Pre-release Info from A&W

Originally posted @ http://argentwaugh.co.uk/flowprereleaseintro.html in April, 2010.

Why do organisations still treat bits like atoms?


Bits are weightless, have no dimensions and are infinite whereas atoms are constrained by the physical world; they need to be moved, stored, used, stored somewhere else and so on. This is the fundamental diffrence between the pre-digital and post-digital age; atoms are atoms, but everything else can benefit from the weightless, infinite, immediate properties of digital.

This includes business processes, so often a result of simply mirroring outdated physical processes in the virtual world. Hence data is moved, stored, used, stored somewhere else, turned into atoms (through printing) and so on, resulting in clunky processes, lots of email and data held all over the place, locked away in emails and proprietary, local access only databases.

Working with third parties is clunky; there are plenty of cloud document storage solutions but none that truly bring together separate organisations. Getting data in or out of an organisation is a pain; communicating internal processes outwith the organisation even more so.

Why doesn't IT make organisations more productive?

All we’ve done is mirror the inefficiencies of the physical world in IT systems. Work is inefficently split; across internal systems (work tracking, project management, financial), email, to-do lists, calendars and so on. None of these systems reflect the needs of you or me, the users.

Resources are inefficiently used; bandwidth, capacity, people, money.

Perhaps these are the reasons we can’t release the competitive advantage that our people and our business partners offer; their knowledge and competence cannot be efficeintly exercised. Instead they're too busy fighting fires and working around the inelegance of the systems which they’re presented with; instead of troubleshooting the complex and difficult problems, user’s time is tied up in shifting data from one place to another.

Promoting partnership; the modern approach to business is for organisations to regard themselves as trusted partners rather than selling a product; flow supports this approach by providing locking customers and suppliers together in common processes.

Flow - elegantly organising work for you and your partners

Flow will offer an extensible, common platform.

Flow will have all the basics you need to do business; workflow, project management, timesheets, collaboration tools (fora, chat).

Flow will enable customers to extend it as is appropriate to their business; if you have particular business processes or tools, we'll welcome them. We believe in making the platform open to encourage third parties to develop their own free or paid plug ins.

The platform will not mimic any other platform in wide use today; it will link to strategic platforms in your organisation and out there on the web, taking advantage of any pre-existing data on them that you want to use.

It will be free in the cloud and charged for on premise.

Flow - free in every sense

It’s free by default; it stays free online, so there’s no trial period, no hidden costs. If you're a heavy user with who needs to upload several GB of documents, we'll agree a cut off point above which you'll pay for storage only.

You're free to adopt Flow to the extent you wish. It’s up to you, the users within each organisation, how far the platform is utilised.

We're confident you'll appreciate the user interface and hope it will become your core productivity environment. After all, there's nowhere else you'll get the range of features, integration and ease of use.

Flow - cross-organisational working is right at the core

Flow is designed to promote collaborative working - genuine collaborative working through a process, as opposed to merely sharing documents.

Flow promotes the idea of working in partnership with your customers and suppliers within private or public communities. It encourages transparent business processes that make the best of relationships between you, your customers and your suppliers. Flow is a success if it brings you close to your third party partners, allows you to improve your service them and your relationship with them.

Of course, our public communities will be populated with corporate and independent experts from the beginning; legal, process, management, project management. And they'll be waiting for you to join, bringing your expertise with you, with the focus being on free exchange of information and ideas within public communities, with joint development or execution of sensitive processes taking place in invite-only private communities.

And now...

...we'll get back to working on Flow.

Shortly we'll be starting a pre-release blog and getting feedback on our ideas as we start to roll Flow out to some of our partners.

If you'd like to be involved, or have a comment for us, we'd really like to hear from you at enquiries@flowtools.co.uk