IARA

IARA is a BPM system developed for the CGU (Ministry of Transparency and Brazilian Office of the Comptroller General). It simplifies a lot of the task-management common to bureaucratic environment, in a simple interface that provides users their tasks together with all relevant information. It is also extremely extensible, allowing for team managers to configure Roles, Teams, Tasks and Processes in a streamlined interface

I learned a lot working with IARA - it’s where it all began, after all. By the time I entered the project, most of the back-end code was already written in C#, and the front-end was in early development using Polymer, which was big at the time. I mostly worked on the front-end and user interface, which naturally involved talking to users and understanding their desires and expectations, and creating pages, components and functionality as necessary.

The point that stands out to me from this experience was data visualization, for sure - even though the system was flexible and capable, users had a very hard time understanding concepts at first. To help with that, I studied some tools for actually visualizing the process more intuitively, and eventually chose mermaid.js (a great flowchart and diagram library for javascript) to create automatic diagrams for processes and workflow.

The result was amazing: users could now visualize in realtime the processes as they were configured by team managers - this increased trust, and therefore adoption. The system is now in production, being used by most teams at the Minsitry, with plans of reaching to other public organs and simplifying easier between them.