ISIS Papyrus announces availability of the free AFP Viewer in Papyrus V7.1 SP9

ISIS Papyrus is pleased to announce the update of its Papyrus AFP Viewer Freeware, 7.1 SP9 (build number 7.19.0.1730), which is available now for download from the ISIS Papyrus website.

It offers a completely reworked user interface which follows the ISIS Papyrus user interface flat design concept. Moreover, ISIS Papyrus is committed to continue the AFP Viewer plugin support for IE and Firefox that support NPAPI. As an alternative, with V7.1 SP9 we offer the installation of the Papyrus AFP Viewer Freeware as a Windows application. The AFP Viewer application supports AFP documents with external AFP resources in order to reduce the actual document size to a minimum.

CEO Annemarie Pucher says: We are very happy to support the AFP community with the free AFP Viewer, which is unsurpassed in its WYSIWYG AFP viewing and printing capabilities.

Roberto Anzola, VP Solutions of ISIS Papyrus Group and Board Director of the AFP Consortium (AFPC), says: ISIS Papyrus is continuing its dedication to steer the Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) architecture into a fully fledged and open document standard. Its independence from specific applications and devices makes it the first choice for any business document and information presentation including also embedded PDF and video resources.

Read more about the new release on the AFP Viewer Blog.

ISIS Papyrus Open House and User Conference 2014

ISIS Papyrus is pleased to announce the program of the 2014 Global Open House and User Conference at the ISIS headquarters in Vienna, Austria, from May 4-6, followed closely by the US Open House in Southlake, Texas, from May 18-20. As always, customers, friends and everybody interested in leading-edge enterprise communication & process technology are cordially invited to join ISIS Papyrus for two days of interesting presentations, discussions, workshops, real-life case studies and networking plus the traditional Gala Dinner on the eve of the event. This time the location is at the stunning Leopold Museum with the opportunity to enjoy the unique atmosphere in Vienna’s splendid MuseumsQuartier. As always, admission to these events is free and registration is open as of now.

What we see currently in enterprise IT is no more and no less than a fundamental change of how businesses interact with customers and the barriers between front and back offices is dwindling. Customer experience comes strongly to the fore and requires a consolidation of all touchpoints. The Papyrus Communication and Process Platform with its unique concept and powerful feature-set provides the ideal launch-pad for future-proof innovative solutions. The ISIS Papyrus Open House with its special flavor again is the perfect backdrop to gain profound insights in the latest technological advancements that have become a hallmark of ISIS Papyrus since its inception.

ISIS Papyrus Finalist in DM Awards: Voting is Underway

ISIS Papyrus feels honored to have been–once again–nominated as finalist in the prestigious DM Awards program. Following the recent success in the 2012 Global Awards for Excellence in Adaptive Case Management this is another proof for the innovative leadership demonstrated by ISIS Papyrus over the years.

ISIS Papyrus and the Papyrus Platform can be found on the following ballots:

• DM ENTERPRISE CMS Product of the Year – Company: ISIS Papyrus Software
• DM ENTERPRISE CMS Product of the Year – Product: Papyrus Platform for Business Communication
• DM Data Capture/Recognition Product of the Year – Company: ISIS Papyrus Software
• DM Data Capture/Recognition Product of the Year – Product: Papyrus Capture
• DM Workflow/BPM product of the Year – Company: ISIS Papyrus Software
• DM Workflow/BPM product of the Year – Product: Papyrus Platform for Business Communication
• DM Software Product of the Year – Company: ISIS Papyrus Software
• DM Software Product of the Year – Product: Papyrus Platform for Business Communication
• DM Product of the Year – Company: ISIS Papyrus Software
• DM Product of the Year – Product: Papyrus Platform for Business Communication
• DM Company of the Year – Company: ISIS Papyrus Software
• DM Company of the Year – Product: Papyrus Platform for Business Communication

You may visit www.dmawards.com to vote through October 11!

The Papyrus Platform – built on its Papyrus Objects integration architecture – delivers pre-built business processes across ERP, CRM, ECM, as well as business intellligence and industry applications using a meta-object model, SOA-compatible and general messaging interfaces, and a powerful freely definable portal user interface. Inbound and Outbound document management is tightly integrated with the central Change Management repository. Additionally, business users are able to extend the object model with their own meta-data definitions, store it to the repository and have full upgrade protection across any future product versions.

ISIS Open House Vienna 2012: A Brief Review

The eve of the Open House was dedicated to the traditional gala show and the famed white stallions of the Spanish Riding School formed a fine contrast for the splendid display of innovative performance at equally high levels that was to follow during the next two days.

