Earlier in July EA, BPA and BPM tools provider Metastorm released two new products, M3 and Smart Business Workspace, that launch it into the middle of a group of vendors now supporting customers' transition to a more open, collaborative approach to business improvement.

In line with the current trend to provide collaborative discovery & requirements analysis tools as hosted offerings (see Blueprint, BPM Blueworks, ARISalign), both M3 and the Smart Business Workspace (a general-purpose, role-based rich UI framework on which M3 is based) have been built on Microsoft’s Azure Platform. However Azure’s use of the .NET framework gives Metastorm some nice additional flexibility: it can offer the same tool capabilities in a public, shared hosted environment (hosted on Azure in Microsoft’s datacentres) or as on-premise customer-managed software. The same code can be deployed in either context. Right now, the tools are available free-of-charge to existing customers.

There are a couple of other very noteworthy features here.

First, this isn’t just a process modelling environment: Metastorm has taken its experience from the ProVision EA tooling to support 11 distinct types of enterprise and business architecture model (with process being just one of those). Furthermore the models aren’t just diagrams: they’re based on one common metamodel (which is compatible with ProVision’s)—which means that, for example, organisational elements you might describe in one model can be used to populate swimlane definitions in process models. Integration endpoints can be linked to system definitions from another model. Models can be exported from M3 in Metastorm’s own interchange format, for further elaboration either in the ProVision EA tool or in Metastorm BPM Designer.

Second, there’s an ability to set up collaborative edit/review sessions with multiple participants (though at the moment only one person can edit models during a session)—and during sessions, all participants can contribute comments via integrated chat. Sessions can be recorded, in which case both model changes, and any associated chat events, can be archived and  ‘played back’ in the sequence they occurred at a later date.

Metastorm positions M3 as being for companies that want to open up their EA and BPM efforts to broader communities—to individuals who already practice modelling in some sense today, but who don’t typically use specialised modelling tools (and this is most people, by the way: our research continues to indicate that the vast majority of people involved in modelling business improvements use Visio, PowerPoint, or pen and paper).

To deliver on this position, the company has tried to make M3 easy to use for the nonexpert—for example there’s a fair amount of help and best practice guidance embedded within the tool, and in the individual modelling environments selection of objects is context-sensitive—making it very difficult for someone to create semantically incorrect models.

These features are a great start, but Metastorm should think about going further if it’s really aiming to use M3 to support a ‘bazaar’-like (open, collaborative) approach to involvement in business improvement exercises, above and beyond the raw tooling. For people who aren’t used to the formality associated with ‘proper’ modelling (based on a formal metamodel), it would be really nice, for example, to see a set of integrated, friendly, interactive guides and wizards that take people step-by-step through the capabilities of M3 and the ways models can be created and combined, based on common business improvement scenarios.

Metastorm is delivering Smart Business Workbench as a standalone product to customers: right now, it’s a free of charge product option. In future EA, BPA and BPM product releases, the Smart Business Workbench will be delivered as an integral part – with the appropriate widgets bundled in. If/when customers purchase more products, the appropriate widgets for those products will be provided for integration into a common workbench installation. In this sense, Smart Business Workbench plays a role for Metastorm that’s similar to the role that Business Space plays for IBM.