In a professional organization people do things because it’s their job. Modeling this fundamental fact of organizational life proves to be the easiest and most powerful way to animate an enterprise’s entire management system.

In Engaging OS all activity therefore flows from positions, such as Financial Manager or Registrar. These bundles of privileges are instantiated whenever a user assumes a role within an organizational body.

A privilege consists, at minimum, of three elements:

• an action (e.g., “approve”) 
• a collection (e.g., “invoices”) 
• a status (e.g., “submitted”)

Actions and statuses are paired—so, for example, “approve” sets an invoice’s status to “approved”. Privileges can also be filtered on additional fields.

A user can hold multiple roles, while a position can inherit from other positions, making the system efficient to configure, especially at scale.

Also core to organizations is that they deal with other organizations. Engaging OS was built from the start to handle multiple bodies. (Remember, when a user assumes a role, it must be at a particular body.)

This makes Engaging OS an attractive choice for enterprises that chiefly serve other organizations rather than individuals, such as franchises, associations and B2B.

The things people do in an organization are not without context; rather they are steps in processes. Indeed it is processes that are what an organization does.

Engaging OS benefits from the insight that users’ privileges and organizations’ processes are not separate settings but simply different approaches to the same phenomenon. In Engaging OS a process is therefore a set of privileges framed by some controls.

A process must be the responsibility of a particular position, becoming observable to that position and likely to other managerial ones.

The nature of the task at hand—enabling users across organizations to play their parts in processes—demands a particular configuration of screens: ports for working, and dashboards for navigating to them. No more, no less.

Zooming in, a port is a single-entry form where the user performs their work on an item—say registering for an event or approving an expense. A port is optimized for the task at hand; it might offer a single large button for easy mobile use in the field, or have many text fields designed for desktop completion.

Zooming out, a role’s dashboard enables navigation to those ports where the role is fulfilled. Organized into color-coded activity areas, a dashboard displays an arrangement of consoles that can be minimized or maximized like GUI windows.

A console presents a table of items to work on; the final column in each row offers one or more conduit links to various ports.

Since every task across every department is handled this same way, there is only one mental model to learn, and institutional learning of the system can be rapid.

Since the actions people take in organizations are steps within processes, it’s vital that users are notified the moment the system is ready for them to take the next step. A work system must send the right message to the right users at the right time.

Engaging OS has a robust notifications system triggered by item updates, sending branded emails to users based on their roles. Emails can dynamically include any content from within the system.

Conceptually, Engaging OS is a layered platform. At its core is the engine, an organic role-based, process-powered architecture.

On top of that, modules provide a leg up for common operations, featuring pre-populated workflows, data structures, and port and dashboard screens. The list of modules includes group registration, certification, accreditation, and membership. When functionality-rich enough, we’ve even spun these out as standalone services.

The third layer consists of collaborating with you to model your organization’s operations by tailoring existing modules and developing new ones.

Meet people’s expectations for a fast, clear and cohesive way to perform the informational aspect of their jobs. Reassure them they work at an organization that has the wherewithal to have mastered this key competence.

Liberate staffers from the drudgery of repetitive, error-prone tasks that computers do better, such as manually shunting data around siloed systems. Free people up to perform work that people do best.

Enjoy having actual living documentation of the enterprise’s operations. Inform managers’ decision-making with comprehensive, real-time views across departments. Effortlessly reveal connections—and opportunities—less easily available from multiple systems.

Model innovations and run pilots. Reap your investment in a modern, flexible, extensible software system that is not an impediment but a tool of change.

Please members of your wider community—customers, suppliers, partners and regulatory bodies—by giving them real-time access to the information they need; they too have vital roles in the system.

Empower your various support, liaison and satisfaction teams to better assist them.