1. Presenter(s): Candace Soderston, Rice User eXperience Architect Matt Sargent, Rice Business Analyst Date:November 16, 2011 Time:1:15 to 2:15 p.m. Creating Workflow & Rules: Share your experience & Needs with the Rice team – Affect the Future!

2. Introductions What topics do you hope we get time for during this hour? And we’ll start with a few questions for you!

3. STAFF AT 7 UNIVERSITIES RESPONDED TO A WORKFLOW SURVEY BEFORE KUALI DAYS 2011 Iowa State University Michigan State University University of California, Berkeley University of Connecticut University of Hawaii University of Maryland University of Washington

4. QUESTIONS: What software tools do you use in creating and managing workflows? What do you like most about these tools? What do you like least? What is the single-most important requirement you would look for in a workflow management solution?

5. WORKFLOW CREATION & MANAGEMENT SURV EY - RESULTS FOR DISCUSSION -

6. WHAT SOFTWARE TOOLS DO YOU USE IN CREATING AND MANAGING WORKFLOWS? Rice RESTful Enterprise Workflow Web Service (powered by Rice), Kuali Rice, Ariba, Sharepoint and other niche tools bbedit, oxygen, dbvis, subversion, jira, jenkins, oracle 11g, kew, java, netbeans, eclipse Ariba Eclipse's xml editor SAP, Forms Tracking Utility (FTU): in-house workflow application Locally written product

7. WHAT DO YOU LIKE MOST ABOUT THE TOOLS YOU USE TODAY TO CREATE AND MANAGE WORKFLOWS? flexibility, control, best of breed, integration Flexibility, capabilities, cost They are flexible and very easy to use Simple; easy to use; locally written, so can extend as needed. Has code coloring and validates that the xml is well formed. Application integration provided by custom Enterprise Workflow Web Service (java) that talks to KEW/KIM but abstracts out the workflow engine functionality (initiate workflow; act on workflow; etc.) into RESTful resources. Has allowed us to create a lightweight framework to interact with standard HTML forms as opposed to configuring an eDocLite or KNS application. These Web Forms can take advantage of the Rice workflow engine without knowing anything about Rice.

8. WHAT DO YOU LIKE MOST ABOUT THE TOOLS YOU USE TODAY TO CREATE AND MANAGE WORKFLOWS? (CONTINUED) SAP: 1. Provides extensive info about all phases of the workflow 2. Multiple ways of finding and viewing information 3. Very fast response time 4. Once the steep learning curve is passed, the product is very powerful. FTU: 1. Provides basic uncluttered info 2. Very intuitive UI 3. Very flexible design (seems to handle diverse situations and applications without redesign or programming change) 4. Very fast response time 5. Easy to request FTU programming changes (small number of in-house developers) 6. Has some nice features such as allowing ad hoc approvers, timeout on individual workflow steps. 7. Because the software is standalone and in-house, it does not have to be designed for many different form applications. It is designed for our applications where environment and processing logic can be enforced.

9. WHAT DO YOU LIKE LEAST ABOUT THE TOOLS YOU USE TODAY TO CREATE AND MANAGE WORKFLOWS? lack of documentation, limited community expertise I'm the one who has to do the extending too many different tools that don't integrate well with each other; lack of visual tools for designing and displaying workflows. It doesn't have an integration with a text editor or IDE. It provides two HTML boxes to code in JavaScript. I have worked around it by doing a copy paste, and working with a text editor I don't like managing xml using an xml editor, which in my eclipse is like a glorified text editor. But I guess there's no GUI to create or manage workflows available so I'm stuck doing it this way.

10. WHAT DO YOU LIKE LEAST ABOUT THE TOOLS YOU USE TODAY TO CREATE AND MANAGE WORKFLOWS? (CONTINUED) Assigning users to roles is cumbersome, particularly because each time you select something there is a lag for the reload. Would be nice to be able to just insert a userid without having to search for it and then select it. In general, the whole "Return Value" of the select is cumbersome as well. SAP: 1. UI is not always intuitive and is very complex (that's good and bad). 2. The product's complexity makes it less flexible in all situations. 3. Difficult to request programming changes (proprietary software that we can't easily change ourselves, we maintain a very large staff for this purpose). 4. Requires Oracle (which requires a large staff to maintain). FTU: 1. Provides some customization by end-users, but many desired features are missing. Examples: Conditional routing based on previous approvals, sending informative emails but not requiring approval by these recipients, timeout (expiration) on the entire workflow. 2. Programming changes can be hard to get because the in-house developers have other priorities.

