1. Enterprise Workflow with K2
Andrew Eberhard
MarkWest Energy Partners, L.P.

2. Terminology
Workflow An orchestrated and repeatable pattern of business activity enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information.1 Business Process Automation/Management A strategy for managing and improving the performance of a business through continuous optimization of business processes in a closed-loop cycle of modeling, execution, and measurement. These methods, techniques, and tools are used to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving people, systems, applications, data, and organizations.1 If you just stand up a workflow and walk away, you’ve left half the value on the table.

3. Typical Goals of Enterprise Workflow
Enforce policy compliance
Reliable auditability
Performance metrics
Process refinement
Maximize productivity/Reduce headcount

4. Common Enterprise Workflow Solutions
Workflow only
Notification engine (e.g. “nag machine”)
Workflow + SharePoint
Document approval
Workflow + LOB application(s)
New hire onboarding
IT provisioning requests
Workflow + LOB application(s) + SharePoint
Contract management

5. K2 Components Workflow Engine Forms Engine LOB Application Integration
Rules and Routing
Forms Engine
Task Completion Forms
Dashboards
LOB Application Integration
Aggregate data from disparate sources for use in the workflow and forms

6. K2 Components - continued
SharePoint Integration
Augment or override default SharePoint workflows
Browser based workflow designer
Administration
Terminate workflows
Reassign tasks
Out of office
Reporting

7. K2 Products On Premise In Cloud Blackpearl SmartForms
Workflow engine
LOB integration
SmartForms
Forms engine
K2 for SharePoint 2013/2016 App
SharePoint integration
In Cloud
AppIt – SaaS + IaaS
SharePoint online integration
LOB application integration
Blackperl - SaaS
Beta

8. K2 Drawbacks Its not free
Generally the workflow engine isn’t smart enough to know, on its own, whether or not a user has completed task requiring work in an LOB system.
Code-free doesn’t mean maintenance free; it doesn’t even mean easy maintenance (necessarily)
Silverlight dependencies for certain functions; deployment complexity

9. References