Drawing upon ever developing technology, businesses realized, that IT support to business processes fosters making their complex business processes – that determine operation and pulling together human resources and entire systems – become more transparent, more controllable and what is probably most important, more efficient.
However, initially this IT support did not yield the expected success in process automation. Mostly, the reason for that was customized solutions developed for individual needs. Although there were and are numerous applications supporting the flow of required processes, but it is difficult to extract data from them. Still worse for enterprises, even if they managed to extract the appropriate data, the execution of optimization tasks based on it was either not supported by that given system, or the cost of altering any existing process became too high.
This is why the market is “starved” for products capable of supporting the life cycle of business process management as a whole, pushing subsystems to become efficient tools for planning, assembling, running, monitoring and optimizing of processes.
Systems created for this purpose are based on workflow “engines”, which often cover the five prime needs by themselves. Initially, there was a clear distinction among human-human, human-system, system-system workflow support systems, but as expectations evolved, these distinct functions slowly merged into one product. Workflow systems cannot afford any more to exclude external (legacy) systems or human resources from the circle of processes they support.
.Net
Building upon the K2.Net platform one can develop truly process-driven applications, permitting automation and management of business processes.
Everything is visible, declarative, reusable and intuitive – there are visual tools for business decision makers – while technology experts work in familiar environments, with familiar tools, reusing existing components, code and processes.
K2 as a platform builds upon existing, recognized and well-known technologies. Its close, direct relation with Microsoft’s development teams ensures that existing mission critical technologies already present in almost all environments which use often underutilized Microsoft products such as the Office System, Sharepoint, SQL server, existing Active Directory infrastructure, or the available .Net framework, are capable of being employed in support of business processes with maximum efficiency.