Neil Ward-Dutton Premium report Technology & Suppliers Process Application Platforms 2016: Bizagi November 2016 This report assesses the capabilities of Bizagi s Process Application Platform, and also examines the partners and intellectual property that Bizagi can offer customers exploring associated technology implementations. This assessment report forms part of a series of reports from MWD Advisors which assesses business process application technology offerings technology-related capabilities which support organisations wanting to design, develop, deploy, monitor and optimise partially- or wholly-automated business processes. We strongly encourage you to read this report in conjunction with our accompanying Assessment Framework report at https://www.mwdadvisors.com/2016/10/25/process-application-platforms/ MWD Advisors is a specialist advisory firm which provides practical, independent industry insights to business analytics, process improvement and digital collaboration professionals working to drive change with the help of technology. Our approach combines flexible, pragmatic mentoring and advisory services, built on a deep industry best practice and technology research foundation.
Process Application Platforms 2016: Bizagi 2 Summary With its version 11 releases, Bizagi now positions its technology as providing a Digital Business Platform, with three main parts to its proposition: agile (enabling clients to build and change applications quickly), engaging (providing more appropriate application user experiences for different kinds of worker) and connected (making it easy to integrate with external systems and data sources). Together with a new cloud-based deployment option, Bizagi s freemium model, open APIs and flexible user experience options all support this position well. Bizagi s new Experience Designer extends the value of the platform s already strong support for model-driven organisation and information management, and showcases the flexibility of what s possible in support of exploratory work patterns (rather than heads-down task work). The introduction of ad hoc Plans and checklists for process participants is another welcome development. Support for different types of work Automated work: Error-handling, transactional control, rules specification and application integration facilities (with assistance from the platform s data integration architecture) are all very solid in Bizagi s platform, and the result is an offering that will support your automated work scenarios well. Transactional work: Transactional work scenarios are the sweet spot for Bizagi s platform, without a doubt. Bizagi s main strong points here beyond the capabilities also required to support automated work are strong organisational modeling and model-driven form specification. Exploratory work: Bizagi delivers all the foundational capabilities you need to support exploratory work scenarios in its platform. As yet it doesn t promote an explicit Case Management framework, but this is something that Bizagi is currently working on. Rapid prototyping / quick-start Bizagi doesn t currently offer any specific application generation tools for rapid prototyping or quick start application development, but it does offer clients a range of pre-built process application templates (processes, data, form and rule definitions) that they can use prior to commercial licensing for up to 20 development and test users. Change management The Bizagi platform provides a solid change management foundation for process application delivery initiatives, with some standout features. Team working facilities are good; there s solid versioning and checkin/out functionality, and a simple-to-use change impact analysis tool is something Bizagi provides that s not often found in today s Process Application Platform marketplace. Features to aid deployment are solid, but a process instance migration tool would be a helpful addition. User experience options Bizagi has long offered real depth in the user experience options you have at your disposal. Its new Experience Designer opens up a new, more flexible user experience frontier for Bizagi project teams by making it easy to create data application-oriented (rather than task-oriented) interfaces. At the moment the Experience Designer s output is only available within the default HTML5 Work Portal, but this is set to change soon. Deployment options Bizagi has just begun offering an Azure-based hosted service option alongside on-premise delivery, now available from over 30 data centres worldwide. New complementary tools to foster collaboration within and between customers and partners are also cloud-based.
