Using any software to map processes you will always find limitations and things that you would like to see or have in the software. Visio is one of the main softwares for producing process maps in many companies, competing with MS Excel and MS Powerpoint. So imagine we would pumping up Visio to a complete BPM-solution, what would you like to see? My 10 cents would be the following:
- Absolute and totally safe version handling that could be updated per diagram and not per processmap.
- Seamless publishing, so only one place with the live data, there should be no chance that you will have different version of a diagram.
- Able to collaborate on content, both before publishing content and after it is published with feedback from the end-users.
- Able to use some kind of drilldown functionality on boxes and not just flat linking on the same level
I’m sure that there could be other features that could be included, but which ones should that be? And what should your goals for your process mapping be. Are we looking for and effective process management of your manual processes or are you more into automation?
Is Visio in the first place really a BPM tool or is it just a drawing tool (though a good one as I might point out!)? I think that the term Business Process Management maybe is a bit broad and we should define more what we want to do before setting demands on the software. So steroids maybe isn’t the solution anyway, maybe you should look for something else.