by Jim Sinur
Nintex, a provider of Workflow and Content Automation (WCA), recently held its 2018 xchange conference, which focused on intelligent process automation to optimize the enterprise. The 500+ attendees in San Diego, California seemed in accordance with the idea that the world needs more business process, and better ways to manage it, and I couldn’t agree more.
This blog overviews key highlights I saw at Nintex xchange 2018.
Nintex Prepares for Change in Management
It was bittersweet to witness current CEO John Burton say his goodbyes to customers and employees as he prepared to embark on another challenge.
Eric Johnson, who is replacing Burton, shows no desire to change the company’s direction even with Thoma Bravo’s recent acquisition of Nintex. Thoma Bravo does not like interfering with its companies, unlike other private equity firms. This lack of interference and consistency of direction is beneficial for both Nintex and its clients.
Growth Strategy Is Key
Nintex has grown rapidly by taking intelligent processes to the business user and IT levels, and now it has a new plan. The idea is to orchestrate, via process, the various components of end-to-end processes.
While Nintex proposes incremental horizontal growth, I found no apparent limits on the depth of its process capabilities. If Nintex leverages services, microservices, and (eventually) the polling capabilities of autonomous agents, it will continue to expand process capabilities. I spoke with several clients that had implemented large-volume solutions and experienced no performance issues.
Leveraging Intelligence
Currently, Nintex allows intelligence by tapping into other vendors’ cognitive and analytic components that can be easily incorporated into a process flow. The goal of this push was to leverage intelligence offered by Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and IBM. However, there were subtle indicators that Nintex’s analytic and dashboard capability, Hawkeye, could be leveraged over time to provide a level of intelligence.
Delivering No-Code Process
The potential to provide process for everyone, particularly businesses, is a driving force for Nintex. While this accomplishment would accelerate results via process, managing the productivity storm would create its own challenges.
One organization I spoke with mentioned that it had so many processes that employees were not familiar with all of them, or when they were being released. This means that implementing best practices or emerging better practices poses challenges. One organization revealed that demand was so high that it had to create a prioritization process to maintain consistent benefits, while another chose to operate without a priorities system.
Bottom Line
The productivity-empowered Nintex processes are certainly worth the management challenges. Innovation and sandbox experimentation offer large benefits. Nintex provides the ability for business users to initiate and experiment with innovation while eliminating productivity and cost issues. There are, however, risks of duplication without some sort of mechanism to identify reusable process snippets, smart services, and integration adapters. A little forethought and architecture wouldn’t hurt an already positive situation.
The key takeaway is that with intelligent process automation, managing business processes will become easier than ever, and the barriers to getting started are low with Nintex’s no-code approach.