Why are there so many “Workflow Solutions”?

On Tuesday November 7th, our project SpiffWorkflow will launch on Product Hunt! We’ve posted several articles on what SpiffWorkflow can do, but we never justified why it should exist, why we built it, what sets us apart, and what makes us worth considering. We answered these questions while preparing for sites like ProductHunt, and want to share the same with our readers here on Medium.

You are smart, but even the most talented people can become trapped by shortsighted software. We believe all trades — not just software engineering — need professional tools that empower them to freely solve repetitive tasks. You, like all of us, want to automate the daily mundane tasks that eat away at your time and productivity. Why isn’t it easier to find the right software?

Allow me to introduce you to SpiffWorkflow, our innovative process orchestration engine powered by BPMN, a beautiful flow-chart like notation, and Python, the most popular and intuitive programming language in the world. SpiffWorkflow is a solution to the scarcity of professional general purpose process tools, beyond software engineering, that cater to business users who embrace technology.

“Workflow” is a widely used term in software applications. “Workflow” is generally defined as “a sequence of efforts that take a piece of work from start to finish.” There are many available options for Workflow Software that roughly fall into four main categories: software engineering, business project management (known as BPM), low-code, and no-code.

The diagram shows how the term “Workflow” can be applied across a broad spectrum of tools, from highly technical software libraries, to no-code solutions that seem to think you aren’t smart enough to hold a fork.

Unfortunately, none of those software options sufficiently meets the needs of an emerging “technology middle class” — business users who have broad technical skill and savvy. Unlike many BPM offerings, SpiffWorkflow focuses heavily on business users rather than software engineers. And unlike low-code solutions, we work to remain domain agnostic, general purpose and powerful.

While other applications might appear to have more bells and whistles, we pride ourselves in being function over form. Simply put, it is better that software be ugly and possible, than beautiful and limited. And at SpiffWorkflow, we definitely arc towards usability: when a feature is complete and extensible, we iterate to make those tools more user friendly over time.

SpiffWorkflow allows you to automate, monitor, and improve a set of complex tasks and business decisions. The diagram below contains a simple example of a process you can create using our application. As you can see, even at a glance anyone can understand what this diagram is attempting to do. And the best part of SpiffWorkflow is that such diagrams are not only visually accessible, but are also executable / runnable.

This is a BPMN Diagram, a set of steps to accomplish a specific task — in this case, making a pizza.

This is a breakdown of what each task in the diagram helps to achieve.

With SpiffWorkflow, business users from all departments in an organization are able to author and automate processes. These users are referred to as citizen developers and they have the ability to create user forms, connect to other applications, modify data with scripts, and so much more. These diagrams can be executed immediately, repeatedly, and tested safely within a staging environment before being released to production. And the components are reusable, so an executable diagram can be used in many situations.

A “Citizen Developer” — someone who isn’t hired as a software engineer, but codes anyway, because they don’t care about roles, labels or titles, they care about getting the job done.

SpiffWorkflow is a robust implementation of the BPMN 2.0 standard — the most powerful, widely researched and adopted business notation in existence. It allows you to get started quickly and with more flexibility in terms of deployment. In addition, while most “workflow” applications are expensive and do not follow any standard or research at all, SpiffWorkflow is both affordable and open source.

SpiffWorkflow’s flowchart-like diagrams are easy to understand and share, so even a novice user can build a running workflow in minutes. Since BPMN and Python have low-sloped but long learning curves, SpiffWorkflow allows users to get started instantly and avoid future dead ends.

Using SpiffWorkflow’s form builder, you can create detailed forms with validation, conditions, typeaheads, and more. In addition, we offer critical tools for testing, extension, and connectivity.

I hope this article helps clarify why we’ve spent five precious years of our lives building yet another “Workflow” application. If it makes sense to you, we hope you visit our SpiffWorkflow website, sign up for the demo application, and give it a try! If you like what you see, please visit Product Hunt and give us some support!