and it’s changing how they build for the future.

By employing low-code capabilities that enable non-developers to connect various stakeholders and implement sophisticated functionality, users and teams realize greater efficiency. Essentially, those closest to the problems can now have the greatest impact at solving those problems. In higher education, solutions are wide-ranging, and low-code allows schools to benefit from:

• Automating processes, integrate apps with existing systems, and easily connect to data from multiple sources so information and functionality render in a single user experience. Each instance of building a connector can cost as much as $25,000 in developer expenses when using traditional methods.
• Optimizing ROI from legacy applications to deliver better user experiences and increase user adoption.
• Designing and building best-in-class apps that can be deployed when needed. Provide the ability to iterate and improve as needed.
• Recognizing and delivering solutions for all aspects of the university experience. This includes things like HR management, student recruiting, facilities and operations, and alumni relations.
• Migrating applications from on-premises to the cloud.
• Delivering applications in mobile formats to increase usage for students, faculty, and school staff.

Low-code solutions like Process Director give users a highly visual dashboard and software components that can be used to create an application without having to use code. The combination of rapid development capabilities along with the low-code approach offers enterprises the ability to build, deploy, and iterate quickly. Additionally, it provides ways to identify deep insights into usage and performance of applications.

Higher Education Technology Transformation

In higher education, using a low-code approach is about much more than just the applications themselves. It can save schools money, improve how IT resources are used, and deliver services to better meet the ever-changing needs of the 21st Century university student, faculty members, and staff. These things, in turn, make schools more competitive and economically viable.

This is important for colleges because they operate according to prescribed schedules — admissions, registration, financial aid, and the routine of the quarter or semester system. It’s difficult to innovate when the next milestone is right around the corner. Having to adhere to the typical application development lifecycle is slow and typically results in solutions that can be obsolete before they even become available. However, by building and delivering quickly, and with reusable components, university stakeholders can not only deliver fast, but IT teams and departmental groups can iterate and update applications continuously.

Low-code process automation provides a foundation for all university processes, and operates as the engine that moves the student through their journey from first point of contact, all the way through graduation.

Process Management and Workflow for Higher Education

In a university environment, admissions, financial aid, HR, and all departments are using Process Director to effectively manage the complex processes involved with operating a school and delivering effective services. Higher education institutions are able to deploy Process Director to help them meet business-level goals for things like student outcomes, effective recruiting, employee management, and facilities-related operations. It also supports IT goals like integration, process efficiency, and repeatability.

Institutions use Process Director to automate services delivered according to a school’s specific requirements. An example is its digital process automation capabilities, which enable the efficient processing and reviewing of applications across all necessary admissions counselors and administrators. As the application process has become more competitive and rigorous, students are required to provide more data points to make their case and stand out from other applicants. Consider that the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) received 102,242 student applications in 2017, each of which required analysis and processing, all within a 3-4 month timeframe. Building the application framework to support this scale of automation cannot be done in normal development timelines. Low-code changes how a school like UCLA would be able to adapt to increased demand through effective process automation.

The Importance of Process Automation for Colleges and Universities

Low-code equips teams to build applications that work in a human-directed work style. Process Director encourages this innovative approach through things like:

Document and forms management: Consider how students submit all manner of documentation in the course of their time on campus. And employees use a variety of forms in order to be hired in the course of their time as employees. Schools like the University of Central Florida Global deliver low-code solutions to ingest and make sense of things like transcripts, test scores, recommendation and letters for students. For employees, it manages applications, personal data, benefits information and a variety of other types of documents. Some of these are submitted and stored digitally, while some are delivered in paper form. Process Director is able to digitize these documents and include them in individual files. This eliminates outdated and inefficient processes like managing files through email attachments and paper-based artifacts. The result is more context about students and other stakeholders, provided through validated documents. Process Director also enables sharing of information with trusted decision-makers so that milestones in the process can be made with greater efficiency.

Application integration: The student and potential employee application submission is the first touch point with the university, and kicks off processes that will lead to admissions or employment. Process Director uses built in connectors for a variety of ERP systems, and allows users to construct forms that can pull and deliver data that can be useful for things like financial aid and scholarships, housing, and registration for students, and things like hiring and benefits administrations for employees.

