What’s ahead for 2016

2015 finished with a flurry of activity for iGrafx! We held a very successful Customer Conference this past October.  Our thanks again to our customers who joined us!  And a very special thanks to those that joined us from Cisco, JPMC, Logitech, Mecklenburg County Government, Munich Airport, Nordstrom, Northern Health, Verizon, SAL Heavylift, Smurfit Kappa Paper, Wells Fargo and World Bank Group – all made compelling presentations.  Without them we could not have had such a valuable event.

Also worthy of special note and congratulations are our iGrafx Visionary Award winners:  Verizon, NASA, Benjamin Miekisiak of Credit Suisse and Jon Theuerkauf of Bank of New York Mellon.  Their visionary projects and presentation represent impressive goals achieved which brought significant benefits to their organizations and our industry.

Also in October, we delivered our Origins release which is a major milestone for iGrafx, allowing our customers to receive great benefits from this release beyond the current features and capabilities being delivered.  Integral to the Origins release is a complete rework of many of our technology bases and associated internal business processes.  We have leaped ahead to the leading edge of technology and development processes which will bring many benefits.

Our new processes support much more frequent deliveries of functionality and improvements which we are very excited about.  These changes will accelerate our ability to deliver value to our customers, which has already been demonstrated with a follow up functionality release to Origins in December.

Looking ahead to 2016 I see a year of change and uncertainty.  The world economy will be choppy at best for most industries and for many will be very challenging.  The challenges presented will make BPM efforts all the more important to provide the agility needed to respond and adjust to these pressures.

Here are 5 key trends I expect to see:

1. iGrafx’s new processes will continue to accelerate our rate of change and ability to deliver value to our customers.  For example, our next release of functionality is already scheduled for the end of Q1 2016.
2. Analysts such as Gartner will update and continue to evolve their perspective of BPM to be more than process automation focused, and will highlight broader business modeling and methodologies further emphasizing BPM activities around process excellence and performance excellence as compared to BPM activities around application development.  The digital transformation initiatives will grow during 2016, and although technology enabled, will require the need for the application development activities to be driven by higher level business views.
3. The intersection of Risk Management and Process will become an even more critical success factor for many industries, especially financial services.  Pressures from regulations like BCBS 239 will drive banks to find solutions that integrate into their LOB activities seamlessly.
4. Business model driven Performance Management will see a rapid increase in interest as more and more customers realize that the BI dashboard investments they have made are expensive to maintain and quickly changing artifacts within their operating landscape proves difficult.
5. Cloud architectures will continue to displace traditional approaches, with larger organizations using private clouds to maintain more control and security yet still reaping the administration, maintenance, and accessibility benefits of cloud architectures.

I believe iGrafx is well situated to provide benefit to our customers with respect to all 5 of these trends, and look forward to working with our customers to meet their goals.

I wish you all a prosperous 2016.

Ken

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