Some of you have purchased the Wifi version of the iPad supposing that this will be sufficient. This can be actually the case for the most. But, some would probably regret this. How can they catch-up? How can they do even better than purchasing the 3G enabled iPad and pay for a dedicated data plan?
Here is following what I’ve done myself. Believe me it is amazing.
I went with my little family to Agadir, a well-known sun destination in Morocco. After 4 days, I wanted to share what I see with my mom (located in Tunisia) and my brother (located in Bremen, Germany). I have the iPhone with international data roaming deactivated (you understand why). I have also my business Blackberry with which I have 50 euros of international data plan that I use only to consult my urgent business emails. Of course, this is said, we all know that BBs are not suited for video calls and that BBM is the only feature make BB survive (wait for the iOS 5 ).
So, what to do knowing that no Wifi available at the pool? I went out look for a taxi and I asked him to drop me at the nearest telecom shop. And there I found the 3G paradise. Imagine the plan I found at Morocco Telecom: 1 week or 5GB of data for only 5 euros! Not even in dream… They provided with immediately working SIM card. And what now? Here is my secret weapon.
Have you heard about the Mifi solutions? They are “Mobile Wifi” or “Self-Hotspot”. It is a 3G to Wifi router, a tiny gadget mostly in the size of a little mobile. My favorites are Huawei brand. But there are others. For French geeks, they certainly have heard about the “Domino” plan offered by Orange. They offer for 64€ (about $85) a month, an unlimited data plan with the Mifi dongle purchased alone at more than 150€… Very, very expensive! I got mine at 94€ including shipment at Deal Extreme. I received it in about one month (it wasn’t in stock), in last September. And, 3 years ago, I have purchased a full, unlimited 3G data plan from Bouygues Telecom at 30€ a month!
The big advantage of this Mifi solution is that I can make 5 people connected at the same time to full Internet and enable them even to have free, unlimited and international access to Skype communications. And that’s what I’ve done at the pool in Agadir: my mom was amazed by the sight and the sunny conditions and my brother (later) with his wife assisted with us to the sunset (believe me, it was wonderful). Just imagine, I’m in Agadir, video calling my family and facetiming (HD video quality) and SWISing (See What I See) over the air (3G connection) with a good connection as estimated by Skype…

Of course, beyond video calling, you can imagine all the potential (and the happiness) of delivering ubiquitous service to your company while “completely” enjoying your family life… I’ll let you dream now

Will come back very soon with another article…

Lately, I have read a post on iPad usage in business. It showed that beyond email, web browsing and other productivity applications, some in-house applications can be developed for usage to manage sales forces, help vendors make orders OTA (over-the-air) and to streamline many business processes. Of course, those applications are not limited to the iPad and can be developed on other PC tablets and smartphones. But the focus here is the robustness of the iPad and it’s ability to cope with harsh conditions in business and industry.
The post I have read seemed limited and according to my opinion, it hasn’t presented how much the iPad is making our office time more profitable and enhances our efficiency and availability.
Let just talk about 2 usages that I think they have changed my life!
First usage: presentations and training
We all know about presentations during meetings or trainings. We plug a laptop to a video projector and then, thanks to a remote mouse, we run through different slides and even point “laser like” pointer on the screen to emphasize the focus on a certain region of the slide. This is really handy and helped trainers and presenters communicate better with their audience. But, when the trainer wants to switch to the application, he needs to sit down near the laptop and use the keyboard to type an URL or enter an information in a field. This can breakdown the attention of the audience and increase dead-times of the presentations. Imagine then what would be the impact on your audience if you can point, slide and even type text directly from your tablet. Even better, unless you have a screen in front of you (the one of your laptop), you will be tented to turn your back to your audience to see what they see on the projected screen. With an iPad and a remote desktop application, we have the screen “and” the audience together under almost the same direction .

Second usage: Ubiquity! Or the remote office
This time, I would like to show you how I really improved my efficiency and availability to my business. I deal with almost 30 labs around the world, from China to the USA, covering about 20 time zones. I travel most of the time and i have many phone meetings. And above all this, I’m the system owner of our new computerized Quality System. All this requires full availability to answer quality managers and end-users needs. What to do if I’m holidays, with my family drinking some fresh drinks on the pool? Amazingly, with an iPad connected through Wifi or 3G and a remote desktop application, I’m controlling my laptop that I left connected at home. VPN activated, i have no problem with confidentiality and with the remote desktop layer it is even more secured. I receive an email asking for an advanced configuration. It is immediately done! I let imagine how my business is appreciating my collaboration. And believe me, after this, my little son (7 months) called for food: it is done immediately .