Among the cherished guests at the ISIS Headquarters was Toronto-based Sandy Kemsley, who tweeted live from the multitude of workshops, labs and real-world showcases that demonstrated the versatility and uniqueness of ISIS Papyrus solutions. Sandy is an independent analyst and systems architect, specializing in business process management, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise architecture and business intelligence. She is an internationally renowned speaker, trainer, and blogger on those topics. Here are some quotes from her coverage of #isisopenhouse:

“They’ve created the critical round trip between strategy and execution by connecting strategic objectives (in a strategy map) to business architecture (in a capability map) to process goals (balanced scorecard and other KPIs): not only is this top-down, where strategy defines capabilities, which in turn are used to define KPIs, but also feeding back so that the actual performance during execution is compared back to the architecture and strategy.”
(On ISIS Papyrus Adaptive Case Management)

“They provide a mobile app that acts as a portal to any application developed on their platform; … This provides access to the same application on iOS, Android, PC desktop and in the browser through their UI widgets. … We saw a demo of an iPad-based vehicle claim app built on this platform, and how the menus and features on the app are driven by the case definition in the desktop environment. Because it’s driven by the Papyrus platform, the app has access to the same data and documents as a desktop application, although rendered in a mobile form factor.”
(On Mobile Integration with the Papyrus Platform)

“Rather than having multiple systems that deal with content – ingestion, analysis, processing and generation, multiplied by the number of interaction channels – a single platform can reduce the internal efforts to develop content-centric processes, while presenting a more seamless customer experience across multiple channels. … it’s something that comes up in many of the BPM implementations that I’m involved in, and typically isn’t handled all that well (if at all) by those systems. In many cases, it’s a poorly implemented afterthought, performed in a non-integrated fashion in another system, or becomes one of those things that the users ask for but just never receive. ”
(On the ISIS Papyrus Business Communication Platform and Correspondence Generation)

The complete posts can be found on Sandy’s blog called Column 2:

Keynote of ISIS CTO Max J. Pucher

ISIS Papyrus Business Communication Platform for Correspondence Generation

ISIS Papyrus Integrated Inbound and Outbound Correspondence

Personalized Electronic Statements at China Trust Commercial Bank

Mobile, Social And Integration With The Papyrus Platform

ISIS Papyrus Adaptive Case Management

Document Capture to Process

As a reminder for those who missed the opportunity to attend the event in Vienna: the US Open House and User Conference at Southlake, TX, takes place from May 20-22 and brings similar insights in the technological breakthroughs from ISIS Papyrus.

All the details of this event are again brought to your mobile device through the ISIS Papyrus Event Planning app that can be downloaded for free:

For iOS:

http://itunes.apple.com/at/app/isis-papyrus/id522141912?mt=8

For Android:

http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.isis_papyrus.eyegen

Using Technology as Innovation Driver

While innovation is rightfully widely hailed as a key element of business success the widespread day-to-day practice in many organizations seems to confirm that there is no real commitment to innovative efforts other than paying lip service. Yet most good managers are aware of of this dilemma but the current bureaucratic business and IT environment is usually too rigid to allow them swift responses when opportunities arise. It is therefore essential that managers become technology savvy and understand the immense power of change potential that IT can create. To ensure that their businesses remain competitive they ultimately need to consider how they want to use IT to enable knowledge and innovation.

Only businesses that manage to use technology as an innovation enabler are shooting past those that control IT and/or processes by using excessive bureaucracy in terms of governance, centers of excellence and best practices. Each day a business does not innovate it falls behind because the economy is a six-lane highway and the speed limits are going up each year. If they stop to execute lengthy innovation processes to figure out whether you need to go straight or exit, they will get run over. Missing the right exit will cost time and money. Businesses take thousands of those decisions each day and the more of these are automated, the less does a business consider direction in relationship to outside conditions. Evolutionary change can’t be encoded into innovative processes. The long-term impact of suppressing tacit knowledge and change through optimization is dramatic.

The only way to enable the business to improve innovative processes and emerging practices through transparency, flexibility and adaptability of business operations is an embedded Business Architecture including strategy, capabilities, relationships, business entities, and processes. This in turn requires that the interaction is driven by users and not by some predefined process. All that is needed instead is collaborative information sharing and free-flow execution between many possible service and resolution tasks while management can intervene for guidance and advice. Instead of bureaucracy and methodology to tie them down technology must empower the actors and provide the means to achieve a specified goal and create true business value.

