ISSUE FM99-18 ISSN 2052-6490

Interfacing Technologies:
Redefining the Future of Management Software Solutions
An Interview with Scott Armstrong

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 Executive Insight

SCOTT ARMSTRONG
Managing Partner at Interfacing Technologies

Headquartered in Montreal,
Canada, Interfacing Technologies
Corporation (Interfacing) has
been developing award-winning
software solutions for over two
decades, serving both large &
small organisations across the
world. Recognised as not only a
pioneer, but also a leader in the
field (within Gartner® Enterprise
Business Process Analysis,
Business Operating Systems &
Operational Intelligence reports),
the company provides quality
management technological
solutions to document, analyse,
improve, and govern process,
risk and performance data.

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This month we caught up with Scott Armstrong, Managing Partner and one of four
owners of Interfacing, who discussed the company’s commitment to continuously
innovate and redefine the future of business software solutions.
Interfacing Technologies dates back to the
early 80s – can you tell us more about the
history of the company and its commitment
to process? How have Interfacing’s solutions
evolved? What are the company’s mission
and values today?
Originally, Interfacing was a small IT consulting
company. In the early 90s, the company was part
of a large research and development MRP project
which was funded by the National Research Council
of Canada and included some big players such as
Nortel at the time. As a result of the company’s
participation in the project, in 1994 Interfacing
released one of the first process modelling and
simulation tools.
With the advancement of the World Wide Web and as
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) evolved into
Business Process Management (BPM) in the early
2000s, Interfacing launched one of the first web-
based collaborative centralised repository solutions
– the Enterprise Process Center® (EPC). To date,
this is our flagship product and we are currently on
version 10 (a.k.a. EPC X) – the revolutionised next
generation of the platform - fully cloud-based, mobile
ready and architected utilizing the latest & greatest
highly scalable technology stack. Interfacing has
been a player for many years, however, the change of
ownership and management team four years ago is
what catapulted the company forward and continues
to fuel the growth today. Interfacing’s mission is
to empower organisations to efficiently govern
business complexity and transformation through
process based quality, continuous improvement
and compliance management solutions. I’m proud
to share that the vision, team, and technology are
stronger now than ever before!
What is the current state of the market and
how does your solution align?
The need for automation is now well beyond to
increase productivity, the digital age has forced
companies to re-evaluate their core product and
service offerings. The need to reassess what their
company does as a business and apply changes to
adapt to the digitisation of their industry is a big
Executive Insight
driver for our growth. Every industry is undergoing
massive changes connected to digitisation, so with
such large-scale digital transformation projects
comes the need for major business transformation.
Our repository based knowledge management
platform is designed to assist with requirements
gathering, system configuration and deployment
training. The platform provides the organisation
with a blueprint of the current and future state and
a tool to support the ongoing change management
– every user can see the previous process versus
the current process, what has changed, why it has
changed, where they do their new work and how to
do it. In effect, offering searchable mobile Digital
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) with video
work instructions.
With digitization and the fast pace of technologies’
ongoing evolution came the need for increased
agility. The Enterprise Process Center®’s Rapid
Application Development (RAD) module supports
low-code development and workflow automation.
The EPC RAD platform is unique in the BPMS
market because it supports not only process and
case management event based automation but
transactional and data driven application typesas
well! With graphical editors for data modelling, web
forms design, process mapping, rules configuration,
and dashboard creation, the EPC RAD solution
helps companies create and continuously improve
an application with relatively low amount of time
and effort.
What trends do you expect in digital
transformation in 2018 and how will these
affect the products that Interfacing offers?
The main trend that we’re seeing is the role
of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics in
automation. The way we’re planning to leverage
AI in terms of our technology base depends on the
module. Our KPI module for example could leverage
AI by providing predictive analytical insight to help
our customers foresee issues before they arise.
Within automation, the software could provide
more information at the point of decision making
based on the trends of historical actions and with
FINANCEMONTHLY 37
 Executive Insight
the addition of robotics even remove the need for
any human intervention within certain use cases.
A progressive trend in the process analysis is
space is customer journey mapping. Before the
internet and social media, customer experience
didn’t have such a direct impact and influence on a
customer’s buying patterns. In today’s digital age,
the customer is spoilt for options when it comes to
finding a specific service or product and can easily
compare these options by doing quick research
online. Fuel this with the fact that a customer is
more probable to make the effort to post a review
about a negative experience than a positive one
and hence the heightened importance of mapping
your customers’ journey. Historically, businesses
were focused on trying to improve their internal
process to reduce things like cost, duration, delay,
without paying attention to how this impact the
customer’s experience. What is truly remarkable
about our tool is that it not only allows businesses
to map their customers’ journey, but they can
connect the customers’ touch points to their
internal operations to visualize the handoffs
within a single diagram. This transparency
provides clarity in relation to the areas that need
to be evaluated, revised and improved in real-time,
increasing corporate agility. It’s important that we
continue to invest in this area, as intelligence will
be increasingly more available to consumers and
more and more services will become online-only.
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Every industry is undergoing
massive changes connected to digitisation,
so with such large-scale digital transformation
projects comes major business
transformation.
A big portion of our readers are in understand downstream impacts and manage
finance, can you please tell us a bit change. To achieve this, corporations and other
about Interfacing’s Governance, Risk organizations must leverage technology to
Management and Compliance (GRC) minimize the impact and amount of manual work
solution? needed to comply. Companies’ focus on vision,
objectives and performance should always be their
Interfacing’s Enterprise Process Center® number one priority, not compliance!
has evolved beyond process analysis and
automation to offer a comprehensive solution Our tool offers policy, rule and requirement
for GRC Management. The ability to bridge the management that simplifies companies’ effort
gap between risk, compliance, audit and the to adapt. Thus, if a law changes, users can
continuous improvement teams is another major immediately see all the potential implications
differentiator of the EPC. With constant new – and how the law change will impact specific
legislation forcing organizations to regularly adapt policies, rules, processes, risks, controls, roles and
their policies and rules to ensure compliance, systems. Additionally, customers can break down
professionals are looking for a way to better their corporate high-level risks (ERM - enterprise
 Executive Insight

