Here's a transcript of our April 9th Live Q&A with Ayo Falokun. Read on to learn more about BPM Blueworks Live and the cloud.

Joshua Whitney Allen Good morning. I’m the GWC Community Manager Josh Allen and I’m happy to welcome Ayo Falokun. Ayo is here to answer your specific questions on the use of cloud operational environments for time savings cost reductions and the optimization of business processes.

Ayo Falokun is Vice President Manager BPM ECM Competency at Keybank. He is a proven developer administrator technical leader and architect with 18 years of varied IT experience in designing developing and implementing successful solutions. He has domain experience in banking insurance accounting telecommunications contact centers and government. Ayo is certified by IBM to install and implement solutions on IBM BPM/BlueworksLive and FileNet P8 4.0/4.5.1.

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen:  I'll get started. Perhaps you can explain the key features of IBM Blueworks Live?

Answer:
Ayo: Hi Josh. BlueworksLive allows you to model and run processes in the cloud. It is a tool that allows you to quickly document and model your business—and model your business processes in the cloud. It also allows you to run simple processes that are currently being run via email. You can also access private and public communities focused on process improvement.

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: What format does BlueworksLive use in documenting its processes?

Answer:
Ayo: It uses BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) which is an industry standard. BPMN consists of symbols that represent the various parts of a process model. Blueprinting allows you to discover and document business processes. You can also run simple processes right in the cloud without the need to provision infrastructure in house so you can get up and running very quickly.

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: When businesses consider the cloud security is one of the most common questions.  What should organizations keep in mind when planning BPM on the cloud?

Answer:
Ayo: So that they cannot be intercepted BWL uses strong encryption to encrypt all communications between your browser and IBM's servers. There is also role-based security for the processes themselves. There are also password standards that meet all industry standards so that you know users are using very strong credentials.

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: Are there specific security concerns that you have? Server security comes to mind first.

Answer:
Ayo: BWL servers are based in hardened data centers that have the latest security processes and environment: weather proof multiple sources of power armed guards. Users can also request their data be kept within certain geographies e.g. the US so a company can request that there data never leave the United States for example.

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: Blueprinting is also a great feature.  How does this feature work and what sort of documents result from the blueprinting process?

Answer:
Ayo: Blueprinting consists of process discovery and process mapping. You start by creating a bulleted list of milestones and activities which easily be re-arranged via drag and drop. It then automatically generates a diagram based on the bulleted list and it's properties in the BPMN notation. You can export the results of blueprinting in Word PDF Powerpoint formats and share with your stakeholders. Blueprinting is one of three key features of BWL.

The others are actually running the processes in the cloud and also the social collaboration features which have a public community and a private community within your company. 

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: Those social collaboration features could really improve communication? How do they work?

Answer:
Ayo: You have access to a social community focused on process improvement which is almost like a Twitter feed. You can ask questions and get input from the community. Within the private community you can do the same but it goes beyond that. You can comment on processes created by others. You can follow process apps or process diagrams so you are notified when they are updated. IBM does have another cloud-based BPM product named IBM BPM.

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: What are some of the benefits an organization can achieve on the cloud as opposed to traditional deployment? 

Answer:
Ayo: Well benefits include the fact that you can get up and running very quickly with cloud-based BPM and can start to enjoy the benefits without having to deploy your own internal infrastructure. 

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: What about cost?

Answer:
Ayo: You do not have to spend a ton of money before proving the viability of the concept/process improvement.  At very low cost and low risk you can quickly determine if the idea has merit. 

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: How has your organization used Blueworks Live on the cloud? 

Answer:
Ayo: We've used it as an enterprise process repository where we model and store our process models—both the as-is and to-be process models for easy cataloguing and future reference. One of the challenges with BPM in the cloud is the need to connect to internal systems and databases. There is a solution for this with secured pipes established between the cloud and the enterprise databases and systems. An encrypted private network can be setup between IBM's cloud servers and your companies servers so that the cloud based processes have immediate and speedy access to data needed by the processes. 

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: Can you talk about how to test those connections? 

Answer:
Ayo: With cloud-based BPM just like traditional in-house environments you should have multiple environments: a test environment UAT (user acceptance testing area) and actual production. So the cloud test environment will be configured to talk to your internal test environment—same with UAT and with PROD. You would then run your test cases in test and have the business verify everything looks good in UAT before you go into production. 

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: How do you deal with a sudden spike in user activity in the cloud?

Answer:
Ayo: That is another key benefit of being in the cloud. IBM's BPM in the cloud runs on IBM's platform as a service environment which allows you to ramp up resources quickly depending on your contract. You can have almost limitless capacity available as needed. Nothing's really unlimited in reality though.

If you were running locally and you run out of internal server resources you are essentially out of luck until you can get more servers stood up which usually takes some time. This concept of elasticity is one of the key benefits of the cloud. 

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: And your costs are determined by your use of cloud services right? 

Answer:
Ayo: That is correct. Internally if you buy server resources to cover every possible contigency you find you're wasting money. In the cloud you pay for what you use. 

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: How does an organization get started?

Answer:
Ayo:  The good thing is that there is a free evaluation period where you can go to IBM's BPM web site and register and essentially get to try it out for free for a limited time. This would be a good place to start. Analyze and see which of your processes would benefit from BPM and process optimization so this brings up to the benefits of BPM generally. BPM (Business Process Management) allows organizations to model deploy run monitor and analyze business processes to improve customer service reduce costs and increase efficiencies so the starting point is the analysis and documenting of the processes themselves which you could do in BlueworksLive. You can go to BlueworksLive.com and request a free account to try it out. Once the processes are modeled (to be process models) then you have to decide is they are simple enough to run within BlueworksLive or if you need the full features of IBM BPM in the cloud so that would be the place to start. 

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: Do you have a time frame for this initial stage? 

Answer:
Ayo:  Timing of the analysis depends on if you have Process Analysts available (either Lean Six Sigma resources or similar). It could be as short as two weeks if you have the SMEs that understand the current process and bottlenecks.

A major mistake that is made in this area is to assume that a business analyst is automatically a process analyst.

Process analysis requires a "process" mindset. A process has a defined business trigger event a desired outcome and a series of activities that get you from the trigger to the outcome those are the problems BPM is designed to solve. 

Question:
Joshua Whitney Allen: Great Ayo thanks for your words.  Ayo will be speaking at Impact 2014 so be sure to catch him in Las Vegas. Thank you to our members and guests for registering for this Q&A!