Portfolio Press Release
Lombardi's Spring '09 Blueprint Release Puts BPM On Every Desktop
Facebook-style Networking Allows Everyone, Not Just Experts, to Collaborate on How to Improve Their Business
Lombardi Press Release
12 May 2009
Austin, TX — May 12, 2009 - Lombardi®, a leader in business process management (BPM) software, today introduced the Spring '09 release of Lombardi Blueprint™, the company's SaaS-based BPM product. This release of Blueprint is built so that every employee, partner, and supplier can easily and collaboratively participate in communicating and improving on an organization's business ideas and initiatives. Blueprint brings social media concepts into the enterprise, while structuring those conversations around business improvement issues.
"Most everybody goes to work trying to do a good job, and everyone has good ideas about how to improve upon what they do. They probably don't think about "process," but they do know their job. Up until now, companies had to have process experts interview those people, translate their ideas using heavy methodologies, and ultimately, maybe some change would be imposed from the top-down," said Phil Gilbert, president of Lombardi. "Blueprint turns this notion upside down, by empowering every single employee to directly and actively participate in the business improvement discussion, track their comments, and see the results. BPM is as much about moving corporate culture to one where everyone participates in the change discussion as it is about implementing that change. Blueprint accelerates that discussion."
In a February 2009 report, , entitled "Vendor Snapshot: Lombardi Blueprint Bridges Gap Between Process Discovery And Execution," senior analyst Clay Richardson of Forrester Research wrote that "Lombardi Blueprint combines collaboration, ease of use, and a centralized process repository into an inexpensive and elegant SaaS-based offering." The report also stated "Lombardi is one of the first BPM suite vendors to deliver on the promise of ease of use for process analysts." Now, with the Spring '09 release of Blueprint, Lombardi is taking collaboration and ease-of-use to an even broader scale.
Unlocking Broad Participation in Business Improvement
Historically, process mapping and diagramming tools have offered very little capabilities beyond being able to manipulate process drawings. Yet, drawing processes is only a small part of the work of identifying process and business improvement opportunities. Beyond technical business analysts, line of business employees, partners and customers have had few, if any, ways of participating in an ongoing discussion about business improvement using process. Beyond the BPM market, there are many examples of leading social networking sites such as Facebook, Ning, Linked In, Twitter, and others, that have done a great job of facilitating communities of interest using new social networking techniques. The Spring '09 release of Blueprint applies the lessons learned and tactics of those communities to business improvement through process.
Blueprint stimulates the business improvement creativity of every user that participates in a process by allowing them to see, in effect, "read only" views of process maps and diagrams, while allowing them to comment directly on aspects of them in threaded conversations with the process authors. These "Participants" are then notified via Facebook-like feeds when their comments are replied to, when processes they are involved in have changed, and when other co-workers join or leave process groups. Blueprint does this without requiring the user to know (or care) about any process diagramming or methodologies. At the same time, Blueprint "Authors" have traditional access to the process maps, diagrams and documentation, and can easily incorporate those comments and suggestions made by the "Participants" into the process directly through Blueprint.
"This changes everything about linking process change to business improvement. Process is simply the lens we use to talk about our business, but most people just want to quickly say how they could make their jobs better. People can think of Blueprint as disintermediating the typical employee suggestion box; it takes those suggestions, structures them automatically, and then allows the 'process people' to directly implement those suggestions into their process documentation and practices. All the while, the employee is able to watch how their suggestions are acted on, and participate in the 'fleshing out' of those suggestions into a scalable process change," said Barton George, director of business development and marketing for Lombardi Blueprint.
Lombardi Blueprint Spring '09 delivers the following major enhancements and innovations to help companies increase their business process discovery and documentation efforts globally:
- Wider Sharing and Leveraging of Processes — A new "participant" role allows anyone inside or outside of the organization to view offer feedback on, and collaborate on processes in Blueprint. Access controls ensure that the right people have access to the right processes.
- Comments and Suggestions — Blueprint now makes it easy for users to comment on and make suggestions for how to improve processes. Similarly, process authors may conveniently view, triage, and take action on any suggestion.
- Track and Reuse Common Assets — Blueprint's "Where Used" view instantly identifies where process assets are utilized and referenced across the entire enterprise.
- Browsing and Navigation — Blueprint taxonomy now supports the creation, categorization and tagging of process metadata automatically, enabling users to more easily browse and navigate through large lists of published items.
- Notifications — Blueprint's login page immediately tells users which new processes have been published, as well as which of the processes that they are involved with have been edited, and who has commented on which processes.
What Customers Are Saying About Lombardi Blueprint:
- "I am really excited about the new release since the question I'm getting more and more often is how we can get more people involved. The addition of participants alongside authors directly addresses this. Bringing participants into the loop gives us additional feedback and will help us to break down silos so that we can take our process initiative to the next level," said Rachel Pace-Maron, director of operations support services at PRC, an outsourced customer relationship management business solutions provider.
- "During the course of a project it's really hard to keep all your content in synch," said Stacie Kenney, senior business process analyst at West Bend Mutual Insurance. "What's great about Blueprint is that all of the content is housed in one spot, making it easy to keep it fresh as opposed to trying to keep it up-to-date while it's scattered around in a multitude of places. The collaboration and mapping capabilities are also a huge value to us.""
- "Using Blueprint to communicate process and collaborate across the organization has been transformational for Tillamook County Creamery Association," said Gordon Andersen, special assignment — enterprise process management at Tillamook County Creamery Association. "It has allowed us to drastically reduce process duplication, inaccurate data and begin to manage the white space between our functional silos."
As part of the Blueprint Spring '09 announcement, Lombardi is hosting a webinar that will highlight the important aspects of the technology:
- "Introduction to Blueprint Spring '09," features Dave Marquard, senior product manager at Lombardi, and is being held on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. CDT (4:00 p.m. UK). This 45 minute webinar presentation provides a guided tour of Blueprint Spring '09's latest features and is designed to be appropriate for current Blueprint users as well as those that are new to the product. For more information, or to register, please visit: www.lombardi.com/webinar-introduction-to-blueprint-spring-2009.php.
The announcement coincides with the release of Lombardi Teamworks® 7, and Lombardi University, a BPM talent development program that combines role-based education with an extended faculty network of industry luminaries.
For more information about the Lombardi Blueprint Spring '09 release, please visit www.lombardi.com/blueprint.
About Lombardi
Lombardi is a leader in business process management (BPM). We offer award-winning BPM technology and services to help our customers, partners and government agencies around the world succeed with their process improvement initiatives.
Lombardi is behind some of the largest, most successful BPM implementations in the world. Our customers include AARP, Aflac, Allianz Group, Applied Materials, Banco Espirito Santo, Barclays Global Investors, Chiquita Brands, Dell, Financial Services Authority, Ford Motor Company, Hasbro, ING Direct, Intel, Jaguar Land Rover, Mirant, National Bank of Canada, National Institutes of Health, OAD Groep, Pfizer, PHH Arval, SIRVA, Symantec, UCLH, Wells Fargo, Yale University and numerous governmental agencies. For more information, visit www.lombardi.com.
For more information:
Wayne Snell
Sr. Director of Marketing
+1.512.382.8200 ext. 377
Wayne.Snell@lombardi.com
