ALM tools are the ‘source of truth’ through the software development lifecycle to update all stakeholders in real-time. These tools manage requirements, acceptance criteria, documentation, test cases, problem incident reports (PIRs) – bringing processes, and people together.

On March 27, 2020, U.S. Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in response to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. State Workforce Agencies (SWAs) across the nation scrambled to develop technical solutions to accommodate millions of Americans suddenly eligible for unemployment benefits. Throughout the pandemic, rules, policies, regulations, and legislation were—and remain—fluid and evolving and SWAs are interpreting and implementing federal and state changes constantly. 

With the unprecedented pass of the federal CARES Act to deal with the economic impacts of COVID-19, State Workforce Agencies across the nation scrambled to develop systems that could quickly accommodate millions of Americans suddenly eligible for unemployment benefits. IT leaders and software application developers were hit with an urgent and immediate demand for technology solutions without knowing the volume and scaling requirements—in an environment that was highly visible, politically charged, and frequently covered by mass media.

The goal of any software should be to provide the best value possible while maximizing profits. The software development process is critical in ensuring that the Return on Investment is optimized.

Steve Jobs said, “You've got to start with the customer experience and work backward toward the technology – not the other way around.”

At its most basic level, Business Process Management (BPM) improves system functionality by managing and tracking work. At a deeper level, BPM is an operations management discipline, using a combination of methods, which can include discovering, modeling, analyzing, measuring, improving, optimizing, and automating business processes.

However, what organizations will want to know is this: How does effective BPM save time and cost?

Automation with Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming common today. AI unlocks productivity gains and it makes process outcomes precise and accurate and is scalable technology. Intelligent machines are likely to open new avenues for us to explore, freeing us from mundane, routine tasks and giving us an opportunity to leverage our creativity and imagination.

Many people still confuse workflows with processes and it is easy to understand why. The earliest Business Process Management (BPM) solutions were based on workflow – or how individual processes coordinated.

Application development today has become much easier than a few decades back. You don’t need a working prototype or even a pre-existing database to design the workflow and behavior of your application. All you need is an entity-based approach.

Any organization today is a complex set of departments and communication is crucial between them. For example, the IT department knows how to build a computer system and the business teams have knowledge of how the system should behave. How can the IT and business teams communicate effectively? How do they manage business rules that are always in flux, especially in the benefits administration area that is frequently subjected to policy changes?