Kidding apart, there would be no limit for imagination to enhance our availability at work as well as profiting from our free-time and having fun with family and friends.

In a future post, I will show how we can have OTA connection for iPad Wifi only. That way there will be no excuse to be absent!

Flow Objects

According to Wikipedia,

Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a workflow.

More historical and overview are shown the Wikipedia page for BPMN. In this post, we will overview the major elements that can be used while modeling a process using BPMN (NB. : the used version of BPMN is 1.2, since the coming major revision, version 2.0, is still in progress).

In future posts, we will give deeper details on those elements:

• Flow Objects
  • Events,
  • Activities,
  • Gateways
• Connecting Objects
  • Sequence Flow,
  • Message Flow,
  • Association
• Swim lanes
  • Pool,
  • Lane
• Artifacts
  • Data Object,
  • Group,
  • Annotation

They are the main describing elements within a BPMN process.

Events

They are “things that happen or happened” and according to which we engage or stop activities. They can be catching events or throwing events

We have:

• Start events: all processes have at least one start event. They are “Catching” events
• Intermediate events: They are events happening while executing the process. They can be either
  •  “Catching” inputs for an activity
  •  “Throwing” outputs of an activity
• End events: all processes ends with at least one event. They are “Throwing” events

 Activities

They are either:

Self explaining task with no need for details

Complex processes that can be explain later like a complete process

 

Gateways

They are decision blocks. They help us describe situations where several pathways are possible.

Connecting Objects

They help describe the pathways followed by the processed information between flow objects.

Sequence Flow

Natural pathway linking two flow objects

Message Flow

Dotted arrows indicating the departure or the entrance of a message in a pool (limited scope of a process, cf. below)

Association

Generally used to associate a data object to an activity. It helps also to show the output or the input of a process element (using the direction of an arrow).

Swim lanes

They help group activities depending on their actors.

Pool

Each pool is dedicated for a participant in a process. A participant can be a business entity, or a defined role for example.

Lane

It is a sub-pool for sub-groups of participants or roles.

Artifacts

They are additional objects in a process to give deeper details: like activities’ categories, manipulated objects (data or information) or further process description.

Data Object

Group

Annotation

Useful links and references:

• OMG website: Object Management Group / Business Process Management Initiative. This website is the reference for BPMN specifications.
• FAQ on Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) Information
• BPMN Community: there are interesting tutorials on BPMN, best practices and some work on reference processes.
• BPMN 1.1 Poster
• Some links to blogs : http://www.bpmn-book.com/index.php/blogs
• Available BPMN tools:
  • BizAgi Modeling tool: seems to become the reference. They provide to complete free to use tool (but not fully featured!).
  • Oryx Editor: web-based tool and works best under Firefox (download an embedded version of firefox to get a platform independent tool)
  • ADONIS Community edition: not that simple to use, but it is complete.

1 - Definition

The workflow concept is now inevitable in the business world. The desire to streamline operations in any sector and organize the benefit of different approaches has allowed this concept to develop and integrate components as almost inevitable in the information systems business.

Here is an overview of what these strange structures called “workflow” or “workflow” …
According to Wikipedia, “A workflow is a flow of information within an organization, such as automatic transmission of documents between people.”

In the following, I will try to popularize this concept, hoping to explain it and better clarify the definition given on Wikipedia.

Table of Content:

1. Definition
2. Definition bis
3. What?
4. Who?
5. How?
6. When?
   • Concept of “triggering” and “Notification”
7. Where?
8. “Start” and “End” activities
9. Life cycle
10. Useful links

The “Workflow” is an answer to the 5 “Wh” questions:

• What?
• Who? 
• How?
• When?
• Where?

2 – 2^nd Definition

A workflow is a set of activities or tasks, each with:

• Inputs and outputs 
• Actors
• A well-defined procedure
• A “Previous” task and/or a “Next” task
• A place where it is executed

3 - ”What?”

The answer is a physical entity (physical object) or not (an idea or information). This entity is what will operate in a “flow” and undergo transformations or qualifications.

