With the December release of BlueworksLive, IBM continues the steady and incremental improvement of this product.

Here’s the list of new features:

• Blueworks Live now allows you to differentiate between a business decision and a normal business activity in the context of a process, and to structure decision details in a table format
• The Microsoft Word export now gives you the option to include a picture of the process diagram along with the process documentation.
• Easily expand or collapse all sub-processes within a process diagram.
• Account admins have the option to restrict the creation of new Spaces to account admins.
• Export all processes in your account through a new BPMN export API. For more information please refer to the Blueworks Live API documentation.

Taken individually, they represent a significant release but I hope that taken together they finally help BlueworksLive to deliver on some of its larger promise.

Finally, it might be a fit-for-purpose requirement gathering tool …

As an IBM business partner, we would love to do more presales and early client engagement in the Blueworks. The dream situation would be to have some early meetings capture the business need in Blueworks to playback to the client.

Obviously, in this situation, the collaboration and social discovery aspects of the tool are fundamentally useless. The client doesn’t have a license and, while Blueworks has always had the ability to export to word and powerpoint, it always had 1 major shortcoming: You couldn’t export the process diagram.

That’s right, the main graphical representation of the process was not easily exportable so Blueworks was brilliant at collaboration if you can log into the system but, if not, you were reduced to painfully taking screenshots and stitching it together.

I don’t think this type of off-line collaboration is restricted to consultants. Just today, one of our customers bought 15 Blueworks licenses. They have over 53,000 employees so any sort of process collaboration will self-evidently be offline and facilitating this use case will drive adoption of the product in the organization.

The December release changed everything.

Now, at the push of a button, the process documentation and process diagram can be exported into a single word document. Basically, this document becomes the high-level scope of any potential BPM deployment or process improvement initiative. All of the great power of Blueworks around social collaboration and process discovery now can painless produce a document to playback to the client or business teams for review and iterative improvement.

This is the real meaning of the understated second bullet point above. Brillant and long overdue.

Some of the Competition …

It’s worth noting that other vendors have built their whole business around this use case. I recently tried MID GmbH’s Innovator modelling platform (sold via Aptero in the UK) to see if it allowed me to quickly generate these a high-level scope documents. I found the personal edition of the product disappointing. Innovator felt like it wanted to live on a server (not my laptop) and parts of the product were still in German.

Still, I was tempted to adopt it in some circumstances to ease the creation of post-discovery materials.

Thankfully, I can now go back to Blueworks in these cases.

It’s nice to see IBM fill out the products potential in these incremental releases.