Gone are the days where signing contracts involved figuring out how to connect to a printer, scanner, or photocopier.

And don’t get me started on fax machines.

Now we live in a glorious new world of rapid digital signature workflows.

There are many kinds of digital signatures. Some may think of the high-tech encrypted keys people like Julian Assange have used to prove whether messages came from them or not.

But let’s be honest, outside of our international secret agent daydreaming we’re not likely to need to use those. What we need is the simple act of being able to add our signature on to digital documents with the fewest number of clicks possible.

Those interested in soccer may remember the high profile signing of David de Gea by Spanish giant Real Madrid from Manchester United. Or, actually, you won’t remember it. Because it didn’t happen. The documents were to be sent in the last moments of the transfer window, and the whole multi-multi-million dollar deal fell through due to a broken fax machine.

Digital solutions to contract workflows are important.

That’s why in this Process Street article we’re going to look at:

• The 5 best digital signature tools
• Digital signature integrations you can use today
• How to connect digital signatures with the workflows in your business

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Processes are all the rage right now, and we’re very pleased to be leading the charge in making processes agile and actionable for organizations of all shapes and sizes.

We’ve written countless pieces about creating a process, writing standard operating procedures, or building business systems.

But sometimes we’re guilty of assuming that having a process automatically makes something organized. It doesn’t.

If you’re a solopreneur or working in a startup, managing processes is fairly easy. You have a limited number and you can easily scroll through to find the one you need when you need it.

But what about large organizations? Companies where people on different teams are in different countries? Businesses where different departments speak and operate in different languages?

How can we manage processes on such a large scale, and what does that tell us about managing processes for small businesses looking to scale?

This is where a process library comes in.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What is a process library?
• Why you should build a process library for your business
• Determine your information architecture before building your library
• How you can build a process library in Process Street
• Harnessing the power of Process Street’s templates!

Or, if you’ve just come for the templates, grab them below:

• Process Library Checklist
• The Process for Optimizing a Process

Let’s get started!

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Modern business is a fast paced game and there are always new ways you can discover to improve your operations and output.

One of the easiest and simplest ways to improve the day to day running of your business is to supply your team with better tools.

With the array of modern SaaS products available on the market there are specialized tools for a host of use cases.

We use Close.io for our sales team, Intercom for customer support, and Process Street for our business process management throughout the company.

But if you’re a department within a larger company, or a team within a department, how do you convince top management and finance to sign off on a new software product to boost your team’s performance?

In this article, we’re going to give you a step by step guide of how to make that happen. Including:

• What is a purchase requisition?
• The difficulty of bureaucracy
• 3 important factors to convince finance
• How to write a proposal for a new software purchase requisition
• Create or improve a purchase requisition process

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You have probably used Linux today — especially if you don’t have an iPhone. And if you browsed the web today, there’s a big chance that the website you visited was served by Linux, too.

Linux is an operating system, but unlike software like Microsoft Windows and macOS, Linux was developed by a self-organized community of volunteers.

Over time, with the effort of over 10,000 developers and evolving processes to manage the scale of work, the Linux kernel has grown to over 20,000,000 lines of code in total. It forms the stable foundation for…

• Every Android phone and tablet on the planet
• 66% of the world’s servers
• 100% of the top 500 supercomputers

This technology didn’t come from an orchestrated team with a thick policy book and layers of management. It came from a few carefully-chosen and culturally-embedded policies, and a shared mission.

In this post, I look at how a technology so essential, complex and important could have been produced so effectively without traditional management structure. But first…

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Writing perfect processes is a dream all Process Street users share.

But a perfect process isn’t necessarily a process where all the steps work perfectly all the way through.

In real life, processes come up against external forces and unforeseen circumstances. A perfect process doesn’t have to predict all these external influences in advance; it needs to be able to adapt to them in real time as they arise.

Fortunately, there’s a concept for this: Process Flexibility.

Process flexibility helps keep our processes working even when everything else is going wrong.