Decision-making, enhanced with workflow: Process Director uses the following innovations that make it a first choice for many colleges and universities:

• Attractive, web-based, and responsive user interaction;
• Built-in support for multiple languages, locales, and cultures;
• Easy integration with a broad array of databases, web services, and applications;
• Directory synchronization with LDAP, Active Directory, and Windows network security;
• Full integration with federated authentication services, including Oauth and SAML.
• Strong encryption of data at rest, and data in-flight;
• Digital signature of documents;
• Granular permissions structure, with temporary privilege escalation.

Many colleges and universities rely on outdated systems that cannot support schools’ desires to meet the competitive needs of 21st Century organizations. While there is an increasing need to move fast and address specific needs, the low-code capabilities of Process Director can provide digitally transformative education solutions that facilitate efficient management and streamlining of processes.

An article in Educause summed it up nicely, "The digital transformation of higher education is at hand. Leaders must prepare their institutions now to take strategic advantage of the coming shifts in culture, workforce, and technology.”

Rapid Application Development Software For Digital Innovation

Rapid application development software is driving a whole new approach to the deployment and operation of digital applications. Organizations are racing to take advantage of these low coded applications to enter new markets, attract new buyers, and retain their hard-won existing customers. In so doing, they are opening a new front in the digital wars; namely, transformation of the way that those very digital applications are created, deployed, and enhanced.

For applications to provide value to the enterprise, they must be extensible, usable and able to integrate with a changing IT environment. Yet, what is among the more critical aspects of application value is when apps can unite development and IT operations teams to quickly and efficiently adapt and grow in response to an organization’s changing needs. Rapid app development software provides a path that enables businesses to use Process Director to deliver data and functionality through digital channels and across different platforms and form factors.

Process Director Rapid Application Development Software

This model puts those who are closest to business issues in a position to create solutions, and allows them to adapt and change these solutions over time. BPM software developed with rapid application development software capabilities is more usable and more effectively addresses business issues that are most relevant to business users.

Benefits of Process Director Rapid Application Development Software

• Imagine your organization delivering its own rich digital applications, on any platform, before your competitors have laid down the first thousand lines of code.
• Imagine saving millions on expensive technical staff, incompatible packaged applications, and maintenance of obsolete code.
• Imagine providing straight-through processing and visibility all the way from your customers to your suppliers, while at all times guaranteeing compliance, accountability, and security.

Other Useful Features

Process Director has many other useful workflow management software features unique to BP Logix, most notably for the Process Timeline workflow engine and Process Director's electronic forms management software. Process Timeline includes a workflow automation technology that automates business processes. Charts and data are automatically updated as the process runs, which allows for accurate, up-to-date information to be viewed with ease.

Electronic forms software makes it possible to use only electronic forms throughout an entire company. The software connects the company to both suppliers and customers, so the handling of electronic documents goes smoothly. BP Logix BPM software makes handling even the most complex electronic forms a simple process that most any business user can handle.

Also, Process Director is an iBPMS solution that has been recognized in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites for several years in a row.

No Programmer? No Problem

If your goal is to deliver data digitally and fast then Process Director is the BPM solution for you. With Process Director rapid application development platform, you can focus on solving business issues instead of creating software to do so. BPM that relies on low code or no code is relevant to business users today. To learn more about Process Director’s business process management capabilities, contact BP Logix today.

Extensible Software For Your BPM and Workflow Needs

Extensible software applications are an important part to business process management (BPM) because there can still be a mismatch between the features of off-the-shelf applications and the very specific needs of a given business. Custom business application development acts as the glue that fills these gaps, taking data from one or more systems, pushing that data through a process, and updating other systems as appropriate.

Thus, the real leverage of a BPM software solution with custom business application development is found in its ability to combine proprietary processes and data with off-the-shelf applications. However, that leverage is weakened considerably if the BPM solution itself requires custom programming, and all the overhead that goes along with it.

Programmatic APIs and Custom Tasks

Process Director is an extensible software solution equipped with numerous hooks and callouts supporting scripted interactions based on the product’s API. Workflows, forms, business rules: virtually any Process Director object can be augmented by scripting. You can also take advantage of Process Director custom tasks to create packaged, reusable scripts that can be treated as “black boxes” by your workflow and form builders.

Web Services / REST

Your applications can access Process Director data and manipulate the product’s behavior through the product’s extensive web services APIs. Process Director web services are WSDL-based and REST-enabled. Virtually any Process Director feature or function can be manipulated via web services.