11. Import / sync Identity data ( 3.86., 4.0 ) Create / update / delete users’ identities (4.43, 4.38) Create / update groups, roles, lists (4.57, 1.38) Create an alternate or delegate (4.29, 3.75) Find information or function (3.86, 5.13 ) Define, update, delete routing rule (3.71, 4.63 ) Add approver to list for a doc (3.57, 2.13) Install workflow tools or customize set up (3.63, 5.13 ) Define, update, delete a document type (3.57, 2.25 ) (Average frequency x= 3.67) Higher Frequency (7=dailly) Lower Frequency (1=never) Define, update, delete a business rule (3.57, 5.13 ) Define, update, delete a node, graph, or workflow (3.57, 3.88 ) Restart approval processing (3.43, 2.13 ) Edit/check code syntax (3.86, 2.88 ) Delegate some control to user self-service (2.71, 3.38 ) Set up rules for a department or team, different from others (2.43, 4.88 ) Higher Importance to improve (10=top ranked) Lower Importance to improve (0=not in top 10) (Average Importance= y=3.67) Strategic Opportunity QuadrantDifferentiation Opportunity Quadrant Keep PaceLower attention or upcoming paradigm shift? Workflow Creation and Management Survey - Results

12. Missing tasks? Search for documents - I do this frequently as I check on the routing status of items. Workflow troubleshooting - stalled routes, missing approvers, etc. User support - assist users in how to accomplish tasks, answer workflow questions. Statistics and reporting - provide numbers for different types of workflow tasks, volumes, etc. Check on status of submitted user identity info (Explanation of choices) anything to do with identities, roles and permissions (including delegation) is handled outside of the workflow systems.

13. Additional things you’d like to do but can’t today? Centralized authorizations, additional attributes and roles besides primary More nuanced classification of delegates - in some cases would like to be able to have both the delegate and the person in the role get emails and see items in their action lists. In other cases would like the primary to get them and then the delegate to get notification after X time has passed. Design a workflow either visually (preferred) and/or in combination with a wizard tool that guides an end user/BA thru the workflow definition process (nodes, roles, rules, etc.) and then automagically creates the necessary inputs to the workflow runtime engine.

14. FOR THE TASK AREAS YOU IDENTIFIED AS MOST IN NEED OF IMPROVEMENT, PLEASE RATE THE TYPES OF IMPROVEMENTS YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE:

15. Most important requirement? Rapid development systems. Flexibility and inherited relationships Flexible and easy to use Ease of use Ease of use and not overly complex to end users End user self-service to design, test and deploy end-to-end solution We need to map workflow responsibilities to roles that are constrained by organization code and level within organization code and then have the workflow engine understand how to route based upon rules that can be organization specific. Short way of saying we want awesome KEW integration with KRMS and KOM (and KIM of course) --- with ability to override any/all services specific.

16. OPTIONAL) WHAT QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR WORKFLOW CREATION AND MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE AND REQUIREMENTS DID WE NOT ASK, THAT YOU WISH WE DID? (AND WHAT WOULD BE YOUR ANSWER TO THESE!) Q: What technical skill level should be required to build/manage workflow? A: Non technical for basic workflow and highly technical only for complex workflow solutions

17. OTHER TOPICS OF INTEREST - SEE FLIP CHART GENERATED BY THE GROUP! Group Discussion Q & A

18. Craving more Information? E Visithttp://kuali.org/rice Test Drivehttp://demo.rice.kuali.org (login as admin) Downloadhttp://kuali.org/download-form Get Involvedhttp://kuali.org/membership https://wiki.kuali.org/display/KULRICE/Collaboration Contact rice.info@kuali.org