I think all those views (although have some degree of veracity in them) are too absolutist in the sense that things are not black and white. But also, it depends on the point of view of each person and their own experience.

All platforms have their own strengths, if they didn’t, neither of them would reach to the place they’re right now. Some value is the end user getting from them.

Here’s what I think in short words:

Blackberry OS

Is the oldest of the big three (even though Windows Mobile has a long history) but that doesn’t make it a looser. Been the oldest brings a lot of experience to the table. One of the biggest and strongest fields of Blackberry is their enterprise market capabilities. It has lots of good features built in that satisfy big companies like the White House. Lots of features has been incorporated into Apple’s iOS trying to get into this market, but adoption has been slow. As I said in the beginning, Blackberry has lots of experience in this field.

Besides been a leader in the enterprise market, Blackberry has fair good market share of the consumer market. This comes by a good reason: there are features that millions of people feel attracted to when buying Blackberry, one of them being the BB Chat. See as this simple and common capability, available on the Internet since its own birth, is one of the top features. Again, experience. I still don’t know why Apple didn’t launch the first day with a feature like this.

Apple iOS

It has a domination of the consumer market. The ease of use makes it a winner between people that have never had a smartphone.

Also, one of the biggest advantages is their App Store that has thousands of good applications. And more coming in with innovative features. This makes it a winner for usability and in the area of solving daily issues.

Adoption in the enterprise market has been slow, advancing a in small steps, but it’s coming.

Android

Also the usability here is a big winner. A fast growing market of applications makes it look interesting against Apple and Blackberry.

The biggest advantage of Android might be their price. As it’s an open source platform, carriers and phone makers don’t have to include royalties in prices bringing the phone’s total cost of ownership down.

Conclusion

I think all three has their own pros and cons. Neither of them should abandon their technologies for adopting the other. They have their own bright spots.

Even more, there could be some partnership between them if they want to consolidate and reduce costs. For example, a partnership between Android and Blackberry could integrate Blackberry enterprise features into Android giving it the experience and technology know how to become a unique platform that combines consumer and business capabilities.

Who you think should partner with who?

• Create rectangles, circles and lines
• Arrows
• Markers
• Everything with the colors you need

After editing you can save the image in JPEG format or copy it to the clipboard for further processing, send it to an email or paste it on a document.

The best part is that we’ve made the tool, the screen capture software, available for free so the community can take advantage of it. If you want any more features, just contact me and I’ll try to include it in the development schedule.

Some of the things you’ll get:

• Central document repository: no more storing files on your local
  hard disk or on a shared folder in the network. With SharePoint you will be
  able to store documents in a repository accessible via web. When some other
  person needs to collaborate on the document, they can just go the specified
  web site, open the document, edit it and save it back to the repository. No
  more documents lying around.
• Document versioning: yes, will have a whole history of all the
  edits made on the document and go back and recover that version that you
  need.
• One search: search for documents and information inside documents
  from a single place. When you install SharePoint Portal Server, you will get
  the ability to search across sites and document libraries everywhere. Now
  you won’t loose a document again.
• Metadata fields: Add information about documents. Forget about
  folder hierarchies for classifying documents. Add metadata fields for
  describing and searching.
• Forms: create a repository of standard forms used in your
  organization. Training requests, purchase orders, expense reimbursement,
  etc., etc., etc. Create and publish them in SharePoint.
• Sites: create special sites for collaboration. A site for the
  sale department, human resources department. For that new project we are
  starting.
• Collaboration features: create calendars, meeting spaces, assign
  tasks and create contacts around documents and other objects of the
  organization. Everything integrated in one site created for that purpose.
• It’s the future: yes, it is. We will have one environment,
  invisible in the background, where all our documents will live and all the
  collaboration information will be stored. Today is called SharePoint.

Of course, this are just some of the things you will get when deploying
SharePoint. There are a lot of other things you can do with it and customize it
to your needs.

After your implementation don’t forget to go a step further with workflow.
Add document approval and routing to those documents and forms in SharePoint
using our product, Procx. With it, you can really streamline processes and
really do more with less. Go, give it a look at our
SharePoint Workflow
site and our InfoPath
Workflow site.

When people ask me to define productivity, I respond a four word sentence: do
more with less. That’s it. Process more insurance claims without increasing
personnel, find company documents and information more easily without wasting
time, automate processes and relocate employees to perform value added
activities in the business, handle more loans without increasing officials, find
new channels of delivering your product without investing lots of money.

Technology has been playing a huge role in productivity, especially
information technology. Today organizations have a portfolio of software
products available online that can automate almost any part of your company.
Identify your needs, look for manual routines that employees do and think how
you can improve that part of the business and which software can help you
achieve your objectives. A small increase in productivity can yield into high
profit values.

If you go to the customer service representative, do you know how much time
is lasting for giving the customer a definitive answer on their problem? There
is no way we can improve these type of services if you are not taking measures
of the process. By doing so, then we can think about augmenting our customer
satisfaction index or reducing the amount of errors that a product has when
going out to the streets.

In this

article by Seth Godin, he makes a call to people to stop being afraid of
taking care of processes. Yes, we know this is a routinary thing, but it is a
strategic value to our business against competitors. If I’m more efficient
internally, I can handle more jobs and customers with less the cost of similar
organizations in the industry.

So, stop for while envisioning what your company will be in the next three
years and take care of those processes that customers and employees are
complaining right now.