security and ensures all stakeholders’ approvals

are received before publishing a change.

Interfacing has been labelled a “Game

Changer” by our team of analysts, what
makes Interfacing stand apart from the
rest?

Beyond our deep roots and understanding of

the market, what differentiates Interfacing’s
Enterprise Process Center® from its competitors
is the value it brings to a diverse number of groups
within an organization and the high level of
adoption by end-user employees. We noticed a big
gap in the market whereby processes were being Scott Armstrong
used by multiple teams within an organization
but usually not consolidated into one solution and Interfacing Technologies enables organiza-
never truly rolling out to every employee across tions to efficiently govern business complexity
the entire organization. For example, within and continuous transformation through pro-
a company, you may have business analysts cess based quality, performance and compli-
leveraging such a tool for process improvement, ance management solutions.

audit department mapping for compliance and

risk management) down to the operational level
and asses them against the controls that mitigate
them. All risks and controls are reusable allowing
customers to reassess each risk by process as
well. Our platform not only documents risks and
controls, but it also monitors key risk and control
indicators – something that a lot of other products
don’t do. This provides companies with the
ability to track their risk mitigation strategies on
an ongoing basis and react before going into the
red, instead of having to wait until the end of the
quarter once an audit is carried out to understand
what went wrong. The EPC does support auditors
as well though – from planning, to scheduling, to
executing, through to reporting, the EPC offers
a complete audit management solution. Finally,
governance is at the core of our system, the EPC
manages versions, tracks all audit trails, enforces
risk assessment or IT documenting requirements
for a system deployment and automation project,
however, the reach tended to be confined
and limited. At the end of the day, it becomes
difficult to gain the real value out of the effort of
documenting processes, procedures, roles, risks,
rules, controls, KPIs, etc. if they’re not rolled
out to the people that require this knowledge to
complete their daily tasks. Thus, our entire focus
when redesigning our flagship platform was the
end-user. Today, we offer truly a corporate-wide
software that provides transparency at all levels of
the organization and gives every employee a voice.
Within the current digital landscape and fast pace
of technological change, agility is a must to remain
competitive. The need to collect feedback and
continuously improve one’s processes, products
& services on an ongoing basis is more important
now than ever before.
In addition to numerous awards, the Interfac-
ing Enterprise Process Center (EPC) has been
recognized by Gartner as a leading digital
management software for multiple years now
within 3 independent market categories, in-
cluding: Enterprise Business Process Analysis
(eBPA), Business Operating System (BOS) &
Operational Intelligence (OI).
Interfacing’s clients are noted medium to
large organizations. The company partners
with leading management consulting firms to
provide integration, workflow, SOP, GRC and
process excellence services worldwide.
Interfacing BPM starts from static process
modeling in their Free BPMN Modeler for MS
Visio®, to full scale and multidimensional
process lifecycle management using multi-
user BPM suite - the EPC.

Our platform not only

documents risks and controls, but it
also monitors key risk and control
indicators – something that a lot of
other products don’t do.
www.interfacing.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/solution/

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