The primary objective of enterprise systems is to manage the data describing their organization’s business information. This is what they do. Most of them do it well for many years.
Users, however, are not supposed to manage data. They perform business tasks. Synchronizing the business task with the system tends to be time-consuming and requires extensive subject-matter expertise. This is the main reason for the high operating costs that so many enterprises struggle with.
Mosaics was invented to enable the change.
In the following sections, we describe the pain point and its origin, how Mosaics provides a disruptive cure, and what makes it capable of doing what other modern technologies cannot.
The Pain and its Origin
Since the dawn of the Information Age (some four decades ago), the way enterprise systems communicate with their users is through user interfaces based on menu systems that lead to screens where users can view, add, update or remove data records according to the data model that defines them.
In order to execute core business processes, users must be familiar with the affected data models. It is their responsibility to navigate to the right screens and enter the required data, often based on complex mapping and conversion of input data.
As time goes by, business changes, data models expand, and business processes become more complex. As a result, the number of screens grows, and they contain more and more data of which some becomes no longer applicable. Converting input data to what is expected on the screens becomes less and less intuitive.
No wonder the users’ learning curve is steep, their productivity is low, and the number of errors they make is big. Over time, operating costs continue to rise. Participation of business partners or customers in core business processes is not at all an option.
Mosaics Provides the Cure
Mosaics offers a disruptive yet intuitive upgrade: it focuses on users and the most optimal way for them to perform their tasks.
The digital interface created by Mosaics consists of screens along paths that correspond to the steps of the user tasks. Users enter only relevant data. The path and the interface’s behavior change dynamically according to the cumulative data and any derived business rules. A sequence of steps that do not require user discretion is performed automatically, without any human intervention (“behind the scenes” robotic process automation).
Information presented or inquired throughout the process contains all and only relevant data at each stage.
Users are completely exempt from learning the system’s data model. They no longer have to memorize and remember all the screens that belong to the task and how to navigate to them. Mapping input date to data on the screen does not require any conversion. There is no need to type irrelevant data just to be able to proceed. Users do not see and cannot enter data if it does not apply to the stage they are on in the task.
Moreover, Mosaics generates the digital interface based on its built-in UX design rulebook for enterprise applications, ensuring optimal user experience.
Mosaics’ human-centric, task-driven digital interface leads to exceptional improvement in all metrics related to employees’ throughput, error rate, and learning curve. Business partners and customers can immediately take an active role in their part of the core business processes.
What Makes It Possible
Mosaics’ key differentiator is the solid line it draws between the user-interface layer and all underlying layers such as business logic or database access. This enables Mosaics to focus on building the optimal human-centric, task-driven digital interface, totally ignoring constraints imposed by the data model or business logic implementation.
Once the digital interface has been proven to be optimal, it can be smoothly integrated with new as well as existing business logic layers.
While the concept of separating between the user interface and the other layers is intuitive, it is not obvious. Modern tools and methodologies still follow the record-driven paradigm where the user interface and the data model are tightly coupled. As such, they are completely inappropriate for building a true task-driven digital interface at an affordable cost, duration, and risk.