IPA Biz and Tech Learnings to Share from Interactions 2012

The Interactions 2012 event in Indy was tremendous! Lots of good mojo about IPA was flowing from customers who presented to discuss their various states of deployments. We heard from healthcare, insurance, consumer electronics and other industries who were so excited about Interaction Process Automation they could hardly contain themselves (so it's not just me)!

Of those customer presenters, it was my distinct pleasure to see both business and IT representation from a global medical diagnostics manufacturer discuss efforts on their implementation with IPA. They're automating a couple of relatively small processes for a proof of concept, which is a great way to get started with IPA. I've been doing the consulting on As-Is and To-Be for one of those processes. The session was a lot of fun and equally gratifying regarding our experiences with them to date.

As for our IPA session at the conference, Mr. Jason Loucks did a bang up job discussing Eventing, Log tips and tricks and other details and was kind enough to leave me plenty of time to plough through "light" topics like the Database Driven Design, Restarter Process, and Actions Process design best practices. We had some long time ININ partner and customer tech folks in the room who ate it up. Our apologies to any business-side folks who weren't expecting a deep dive.

The lab that Development ran gave us a great sneak peek at some up and coming features with IPA.

I'll write in more detail on some of the points in the future. For now, here's some food for thought:

Business Considerations

• Involve all of the stakeholders in the business and IT from the start.
• The making of a process with IPA: As-Is first, To-Be and Work Item mock-ups second, implement third. No exceptions.
• An IPA deployment done right takes time, so be reasonable with expectations.
• Take a bite of the elephant (processes) to start, not TheWholeDamnThing. In other words, don't try to automate your entire business to start.
• User Experience and good GUI design is critical for IPA Work Items.
• MarketPlace!!! MarketPlace!!! MarketPlace!!!

Tech Stuff

• The Data Grid View for Work Items is huuuge!
• Eventing will change the way you process with IPA. More on that later.
• MarketPlace!!! MarketPlace!!! MarketPlace!!!

Yes the MarketPlace is going to be superfreakingcool in case you were wondering. Think App Store for IPA Templates and other custom offerings for ININ solutions. Can't wait until ININ has something live we can share. Your truly will be making IPA Templates available for sale there for sure.

Feel free to drop a comment about Interactions 2012 or any requests for further detail on the above points.

Happy Processing!