Example: a protocol for clinical trials is subject to several treatments before including it in a file for authorization to market a drug.

4 - “Who?”

These are actors in a process for dealing with entities that move between them. Each player has a role in defining precisely its authority to “make” and “don’ts”.

Example: the submission of a clinical study protocol is

• Created / Written by the project leader of a clinical study (PL)
• Verified / Reviewed by Clinical Studies Project Manager (CSPM)
• Read by the head of the Pharmacovigilance (HPV)
• Approved by the Head of Regulatory Affairs (HRA)

Requirements will imply, for example, that the HPV can not edit the document.

5 - “How?”

A specific activity can explain how to conduct a treatment in a given process. The activity must have a clear and reproducible procedure, generally limited to a well established role.

Example: the PL “writes” the protocol of the clinical study. It has the role of “Creation / Modification” on documents of type “Protocol”. Writing procedure is defined as follow:

• Copy the existing protocol or the corresponding template locally – from server to personal computer (or literally create a new blank document)
• modify the “local” content of the document (by the meantime, the original “server” copy remains available to other users)
• Save modifications to the local content
• Upload the modified content to the server and overwrite the existing version or create a new version.

(In general, the original copy is briefly locked: at the time of its copy or his crash. Reading some content is like making a local copy as if to modify it. Readers can modify their local copy but can neither ”overwrite” the remote copy, nor create a new version.) 

6 - “When?”

An activity takes place, in principle, “after” and/or “before” another one, hence, the “Precedence” relationship between activities. This concept is important insofar as the activities in a workflow are always ordered (kind of sequence).

Meaning of “Trigger” and “Notification”:

An activity may “precede” a number of activities and / or “forward” one or more activities. Going even further, an activity can be executed when one or more or even ”all” preceding activities are completed or when some conditions are verified. We, then, speak about “Triggering” condition of the activity.

If an activity is triggered, usually stakeholders are “notified” either by email or by a particular display in a list of tasks or on the home screen of an application.

Example: The “Verification” of a document can’t be executed before its creation or before a new modification of a published ”version” (key word ==> cf. Subsection “9 – Life cycle”) of the document. But the “Writing” of a document is quite possible after a “check”. “Loops” in a workflow are very common!

7 - ”Where?” or “In which context?”

Each activity can be activated only when a certain number of conditions, other than the trigger itself, are met. All of these conditions is the context. Usually, those conditions are verified on the entity submitted into the workflow.

Example: If the document is already experiencing a workflow, it is not possible to “Editor” to initiate a 2nd workflow above. Moreover, a document being verified can not undergo activity approval.

8 - ”Start” and “End” activities

Those “virtual” activities signify the start or end of a workflow. They handle the triggering and the activation conditions of the “start” or the “end” of the workflow.

9 - Life cycle

The “Life Cycle” (LC) of an entity is an ordered sequence of states. Each state is a set of parameters with well-defined values. The status of an entity is described through the values of these parameters. An entity undergoing a workflow will transit across different states. Executing an activity on an entity will modify its parameters. So, usually, this modification is followed by a change of state of the entity. To retrieve a document to a given state, we use the term “version”. Thus, a new version of an approved document should be created before making any further changes on it.

Example: The protocol for a clinical study follows this:

• Draft: baseline or following a change
• Checked: state following a successful verification
• approved: state following a successful approval (and, usually, the modified version becomes the official or published version and replace the old version)
• Obsolete: state meaning that the document is outdated but it has existed at some point.

10 - Useful links

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workflow
• http://java-source.net/open-source/workflow-engines
• http://www.skelta.com/ (embedded .Net components)
• http://www.nuxeo.com/
• Case study.

I’m finally decided to open my own space in which I can share with other professionals my own experience, knowledge and new findings. I will do my best to maintain this effort as long as I have things to share. It has been about a year when I started thinking about this opportunity to exhibit what I’ve learned in the content and business process management discipline.

My expertise and knowledge can be categorized in 3 main topics:

• Lifecycle management
• Workflows and business processes
• Project management and tooling

In the coming posts, I will try to focus on those categories of activities. Of course, I would like to ask my audition to not care if any extra topic subjects are exposed here like personal empowerment… That will certainly to make the blog attractive to a larger public.

Enjoy and have fun!