For this to happen, tasks must be assign to users or employees inside the
organization. They must then complete it according to their criteria. For
example, in a bank application for creating a new account, the officer will
generally have a task for checking if the person opening the account is already
a customer of the bank, maybe using their social security number (going one step
further this can be automated using a web service that makes a query to the
backend system and returning true if the person is a customer). After the
officer has completed the check, then he can complete the task.

Assigning a task to a person can be made directly or indirectly. In
Procx, you can do it
any way you want. Directly means assigning a task to an employee, a user. For
example, the task described in the previous example can be assign to Jack, an
officer in our Timbuktu branch. You can even get the user from a variable (for
example a user selected in a list on a form). The disadvantage of using this way
is that if Jack is transferred to the Honolulu branch, then you must edit the
process and change the assignment to the new user.

Assigning a task indirectly means not attaching a task to a user, but instead
to a role. A role belongs to an organizational chart and is occupied by a user.
In the previous example, instead of assigning the task to Jack, you can assign
it to the loan officer located in the organizational chart of the Timbuktu
branch. When Jack gets the sad notice that he’s been transferred to Honolulu,
then the only thing to be done is change the user assigned to the loan officer
role in the organizational chart. No other changes are needed in the process and
everything continues to run smoothly.

This is why assigning tasks to roles is the preferred practice when building
workflows generally and one that is totally supported in Procx.

That is how Alan Cooper describes fudgable software in his extraordinary book
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum : Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (2nd Edition): “I call this ability to take actions
out of sequence or before prerequisites are satisfied fudgability“.

For solving the problem, Alan describes in his book that software should be
flexible enough to handle this out of sequence tasks in the process allowing
persons to interact with it in a more human way. It’s like letting the users
decide which is the best way to handle a request.

This flexibility in software maybe one of the most complicated task to
accomplish during construction. Generally products are locked in the way a
workflow should execute, closing any other variables and exceptions that the
final user may want to use, as Alan explains in his book. But, if we achieved
this kind of malleability in software, we are making software that acts more
like a human allowing interaction to be kindly.

This kind of flexibility in software can be achieved using
business process
management software like Procx. The process per se can be changed and
configured according to organizational needs. Exceptions can be taken in and out
of the process as management wants. A request for a purchase order can no longer
be locked in an specific workflow forever. Process analysts can draw their
processes in the workflow
product and decide under which rules it will execute.

So, the interaction of the user with the process is not embedded in the
software, it would be built in Procx allowing the process to be as flexible as
the organization and management wants. It’s a new way of automating processes.
What do you think?

When you are looking to automate this processes you need to find a way to
also take these forms to electronic forms. Then users in the company will have
like a central repository for these requests, allowing them to fill them more
easily and at the same time reduce errors. For developing electronic forms you
have several options in the market:

- Microsoft
Office InfoPath: It’s the product offering from Microsoft. You can easily
draw forms in a very intuitive way. It integrates with other Office products
like Excel, Word and SharePoint. The final produced form is an XML, which makes
it easy to integrate with other applications. For viewing and editing the form,
you need to have InfoPath installed on the client machine.

- XForms: is the W3C standard for
making web forms. It has a whole structure for developing and designing them.
Any organization can take their forms electronic using these technology. You can
view and edit the forms using one of the commercially available products or just
use the Firefox XForms plug-in
which is free. Also with XForms, the final produced form is an XML.

- Developed your own forms: You can also developed your own forms using the
technology you prefer (PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, etc.). The only thing to have in mind
is that the final output must be also an XML to be compatible with other
applications.

Procx allows you to
add workflow to any type of the previous forms.
InfoPath,
XForms or any other
XML file is supported. You can design the process and use the fields from the
form to build business rules and customized notifications. This provide an
integrated environment for developing forms and the workflow for handling the
requests. Real process automation.

The same thing happens in our businesses. There’s a workflow to be followed
for almost any function. The only difference, with our bodies for example, is
that they are not perfect. In the majority of businesses we don’t event know the
steps of processes because they are not documented, making it more difficult to
correct errors.

When you want to make processes in an organization better, you need to
correct errors, eliminate steps, maybe automate others, etc. But there’s always
some tweaking to do until you reach an acceptable level of performance. That’s
why business process management is an every day task. It’s not a project that
finished today.

From

this article: “Both BPM and SOA could be thought of as a way of thinking
about how the business and governance model should be designed and a way of
delivering the technology and applications to support that design,” Miers says.
“Both concepts involve a journey, not a destination. At their core, both employ
an iterative approach to business performance improvement.”

New processes appear every day. They come from new campaigns, new product or
services offering and also from changing directions of companies. Also actual
workflows change due to market needs.
BPM and workflow
solutions will give the flexibility businesses needs for adjusting and
creating these processes allowing them to face competition and increase their
performance in an ongoing basis.

An interesting thing I also find is the length of these forms. They always
have multiple pages and have a huge amount of fields. The majority of the time
the forms have to be filled in an office or desk or a table. Is almost
impossible to do it standing. But with the technology like Tablet PCs these
forms can be made electronic and be filled remotely (in the field). This is an
area, the insurance industry, that greatly
benefit from
BPM solutions. That’s why we have made a movie that represents a life
insurance form been automated with Procx.
A simple process was put in place for approving the form in which if the initial
insurance amount is greater than 50,000 then needs to be routed to a credit
analyst. Hope you like it.

See the movie
here.