Process Application Platforms 2016: Bizagi 3 Inside Bizagi s platform Bizagi s Process Application Platform offering is now on version 11.0 and known as the Bizagi Digital Business Platform. This is a tightly-integrated, in-house developed suite of tools; Bizagi has not assembled any of its offering from corporate acquisitions. A free standalone Modeler tool downloaded worldwide more than 2.5 million times is also available as part of the full suite, which is completed by a full development studio and runtime process application server. Now the core tools are also complemented by a handful of cloud-delivered web-based tools that designers and developers can use to extend and build on the core functionality on offer. Key tools and capabilities The Bizagi Digital Business Platform comprises the following elements: n Bizagi Modeler. This is a Windows-based business process modeling and simulation tool, now on version 3.1 and available as a standalone free product as well as being part of the wider Bizagi Platform. It implements the BPMN 2.0 modeling and notation standard faithfully. It s aimed at business analysts rather than developers. n Bizagi Studio. This is a Windows-based business process application development toolset. It extends the modeling functionality available in Process Modeler to also enable developers to specify information models, organisational models, forms, external systems integration definitions and rules. Models specified in the Process Modeler can be easily imported into Bizagi Studio for elaboration. n Bizagi Engine. This provides the execution environment for your business process application definitions; unusually in the BPM technology marketplace, it s available in both Java and.net versions. Application definitions are stored in a relational database and interpreted by the server at runtime. n Work Portal. This is a web-based user environment for process participants and administrators, delivered by the BPM Server. It also provides the front end for Bizagi s Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and historical process analytics functionality. User experience options With Bizagi s Process Application Platform you have five different options available to you regarding the creation of user experiences for your applications: n The HTML5-based, responsive Work Portal this is the default environment that user interfaces you create with Bizagi s tools will be delivered within. The new Theme Designer allows you very quickly customise the skin of the Work Portal to add your own fonts, colours, icons and logos, and so on. n Delivery of key Bizagi user interface widgets (such as the default task inbox) as SharePoint Web Parts. n Delivery of those same key Bizagi user interface widgets as HTML-based web parts, for embedding into custom websites or third-party web frameworks or portals. n A rich set of APIs that enable you to create completely custom user interfaces for your applications and pull Bizagi data and functionality into those. n Native mobile applications for ios and Android smartphones and tablets. Today, Bizagi s new stakeholder interfaces that you create using the Experience Designer are only available in the Bizagi Work Portal, but future releases will see this capability made available across all the options above.
Process Application Platforms 2016: Bizagi 4 Deployment options Bizagi has just launched a hosted service option for its Digital Business Platform. The Engine runtime is hosted on Microsoft s Azure platform, and available from over 30 data centres across North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia and managed by Bizagi (with Bizagi offering 24x7 support, monitoring, management and maintenance). Each customer s data is completely isolated from every other customer s data, and Bizagi offers each customer distinct authoring, test and production runtime environments as part of a usage-based annual subscription license configured to your choice of Basic, Standard and Premium performance levels (pricing scaled accordingly). As well as hosting its core platform, Bizagi is also providing a growing suite of complementary tools via its Microsoft Azure-based cloud. The most recent version of its Modeler application comes with cloud-based collaboration services enabling teams to share models online; and Bizagi s new Connector and Widget Editor tools are both cloud-delivered tools with web-based user interfaces. The process applications you create using Bizagi Studio are 100% portable between Bizagi s hosted service offering and its on-premises deployment alternative. You can, if you want, use a hosted instance of Bizagi s Studio tools to develop your process applications, and access this remotely via thin-client terminal services technology; however the company expects most clients will use its Windows-based tools on-premises and deploy their applications remotely. Using the products: core capabilities Rapid prototyping / quick-start Bizagi doesn t currently offer any specific application generation tools for rapid prototyping or quick start application development, but it does offer clients a range of pre-built process templates on the Bizagi Process exchange (see http://www.bizagi.com/en/community/process-xchange). Furthermore it allows clients to use its tools as well as these templates for development and test purposes, for up to 20 users, at no charge. Mapping, modeling and application design In your work with Bizagi s Process Application Platform you ll likely use two different tools for different aspects of mapping, implementation modeling and design: Bizagi Modeler and Bizagi Studio. Processes Both Modeler and Studio enable you to define processes using all the standard BPMN 2.0 constructs (swimlanes, activities, gateways, timers, events, exceptions, and so on); however Modeler is primarily used by teams for documenting requirements, which are then elaborated into full process application definitions in Studio. Modeler includes solid process simulation capabilities (by embedding specialised technology from Lanner Group); and the most recent version includes cloud collaboration services which allow team members to publish models to a hosted repository, and invite others to be contributors or editors of models. When it comes to defining KPIs and thresholds for processes, you use specify durations for specific activities or entire processes; or you define timers that embrace sequences of activities. Both Process Modeler and Studio provide a helpful BPMN validation function to help ensure you create logically consistent and complete process models. Data Data modeling plays a prominent role in design work in the Bizagi approach and in recent technology releases, a new stakeholder user experience concept and Experience Designer bring this data-centric application design approach to the fore (see below).