From Standardization to Value Perception

Standardization and uniformity have long been hailed as hallmark in business operations and process management. But all standardization and uniformity gets to a point where every organization is doing basically the same and none has a competitive edge. Moreover, standardization is the counterpoint to innovation and agility and creates a risk-averse bureaucratic machinery where every disturbance of the routine is sought to be evaded at all cost. Decision-making and planning are by and large delegated to an anonymous system fed with all kinds of data of limited validity and doubtful relevance. The output doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t interfere with the dullness of general affairs. This situation is known as innovation gridlock, where an exceedingly complex system finds its justification in cumbersome maintenance and binding resources that are painfully missing elsewhere

However, good business decisions are always taken by experienced people who use intuition to combine relevant data in business context. These are the Leverage Points where people skill has a relevant effect on a customer outcome. What is therefore necessary is to identify technology that is apt for new requirements apart from standardization and uniformity, lends itself to the increasing speed of change and considers the fact that people and organizations working through human interactions and emergent processes cannot be modeled to factory floor concepts where lots of unskilled or semi-skilled workers are expected to do the same repetitive tasks over and over again.

With the help of a Business Architecture including strategy, capabilities, relationships, business entities, and processes such technology should enable the business to improve customer service quality through transparency, flexibility and adaptability of business operations. This in turn requires that the interaction is driven by users and not by some predefined process. The process must only provide guidance, collaborative information sharing and free-flow execution between many possible service and resolution tasks. This cannot be performed even by the most dynamic and ad-hoc BPM solutions but only by an adaptive process environment that empowers the actor to take any action and includes any resource (man or machine) to resolve a given problem in terms of providing value perceived by the customer.

First iPhone Scan Application for Online Payments

ISIS Papyrus proudly announces the world’s first iPhone scan application for online payslip payments. This innovative app created for a major Austrian banking institution fills the void between the convenience of mobile banking and the traditional processing of physical payslips.

Now it’s no longer necessary to do all the tedious data entry for payslip payments manually with all the potential errors. Instead banking customers may simply use the iPhone’s camera to take a photo of the payslip and let the state-of-the-art capture and OCR technology from ISIS Papyrus do the rest.

The first users we asked about their impression were upbeat about the capabilities of the app. “This saves an awful lot of time when doing the ‘paperwork'”, says a middle-aged owner of a small car-repair shop and perhaps not your typical tech-savvy smartphone wizard, “you know I always used to mistype things when entering all that stuff manually and doing the same thing over and over again just drives you nuts every once in a while. I’m really glad to have this app.” He is assisted by a young woman who admits she’s having particular trouble with entering the new IBAN and BIC codes. “When you’re used to the old way of entering these codes it takes some time to get used to a completely new system that doesn’t make much sense in the beginning. I prefer to just snatch the photo and then check it for errors than to do it all manually. It’s really handy!”

Watch this video to see more detailed features of this latest innovation from ISIS Papyrus:




From Production Work to Knowledge Work

As repeatable production work is more and more on the decrease in advanced economies there is an increased focus on the needs of business users who perform emergent or unstructured knowledge work. This requires technological empowerment rather than a new management methodology. While the business strategy is a top-down definition targeting cost, process innovation that targets quality is most likely more effective bottom-up.

Technology has to support both targets. Most process management  solutions need a substantial amount of software implementation for data interfaces, user front-ends, rule engine integration, and back-end orchestration. But they don’t do much for the business user at all. In difference to conventional IT wisdom, the use of – out of principle well defined and thus rigid – process methodology to make better use of technology becomes a hindrance for innovation. Modularization and standardization create fragmentation and additional complexity of integration. The new concept of moving the process knowledge gathering in the life cycle from the template analysis phase into process execution is referred to as Adaptive Case Management or ACM. The ACM system collects ‘actionable knowledge’ based on process patterns created by business users. Actionable knowledge is not just data, information or descriptive text but knowing which action will lead from the current situation A to a desired situation B. As a first step the solution has to make the user aware of the current situation and what the desired outcome for the customer is. Transparency is also needed up the hierarchy to report process outcomes. Bidirectional transparency includes partners and customers into the virtual process organization for managed collaboration.