In this article, we’re going to outline what process flexibility is and the main approaches to managing it:

• What is process flexibility?
• What are the main approaches to process flexibility?
• Flexibility by design
• Flexibility by deviation
• Flexibility by underspecification
• Flexibility by change
• How Process Street is designed for agility

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One of the impacts of technology on how we do business is a greater ability to structure our companies differently and to leverage advantages which would previously have been difficult.

At Process Street, our team is based remotely. Which means we’re able to draw on a wealth of talent based all over the world.

Technology means that communication between remote employees can be as effective as it is within an office; sometimes conferring extra advantages. Using the right communication platform provides a great solution for managing remote teams as it makes collaboration easier and increases engagement amongst your remote workers.

I wrote for AppCues about how our internal systems are so robust precisely because we’re remote based and we need to take every step possible to make sure we don’t suffer any information loss in our communication. This has given us internal processes which are much stronger than many brick and mortar firms.

Being remote is not the only benefit technology can bring. New tech can flatten organization structures, effectively delegate more responsibilities while retaining accountability, and help to create cultures where everyone feels valued.

One of those factors is the ability to bring multiple stakeholders into decision-making processes; a shift which holds a fundamentally democratic ethos.

In this article we’re going to look at:

• What is democracy?
• What are the positives and negatives of incorporating democracy into an organization?
• The democratic ethos in practice and how you could use it
• 5 suggestions for how technology could facilitate democratic input

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“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one” – Haley Marie Craig, 7 Phrases You’ve Been Misquoting

Sometimes, you don’t need to be a specialist – just someone who’s flexible enough to weave between disciplines and bring the strengths of all.

A full stack marketer.

These are marketers who have knowledge and experience of all aspects of marketing, from social media and video to user experience and content. It takes a lot of dedication and consistent learning to become one, and it’s often hard to find someone who has that wide of a spread of knowledge.

So, if you’ve ever wanted to brush up your marketing skills, know what the pros and cons of a full stack marketer are, or wondered why you’d bother to hire a non-specialist in the first place, keep reading this post. I’ll cover all of that, plus give a list of helpful resources which can get you started on the track to gaining that knowledge for yourself.

Let’s get started!

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Have you considered that your marketing process could be broken?

Marketing is the engine of growth driving your business, and making sure this engine is well-oiled and optimized for maximum efficiency goes without saying.

Your marketing plan must be well-organized, robustly structured, and efficient. For this to be true, you need to begin with the process behind the vision and make sure that is working at 110%.

In the absence of a tried and tested process that is fine-tuned to the needs and goals of a particular company, the untamed beast of marketing will waste time, money, and resources, and will fail to deliver any meaningful return.

Why is it, then, that so many businesses leave the marketing process as an afterthought?

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We now have the world in our pockets. Our TVs are smart. Our cars soon to be driverless.

We live in the tech futures of 1970s futurists, or at least partly.

Along with predictions of technological development came ideas of utopias and dystopias. The technology we craft creates new use cases, opportunities, and dangers. The tech and its application cannot be separated.

This brings us to larger questions of how we should employ technology, what risks new tech may bring, and what the arrival of these new futures means to us as humans on our little ball of dirt.

This is the sphere of digital ethics.

Process Street was invited to the inaugural World Ethical Data Forum, and it has set our minds rolling over some of these questions and the discussions of what may lie ahead.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What is digital ethics?
• 3 current hot topics in digital ethics
• 3 challenges discussed at the World Ethical Data Forum
• What to look out for in the future of digital ethics

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The best techniques and technology in the world won’t help you if you don’t know how to use them. Annoyingly, with it being so new, it’s hard to tell what machine learning marketing use cases there are to base your efforts on.

In other fields, the breakthrough tech is being used in medical diagnoses, spam filtering, fraud detection, translation and more. All you need is some inspiration to get started with your own uses.

That’s why this post exists.

I’ll cover, in detail, the key ways machine learning is affecting marketing, and how it can be used to handle some of your business process automation, provide actionable data insights and predictions, and even win $1 million on Jeopardy.

Before that though, if you don’t know what machine learning is (or want a refresher), check out our other posts on the topic below:

• An Introduction to Machine Learning in Business: Analyzing Your Success
• 6 Useful Applications of AI & Machine Learning in Your Business Processes

Let’s get started.

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