Process Application Platforms 2016: Bizagi 5 Relational data models describing entities and relationships of various kinds are central to your process applications. They provide a distinct, separate place where you define the information that your applications will use. There are four kinds of entities you can define: n Master entities define state data that may be managed by your application itself n Parameter entities define application-managed reference data n Virtual entities define state data that is managed externally by other databases or applications n Replicated entities define reference data that s managed extermally. Rules, expressions, forms, reports and dashboards in your applications all store and reference their data through this layer; this has the significant advantage of keeping a lot of data management logic detail out of your process models, forms and so on. What s more, when it comes to defining business logic that is contextsensitive based on the state of running process instances, you use rules and expressions that query the runtime state of your process application and its environment through this same data management layer. Rules With Bizagi business rules definition is carried out through a tool integrated into the overall Studio. Rules can be defined using expressions, written in a Javascript-like language and making extensive use of Xpath; or you can define them using decision tables or decision trees. Rules are defines and stored as standalone artefacts in your repository; they can be stored at the level of applications, rather than being tightly coupled to individual process or task definitions, which makes them easily reusable. The expression editor allows expressions to reference not only process variables, but also environmental information and configuration metadata surfaced by the Bizagi runtime platform. Integration Integration of your process applications with external systems, applications and data sources can be accomplished in two ways: n Firstly, where you have relational data-level access to external systems or where you can make the case for building custom data providers, you can define interactions with external systems via Bizagi s virtual and replicated entities. n Secondly, you can easily connect to existing SOAP or REST based external APIs (Studio provides a web-services definition wizard and a generic Web Services connector); and have external systems invoke Bizagi runtime services through its own APIs (every Bizagi application surfaces its own workflow behaviours and data queries through published SOAP interfaces). Bizagi now provides a pre-built SAP Certified connector that enables you to connect to exposed BAPIs and invoke the associated SAP system methods. There s also a public Connector exchange online marketplace (see http://www.bizagi.com/en/community/connectors-xchange) where Bizagi and its partners publish other connectors; and you can also use the cloud-based Connector Editor to build on Bizagi s new Node.js based connector framework to create your own REST-based connectors where necessary. Bizagi recommends that when you re creating integration points for the purposes of querying external data sources, you create data providers that will slot into Bizagi s entity virtualisation architecture. Through this approach, your application designers will be able to reference externally-managed data just as if it were being managed directly by Bizagi. Where you re creating integration points to instigate actions and changing state in external systems (perhaps creating a purchase order or submitting a trouble ticket, for example) Bizagi recommends that you create standard functional service APIs.
Process Application Platforms 2016: Bizagi 6 Work assignment and distribution In Studio you can define user groups, roles and organisational structures, as well as skills, authority levels and other custom properties you define; the platform also knows about management relationships and allows you to query these, enabling you to specify declarative task assignment logic that s quite sophisticated. Your organisational model is referenceable from any rule or script you write, so you can use it to define not only how work is assigned and distributed but also how it might be reassigned or escalated. You can also define multiple calendars, and assign different roles, tasks and participants with different calendars for the purposes of defining timer and event behaviour. The result is a very rich and flexible work assignment model. User interfaces Bizagi s very firmly metadata-driven approach to specification extends to the business of defining user interfaces for your process applications, using Studio s Form Builder (for designing task forms), Theme Builder (for configuring application colour schemes, fonts, icons etc) and Experience Designer (for designing dataoriented, rather than task-oriented application interfaces). With Form Builder, by default you re encouraged to design forms based on entities you define in your process application s information model; you drag fields from entity definitions onto a form canvas and, based on type metadata and your preferences, the form designer suggests formats for your data. You can specify quite sophisticated forms in this way; because the information model understands the semantics associated with entity relationships, you can nest subforms and tabs that present master-detail data relationships that behave automatically in terms of data navigation. You specify data validation by declaring validations using an abstract scripting language that s automatically aware of constraints and types you manage in your information model. The same scripting language is also used to control the visibility and editability of fields and field groups within forms. Forms that you lay out in the Form Builder are automatically compatible with smartphone and tablet layouts. New in the current version, there s the concept of stakeholder interfaces, which you define the Experience Designer. Bizagi defines stakeholders as individuals who gain value from using a process application, but who are not heads down process workers. Stakeholder interfaces are designed more for knowledge worker personas and consequently, a primary data type (perhaps client, investigation, claim, or similar) is at the centre of the Experience Designer approach, rather than processes and tasks. You define actions on this data that will be available to users, and you can make the availability of actions contextual (perhaps based on the details of an insurance policy, a customer tier, a complaint type, or similar). You can define each action as starting a process, invoking a rule or opening a form to read / create / update data. All user interfaces you create with Bizagi s tools are widget-based leveraging HTML5 and Javascript. A Bizagipowered online Widget exchange enables customers to quickly download new widgets, for free, and integrate them into their projects. Widgets can easily be reused across projects, and you can also create your own custom widgets (using a cloud-based Widget Editor tool). Operation and execution The Bizagi Engine is responsible for executing your process applications and very unusually, it s available in both Java and.net versions. There s no compilation process involved in deploying your applications to an Engine instance; application definitions are stored in Oracle or SQLServer databases, and the server interprets these definitions at runtime. Engine instances can be replicated and load balanced across the copies; or they can be clustered. The Bizagi runtime enables you to trace and debug errors in your process applications; this functionality works across business rules, validations, interface invocations and form control behaviours, as well as business processes. The runtime systems responsible for driving behaviour from all these artefact definitions can provide an unusually high level of detail in their error tracing.
