One of the most challenging and recurring debates in the digital and software economy is determining—deciding, recognizing, considering (getting it right!)—whether, when facing an innovation, we are looking at a service or simply a feature. At least when it comes to deciding whether offering that service is enough to build a startup around it, or whether you’re doomed because what you do well ends up integrated into someone else’s broader service.
Take the case of Dropbox. It’s still around (David Martin-Braun uses it extensively and is happier with it than with other solutions), but there were many voices at the time questioning its future once file syncing and cloud storage became standard features of widely-used products. Today, virtually every platform offers file synchronization and cloud-based file management for individuals and groups as part of their core services. (Remember when a power outage could make you lose all of your afternoon’s work?)
When we began defining Inverbis’s technology and future, we asked ourselves the same question: What if, in the end, this is just a feature? Looking at the process mining value chain, we saw the steps before and after involving massive software vendors, where process mining applications would be a consequence of data acquisition or integration with other sources of information.
So, we quickly defined an API-first architecture—meaning that anyone adopting our tool could use it like building blocks to develop their own solution. Our service would be to give you the picks and shovels to organize process mining in the way that made most sense for your consulting company, software firm, or simply your department.
We tied it to a pay-per-use model, which was surprising to many, considering the license fees of other vendors.
The truth is that while the market has discovered process mining, it hasn’t yet embraced it as an intelligence tool applicable to any operational execution. The usual issues with data—and especially the mental barrier of managing processes based on actual execution data—mean that extending usage beyond a few processes and software solutions isn’t as… automatic as one might hope.
There are so many verticals (by sector and by process) that require customized solutions (for generating, extracting, and interpreting data) that we can expect to see highly specialized services tailored to specific elements or industries… just as we can expect that a sector’s or process’s killer app will need to have this functionality embedded as part of its core identity.
So, what should be done?
We often remind people: there’s a world beyond Order-to-Cash and Purchase-to-Pay. We’ve committed to integrating and developing solutions that bring plasticity to the data (Denodo in the cloud continues to make us happier every day), and we’ve been developing verticals for both data import (connections, understanding data models) and standardized dashboards for specific problems and industries—which are nothing more than starting points. We’ve worked intensively on ITSM, manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare, with a cross-functional, multi-system approach to internal client/supplier chains.
But our architecture and focus on simple, custom-designed solutions is still there and will remain: approach us in either way—as a custom solution platform (for your company, your vertical) or as a packaged solution—and time will tell us all where things are headed.
Check some of our videos:
- New ➽ ICU discharges: where time slips away
- Fast Track vs Standard Path: Which is Better for Diagnosing Colorectal Cancer
- What causes discards in parenteral nutrition preparation? Key factors revealed!
- How Process Mining Uncovers Medication Administration Issues
The Prompter.io is our open project to share our experience—and that of others—in integrating language models and data-to-text techniques into process intelligence. Don’t miss it!