Relational Database

Process Director stores all data in your relational database. The product supports MS SQL Server or Oracle RDBM systems. This information is structured in a documented schema, enabling easy access to external applications and report writers (such as Crystal Reports). For even simpler access, Process Director automatically generates SQL views of form and process data.

Other Features

Process Director an innovative and powerful business process management engine combining the power of BPM software, workflow software and case management solutions with the flexibility and leverage of rapid application development—with no programming. Workflow software and eForms are just the beginning of digital business application development. Process Director is an extensible software solution that combines the easiest and most efficient BPM software in the industry with a rich set of custom business application development tools offering snap-in data integration, rapid prototyping and release, and comprehensive reporting and analytics.

Check out these BPM examples to see how customers in every sector are successfully using Process Director's business application development tools to prepare and deliver transparent, end-to-end digital applications offering engaging customer experience, robust business process governance, regulatory compliance, and smooth, efficient operations.

Schedule A Free Demonstration

See for yourself. Contact us for a free Process Director demonstration from a BP Logix business process management expert.

We recently launched a new educational series: It’s Time to Think Differently About Applications, which will provide a series of articles, videos, and other resources that explain how organizations can gain advantages from a new, innovative approach to business application development. The purpose is not solely to offer a prescriptive roadmap for how you can improve and accelerate app development. It’s also about creating an organizational mindset around how to use business applications more effectively to address customer needs.

The series will be populated with new resources periodically over the coming weeks. It is our hope that these items will be both instructive and energizing. Most will undoubtedly recognize how there is a better way, one enabled by lean, modern technologies, that that will have dramatic impact on the way they concept business applications and use teams to build them.

Internet entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, famously said, “Software is eating the world.” His point was that more and more of global economic activity is dependent upon business software applications and the processes they enable. People adapt to those changes through their behaviors, which created a rush to build better business applications. This, in turn, encourages employees, consumers, and others to buy, communicate, share, and transact online.

Andreessen made this comment in a 2011 Wall Street Journal essay; a lot has changed since then. With the rise of the cloud, mobile, and IoT, we are in the age of digital transformation. One might extend the metaphor to evolve to something like, “The way business software is developed is eating software.” OK, that might be a stretch, but the fact is that organizational activity is increasingly reliant on transaction-based processes, which are then delivered to stakeholders in the form of business software applications. These are the drivers of efficiency and revenue, and to accomplish standard business goals at today’s pace demands that these applications be built and adapted continuously, as business needs change.

The movement enabling this is digital transformation, which is all about change. However, change is not a goal unto itself. For organizations going through this transformative process, the effect that come from implementing new, agile, continuously innovative technology is that they are better able to adapt to changing business needs by applying technology rapidly and accurately to solve specific problems. To be successful, there has to be an understanding of how to use the right technology, and how to best apply it to the right situations.

For most people, the idea of app development is synonymous with coding and all the methodologies that come with it. But we’ve moved into an environment where non-technical people can take control of their tasks and goals by adapting business applications to help them achieve their goals. In the first piece in the series, Intellyx analyst Charles Araujo explains five ways to think differently about applications, and he initiates it with an emphasis on the customer journey. At BP Logix, we spend a lot of time with customers so we can learn from them and how they use Process Director. By understanding how they build business applications and leverage them to connect employees, partners, customers, and other stakeholders, we are better able to improve our own product. But we also learn the outcomes of how they integrate Process Director BPM software into their organization and how it supports their own needs. The ones who have been most successful, in terms of ROI of technology investments and overall revenue increase, are the ones who have created a culture of transformation driven by business applications.

Irrespective of how long you’ve been developing or using business applications, changes brought about by this new paradigm are welcome ones: less code, bigger ability to continuously push new features and functionality, and an agile BPM approach to integration and deployment. For everyone involved with driving business results, understanding that application development is a key part of this, and then understanding HOW to do it is precisely where they will create competitive advantages from business applications. Our educational series will offer all kinds of insights to support their efforts, and we encourage you to join them and us.

With the addition of leading-edge solutions, a new approach to business process management (BPM), and a dedication to change, organizations are adopting transformative strategies that improve the value of what they deliver to customers, and also position themselves for continued change. No aspect of this, however, is more material to the advancement of business goals than  application development, and the organizations that adopt new, innovative approaches are the ones who will reap the rewards of competitive advantages, more efficiency, and more profitable engagement with customers.