Gui Dazzles, Backend Frazzles
This is one of those truths that just hit me on the train this morning. You put a solution in front of a user, its the interface that gets them excited. All of the clever, performant and robust backend processing in the world won’t impress them one bit. The backend is just ‘stuff that can go wrong’.
For a case in point, . I build applications for the financial services industry. A workflow solution has always been a good fit(document centric, process heavy etc…).
A few years ago, i was involved in a pilot of IBM’s solution. I was really impressed, it was well structured and the intrinsic use of MQ made orchestrating human and system processes seamless. The Pilot tanked.
Fast forward to last year, there was a crazy buzz in the business. Everyone was talking about Metastorm. What is it, its a workflow solution. I was confused, why the excitement now about a workflow/orcestration. I was lucky enough to work on our Metastorm implementation and now I understand where the excitement came from.
It’s the GUI. The Metastorm workflow designer is fantastic easy to use and intuitive, the front end ‘todo list’ GUI is web based and similarly very nice.
I’m pragmatic about software. While I really like several aspects of the IBM solution but my customers are exited about Metastorm. Its already working for them and is capable enough to support all sorts of new solutions so I am working with it.