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SLA definitions – used at runtime to trigger corrective processes, e-mail alerts, or updates to a manager’s scoreboard – were easy to implement. Other capabilities, such as organizational routing (based on employee competencies) and built-in audit trails, round out an unusually rich feature set by today’s standards.
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I did find minor nits in the process modeler. For example, you must manually reroute flows whenever you insert new steps into an existing process. But other time-savers – such as built-in dependency tracking, which is essential for change management and often overlooked by vendors – more than make up for the blemishes.
The built-in forms editor offers easy creation and testing of AJAX-based forms. These "coaches," as Lombardi calls them, help keep collaborative processes on track with an integrated help facility that guides users. While Lombardi could enhance certain aspects of forms development – by providing AJAX widgets and tools for CSS, JavaScript, and XSL manipulation, for example – the editor provides a good start to creating dynamic, forms-based interfaces.
Lombardi's simulation tools rank among the best that I've ever used. They're also the easiest to implement, requiring neither a separate deployment process nor involved instrumentation, as is the more prevalent practice in the market today. I was able to launch into process validation, step-by-step debugging, and time-lapse simulation immediately, via the Process Inspector within the IDE.
I found it easy to tap historic playback via the Performance Server repository and to test process updates with quick-click changes; you can even switch perspectives on your data (say, average value vs. number of instances) without missing a beat.
Teamworks tracks historical trends, workload metrics, and overall efficiency – even across multiple processes. The Process Inspector and Optimizer views zero in on hot spots and make recommendations for removing bottlenecks and improving process performance. Because Teamworks manages the entire back end – schema definition, SQL, data transfer, etc. – using Performance Server is as easy as selecting which data to track while building your process definitions. We've come a long way from last decade’s OLAP hypercube manipulation.
Collaborative process discovery
To help business users jointly map out new processes, Lombardi offers a Web-hosted modeling tool called Blueprint. Since I explored the beta last February (see "Preview: SaaS meets BPM in Lombardi Blueprint"), Lombardi has made some marked improvements.
Backed by a chat facility that supports close collaboration, Blueprint's browser-based interface helps nontechnical workers build text-based, hierarchical outlines of process information. From this outline, Blueprint creates a graphical BPMN map that can be synced back to Teamworks and integrated into the process engine.
Blueprint could use a few enhancements. It doesn't yet directly import BPMN graphical notation, or BPDM meta-models, and I would like to see more insight (early variable association, duration expectations, etc.) captured here. Access to live data, such as org charts, would be helpful. Also, traversing large models in a browser can be cumbersome without a zoom thumbnail. But Blueprint's ability to capture goals and key information (process ownership, I/O points, support docs) at the start of the planning process is invaluable.
James R. Borck is senior contributing editor of the InfoWorld Test Center.
