New Tools!
The challenge: too many new tools
I’d like to propose a “new” way to evaluate new tools. I am sure most of you reading this are approached on a pretty regular basis with marketing blasts for new products, new tools, that will make your life or business better. It’s an ocean of incoming ideas and offers to improve the way we do things. But there’s too much noise.
As the leader of the most prominent business process automation specialist in North America, I get approached by process technology firms all the time; in fact, multiple inquiries per day. And when you get approached to evaluate and consider so many new software offerings, you have to have a simple mental model for evaluating them, and deciding when to add something to your repertoire.
Just in the last year, I’ve received unsolicited interest from firms spanning low-code/no-code to RPA to AI to process mining. Almost all of them are interesting out of context — but of course, the world doesn’t exist without context. These tools exist in a world that already has a lot of tools… so how do you decide when there’s something new that really deserves another look?
How the vendors tell us we should choose:
If we listen to many of the software vendors and tool vendors, we should pick up new tool when:
- It is a bit cheaper
- It has some additional functionality
- It is easier to use or has a better UI
- It uses the right architecture (something new), or scales better
- It is open source, or it is proprietary IP (depending on which they are)
- It is new, or it is proven (depending on where they are on the spectrum)
These are details, not reasons. I’m looking for answers to the question of why this product or solution should exist. We’re looking at a new tool — which is going to help me get the job done faster or better.
There’s just one question you need to answer
So the question I ask to get to the heart of the matter is:
“What is hard today that this product makes easier?”
Some advancements bring several good answers to this question. So… let’s review some interesting examples:
- Visual Basic and other drag-and-drop UI building tools. It used to be quite hard to precisely lay out user interfaces using only code. These tools made it relatively easy to lay out a user interface the way you want it, and brought the expression “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) into the world.
- Memory management before the era of garbage collection was error prone, at best. Java made it easier to manage memory with a runtime system that included effective memory garbage collection.
- It used to be super hard to write good, cross-platform code. Java made it easier to write code that ran on many platforms correctly, via the Java Virtual Machine.
- It used to be hard to automate stuff that we humans find easy to do. Copying and pasting data from spreadsheets or filling in forms. RPA tooling made it easier to automate tasks that previously had to be done manually — by offering ways to script and emulate what a human participant would do in the same place.
Now let’s take something near and dear to my heart: BPMN-based process engines.
- It used to be quite hard to have software capture the flow of work. The “work” is simply data in the database — and if I had permissions to access it, then I could, and I could edit it. I could submit for approval, and then after my boss approved it, I could edit the data. This was all addressed with managing which fields were editable. But it was painstaking work to get right.
- And by the way, it was hard to *find* the work you were supposed to be doing. It was somewhere in that system of record, but it wasn’t necessarily obvious for each piece of data what the next bit of work to be done was, nor who should do it. (same as below?)
- BPMN-based process software also makes it easy to find the work that is assigned to you — or that you are an eligible participant in.
- BPMN-based process software made it easier to model the flow of work — so that the work to be done is represented by *tasks* that are *assigned to people*. It isn’t just easier to code — you draw a flow diagram and it … just works. It is truly easy.
- Another problem that BPMN based software solves: you can quickly diagram and implement concurrent programming models. This is something that I think we can all agree has been fairly difficult before — certainly not something you could just draw a picture of and execute.
- At least one BPMN process engine solves an interesting problem with micro services: how to coordinate the atomic actions of micro-services to accomplish audit trails, reversible transactions, and recoverable state.
These examples help illustrate how we might evaluate new tools before we spend the time, money, and energy adopting them.
What is hard today that this product makes easier?
Once you’ve answered that, you can decided if it is worth taking the time to evaluate economic benefits, whether it helps retire other costs (tools), and how it might reshape your business if it is of significant benefit.
I hope this helps simplify the whole process of deciding whether the new tool is also the tool for you. Specifically, if you’re looking at the world of process automation — take a look at BPMN and tools like Camunda — they really do make a class of thorny problems easier to solve; these tools “meet the test.”
One more thing… our team was at a number of conferences, and if you missed us and want to connect, please reach out to me to connect:
- CamundaCon in Berlin, October 5–6th. We were there in person and in the slack channels! We spoke on the topic of moving an application from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8, with a specific example in mind: Our own Brazos Task Manager. It was a very good session, highly recommended.
- We were at Automation Anywhere Imagine October 4–5th in New York City. We were excited to get back together in person with this community for the first time since 2019!
- And finally, we were at UiPath Forward in Las Vegas September 27–29th. I can’t believe it is Forward 5 already.
We’re excited to be back out among clients and partners and software vendors and thought leaders.
Originally published at https://sfrancisatx.substack.com on September 12, 2022.