Process Application Platforms 2016: Bizagi 7 In the.net version of the Bizagi platform there s a one-click deployment wizard; in the JEE version, however, you have to use Bizagi s more sophisticated but more complicated Advanced Deployment Tool. The Bizagi Work Portal provides the central home for administrators with appropriate permissions to easily start, stop and adjust running process cases in your process applications. There are no native document and content management features in the platform, but solid CMIS integration means it s straightforward to store, retrieve and alter externally-managed documents within your process applications. New in the current version, there are also prebuilt document generation and configuration functions that you can invoke in your applications to generate custom documents from templates you specify and application data. Also new in the current version, Bizagi introduces the concept of plans ad hoc personal to-do lists that any authorised individual involved in a process can create at any point to assist with activity completion. Plans aren t modeled at design time, but created in operation. Each plan comprises one or more tasks, each of which you can further structure using a checklist. Each task can optionally be assigned to an individual, and given a due date. What s more, if at a later point it s realised that a plan is a structure that would be useful to reuse, you can create a template from an existing plan. Monitoring and improvement Monitoring and managing operational process instances is carried out by administrators through the Bizagi Work Portal. Administrators can quickly gain an overview of process health and performance, perform housekeeping and remediation actions, and analyse and report on business and process activity at a more detailed level. Source data can come from the main operational Engine; or, in high-performance scenarios, you can set up a separate Operational Data Store (ODS) to act as the source for both BAM (real-time monitoring) and Analytics (historical exploration) activities. It s straightforward to drill down from overall views of process performance information to explore individual instances, their flow paths, their participants, and more. Administrators have a lot of flexibility in the business context they can bring into their historical performance analyses. You can create performance reports that present in the context of sytem-defined dimensions available to all Bizagi applications (e.g. business area, location, position, role, user); and administrators can additionally create their own dimensions for reporting. These dimensions can be specified at design-time, in Studio; or you can also create them in a more ad hoc fashion in the Work Portal. Dimensions can be defined based on any attribute in your application s information model. If you specify task and process durations in your process models in Studio, these will be used to highlight conformance (or otherwise) of individual process instances to your expectations in the Work Portal. In addition you can configure alarms, which will generate and send notification emails to specified people when tasks are about to expire, or have expired. However currently, there s no out-of-the-box capability in the Bizagi platform that enables administrators to reconfigure or restructure running process instances in response to alarms. The ability to report on performance from an organisational perspective is a particularly strong point in the Bizagi offering. Any aspect of your organisational model can be used as a lens through which you can analyse real-time or historical performance. In the BAM reporting area of the Work Portal it's also straightforward to highlight process performance problems graphically in the context of models. At the moment in the Bizagi offering there s no out-of-the-box ability for analytics to guide human process participants through visual cues in forms by suggesting likely choices, based on historic evidence although Bizagi can display its analysis of paths most commonly taken through processes to people if they have the right permissions configured. It would be possible to construct next action recommendation functionality with custom coding to the very rich Bizagi Engine APIs, but it would take some work.
