People do things in a professional organization because it’s their job. Modeling this fundamental fact of organizational life is how an Engaging OS system is animated.

All activity flows from positions, such as Financial Manager or Registrar. These bundles of tasks are instantiated whenever a user, like an adventurer donning a costume, assumes a role within an organizational body.

A task 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”. Tasks can also be filtered on additional fields.

As well as tasks, a position also gets privileges for activity areas, port and console screens, and [coming soon] notifications.

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, such as franchises, associations and B2B.

The things people do in an organization are not without context; rather they are steps in processes, which is what a professional organization does.

Engaging OS benefits from the insight that users’ tasks 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 tasks framed by some controls.

A process must be owned by a particular position. It may also be observable to other managers.

Engaging OS’s infrastructure makes integrations natural: its separate front- and back-end are tied by a connection layer that links to external systems just as easily as to its own database.

This matters because while Engaging OS can handle operations in any realm, it may well be joining an organization already running various best-of-breed systems and must share data with them.

One likely pattern: the source of truth regarding employees sits in payroll or HR software, while a CRM handles the wider community. For Engaging OS to function—for people to work across processes—it must know of every person involved with the organization. Engaging OS can pull this information from the organization’s canonical systems and stay in sync.

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 sport many text fields designed for desktop completion.

Zooming out, a role’s dashboard enables navigation to those ports where the role is fulfilled. Grouped by the organization’s various 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.

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 open source engine, an organic role-based, process-powered architecture.

On top of that, modules provide a leg up for common operations, featuring pre-populated data structures, workflows and screens. The list of modules includes Delegate Registration, Professional Certification, Peer Accreditation, Member News, Jobs Board, and Organizational Membership. Once these become sufficiently developed, we’ve even spun them out as standalone services.

The third layer is collaborating with you to model your organization’s operations by applying existing modules and developing new functionality. Now you know what this means: fun with collections, tasks, positions, ports, consoles, processes, notifications and activity areas.

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.