Regardless of how processes are implemented and ultimately executed, the team owning the process must be in charge of additions, improvements, and corrections. Business users are enabled by the technology to implement many small low-cost improvements that follow the business architecture and can be verified for benefits within days. Technology is not just relevant in terms of functional capability but more in terms of manageability and adaptability. We must not underestimate the relevance of content. Inbound and Outbound business content must be maintained by business users and transparently integrated into the ACM platform. Transparency mandates embedded security on the object and function level. Each access and function of any item has to be authorized. All objects, data and content have to be controlled. All actors have to be authenticated (ideally biometric) and authorized in role/policy models. All changes to templates and definitions must be audited. Adaptive Process combined with an empowerment management paradigm turns more production workers into knowledge workers. In reality it is quite difficult to use BPM for top-down analysis and simulation of business processes and linking key performance indicators to achieve a continuous improvement cycle. ‘Measure to Manage’ optimization is counterproductive to improvement and innovation. Only empowered actors can use their intuition and experience for sensible action. The dynamics of the economy require a self-organizing structure that is resilient to fast changes through its ability to adapt.

Overcoming Obstacles to Innovation through IT

It is common knowledge that organizations thrive best in competitive markets and fast changing environments through constant innovation. Yet too many organizations face a number of serious obstacles when it comes to promote and foster an innovation-friendly culture.

These obstacles include but are not limited to:

• Lack or non-alignment of vision, strategy and execution
• Bean-counter view on cost cutting and short-term financial figures
• Focus on processes and business goals rather than customer outcomes
• IT spending channeled into maintenance of status quo
• Functional borders preventing effective communication

On the other hand, the sources of innovation are also well known and innovation itself is not a matter of geniuses or major breakthrough inventions. More often than not innovation happens gradually and even inadvertently on all levels inside and outside of an organization. Major sources of innovation and contributors of new ideas are among others:

• Employees
• Customers
• Suppliers

Therefore organizations that want to remain competitive need not only to think about reducing costs but more importantly how to use IT to enable existing knowledge and potential for innovation. They need to understand the immense opportunity for change  that information technology can provide when it is used to empower people to improve business processes and to reach transparent strategic goals defined by management instead of disenfranchising them through process management bureaucracy. Only businesses that manage to use technology as an innovation enabler are shooting past those that control IT and/or processes by using defensive business models such as governance, centers of excellence and best practices.

Top-down business transparency ensures that knowledge workers understand why they are doing things, and real-time process transparency enables effective cross-functional communication and allows process owners to intervene immediately when customer quality assessments are poor. Process adaptability allows organizations to yield the results of collaboration and social interaction and to move the process creation and innovation into execution through a well-defined architecture of entity relationships and states, as the prerequisite to define outcomes, targets, goals and rules. These Adaptive Processes enable bottom-up transparency for the process owner and social coaching of the performers to push outcomes in the right direction. All dependencies and responsibilities are immediately transparent to anyone with sufficient authority. Rather than to waste a lot of energy to try and enforce predictability, Adaptive Process enables businesses to utilize the power of emerging processes.

Study Confirms: Knowledge Workers Need More Adequate Support

Real-world business experience as well as research-backed evidence show that traditional IT concepts fail when it comes to improve the performance of knowledge workers. Yet it is this segment of high-value decision makers growing both in numbers and importance throughout mature market economies. One thing that’s puzzling is why organizations don’t invest in the proper infrastructure to provide them with appropriate software and tools while they seem to be perfectly clear about the importance of such an investment and the impact on strategic business objectives. This, at least, is one of the conclusions from a study conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of ISIS Papyrus among 150 process professionals.

Other findings from this study show the following issues prevailing in many organizations:

• Substantial lack of coordination of data, content, workflow and rules between information systems
• Rapidly changing business processes
• Annual costs of process change are twice the cost of initial installation
• Internal obstacles slow down process changes
• IT support remains crucial for process changes
• Overwhelming majority wants knowledge worker empowerment to create new processes

All these problems that cannot be solved by mere process automation and increased governance is a clear call to action for executives because there is a disconnect of process management and business objectives. To keep their companies competitive they have to understand what IT can do to support innovation and creativity and why flowcharted process maps will ultimately fail to do so.

An adaptive approach that defines outcomes rather then predefined process steps is a major step in this direction. It relies on top-down transparency as to business objectives and management targets and bottom-up transparency as to individual goals of the process owners as well as on a balance of value proposition and perceived value for the customer. A technology that enables such empowerment of knowledge workers must provide the necessary authority, means, and relevant information for effective execution. Flowcharts and half-hearted approaches that try to loosen the harness of rigidity just a little bit and leave no room for individual decision-making are definitely not enabling any creativity. On the contrary, it’s at the leverage points of processes where individual skills and experience determine a positive customer outcome and subsequently a business’ success and growth.