Process Application Platforms 2016: Bizagi 8 Change management The Bizagi platform provides a solid change management foundation for your BPM initiatives, with some standout features. Team working facilities are good. In Bizagi, design and development work is organised into Projects. Each Project can encompass multiple Processes, and corresponds to one application upon deployment. In the design environment processes, entities, rules, organisation models, external systems definitions and other configuration information are all stored in a multi-user repository, and a singe repository in turn can manage all the artefacts for multiple Projects. As an administrator it s straightforward to configure the authorisations that different people will have to see and work with particular artefacts in a repository. Check-in/check-out and versioning of design and development work within a repository works across processes, business rules and forms. A particularly noteworthy capability in the Bizagi platform is its ability to quickly highlight to a designer or developer the dependencies that exist between any given artefact and all other artefacts within a repository. When you need to make a change to a particular form, or rule, or process, or data definition, you can quickly see which other parts of your process application (or indeed other applications, if multiple applications share a database) will be affected by the change. The strong authorisation control you have means you can restrict deployment permissions to certain people without difficulty. It s also straightforward to define multiple target environments and deploy process applications seamlessly regardless of the target. However there s currently no ability to control the deployment of new or changed processes through workflows. Using the products: support for different kinds of work Facilities to support automated work Note: In automated work scenarios (sometimes called straight-through processing scenarios) the focus is on automating not only the co-ordination of work, but also as many individual tasks as possible. It s straightforward to define process applications that are completely automated using the Bizagi platform where processes have no end-user interaction steps. This is the foundation capability you need when implementing automated work scenarios. The ability to handle errors comprehensively without resorting to low-level coding is also crucially important in these scenarios. Bizagi does well here: within process models you can identify multiple exceptions with activities/exception flows assigned to them, and can define (dynamic) groups of individuals who will receive alerts when exceptions occur. For more complicated situations, where you need to compensate or back out the effects of activities because of a problem or a cancellation, Bizagi also enables you to do this. Managing the coordination of activities with transactions is also important. Bizagi supports this through the concept of scopes. By creating a scope around a set of activities you can direct them to be controlled by a single transaction. The Bizagi BPM Server runtime implements BPMN s event processing concepts, so running processes can not only be started by events; independent process instances can synchronise information and state with each other through sending and receiving intermediate events. You can set up processes with subprocesses where subproceses are dynamically selected at runtime based on intermediate events received and rules. Changes can be driven not only by the firing of BPMN events within your applications, but also by the results of queries that rules and scripts can make to the server s runtime state, or by direct invocations of the server API from external services or applications.
Process Application Platforms 2016: Bizagi 9 From a scalability perspective, there s good support for load balancing across multiple process servers and for clustered server environments. Facilities to support transactional work Note: In transactional work scenarios, processes tend to be focused on orchestrating and routing clerical or administrative work, often at high volume. For work scenarios where task completion can require the input and agreement of multiple people, Bizagi provides the ability for process instances (cases) to have comment streams attached to them. In the operational environment, process participants can add comments to individual cases as they work on them, providing instructions or advice or requesting answers or input from others. Comments can be categorised to help teams filter and prioritise comments. There s more that Bizagi could do to support operational collaboration between participants: for example by making comments more active (for example allowing individual people to be addressed directly, and providing notifications to people when comments relevant to them are posted) but this is a good first step. As mentioned in above, the ability to report on performance from an organisational perspective is a particularly strong point in the Bizagi offering. Any aspect of your organisational model can be used as a lens through which you can analyse real-time or historical performance. In the BAM reporting area of the Work Portal it's also straightforward to highlight process performance problems graphically in the context of models. Facilities to support exploratory work Note: In exploratory work scenarios, the set and sequence of actions needing to be performed, and the people or roles needing to perform them, are very unlikely to be known ahead of time. Bizagi doesn t specifically promote its platform as addressing Case Management styles of application. However particularly with the addition of stakeholder interfaces and the Experience Designer key design concepts and runtime functionality that help you co-ordinate work in exploratory, unstructured work scenarios are all present. The presence of an information model and the attendant ability to manage relational data that can operate independently of individual business process executions is at the heart of Bizagi s capability here, and the Experience Design makes it quite straightforward to create applications that bring together families of related processes and activities around one core shared information model. With the addition of the plans concept, application users can easily shape their work around events as they unfold rather than following a strict set of pre-defined procedures. Your ability to monitor performance through the lens of attributes defined in an process application s information model means that if you design an application that stores overall case state in the information model layer, you ll be able to carry out BAM and analytics tasks that examine performance state from the perspective of cases that operate over multiple related processes and process instances. There s currently no out-of-the-box method of archiving such cases (which operate over multiple related processes and process instances) on completion in Bizagi but, again with work, you have the potential to configure and extend your application s information model to make it possible to capture the unfolding of cases (including the use of their documents) and archive this information.
Process Application Platforms 2016: Bizagi 10 Reference information Regional capabilities Bizagi has local presences in the UK, Germany, Spain, USA, Colombia and Brazil. It works through partners to provide local presences across Latin America and South Africa. The company provides 24x7 support and service to customers in any country around the world. Industry capabilities Bizagi has specialised sales and engineering teams providing services and content to financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and retail industries. It s developed vertical and function-oriented application templates for these sectors that it claims will give customers 60-80% of what they need to solve particular problems. In financial services Bizagi provides a template for mortgage application processing; in healthcare, for patient registration; and for manufacturing and retail, vendor onboarding. Partners Bizagi has consulting and systems integrator relationships with EY, PWC and Infosys. It doesn t currently have any OEM customers that embed its technology in their solutions.