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It’s been a couple of years since I last attended SAP’s huge SAPPHIRE NOW conference, but this week I’m here with my 20,000 closest friends at the Orlando Convention Center (plus another 80,000 watching online) to get caught up. The conference kicked off with a keynote from Bill McDermott, SAP’s co-CEO, and it’s all about HANA and cloud: everything from SAP now runs on HANA, and combined with their cloud platforms realize the dream of realtime, predictive supply chains. HANA is also at the heart of how SAP is addressing social enterprise functionality, allowing a company to analyze a flood of consumer social data to find what’s relevant.

They highlighted some of their sports-related customers’ applications — which definitely allowed for some good lead-in video — with executives from Under Armour, the San Francisco 49′ers and the NBA. In part, sports applications are about helping teams play better and manage their talent through play/player data analysis (think Moneyball), but are also about customer engagement online and in the stadium. The most traditional usage of SAP on the panel is with Under Armour, which manufactures sportswear and sports-related biometrics devices, but their incredible growth means that they needed enterprise systems that they won’t outgrow. An interesting new industry vertical focus for SAP.

The keynote finished with Bob Calderoni, CEO of Ariba (recently acquired by SAP) talking about how cloud — in the form of private business networks, of course — drives productivity. Good focus, since too often the current technology buzzwords (social, mobile, cloud) are discussed purely as the end, not the means, and we can lose sight of how these can make us more productive and efficient, as well as fully buzzword-enabled.

As usual, wifi in the keynote area is impossible, and since I’m tablet-only, I couldn’t even plug into the hard-wired internet that they provided for we guests of Global Communications – I’m not the only one in this section with a tablet rather than a laptop, so imagine that they’ll have to do something in the future to allow the media to consume and publish during the keynote. T-Mobile’s iPhone coverage is resolutely stuck at EDGE in this area, so I can’t even reliably set up a hotspot, although that would just contribute to the wifi problems. The WordPress Android app works fine offline, however, so I was able to take notes and publish later.

We wrapped up day 2 of Gartner BPM 2013 with David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, on neuroleadership and the neuroscience behind organizational change. Neuroleadership deals with how leaders make decisions and solve problems, regulate emotions, collaborate, and facilitate change; this last one is of key focus in his presentation today. In order to create change effectively using a brain-based model, we need to create a “toward” state, facilitate new connections, and embed new habits. Basically, our brains are really bad at doing things that we’ve never done before, because that requires using the relatively small prefrontal cortex. In other words, if we have to think about something, it’s hard. Furthermore, if you’re threatened or stressed, the capability of the prefrontal cortex decreases, meaning that you’re only going to be able to do simple tasks that you’ve done before.

He outlined three levels of thinking: level 1 tasks are simplistic things that you’ve seen/done a lot before, such as deleting emails; level 2 tasks are things that you’ve seen less often, such as scheduling meetings; and level 3 are more complex concepts that you’ve never seen before, such as writing a business plan. When you’re really stressed, you’re pretty much only good for doing level 1 tasks, although peak performance does happen when you’re under a bit of stress.

Change requires a lot of cognitive processing, but when change is perceived as a threat, cognitive processing function decreases. Having change not be perceived as a threat requires creating a toward state, that is, something that is rewarding; since our brains are deeply social, to the point where social pain is the same as physical pain within the brain, social rewards can be used to create that toward state. The five domains of social pain/pleasure are status (your perception of your position relative to others), certainty (uncertainty arouses the limbic system), autonomy (the brain likes to predict and have a say in the future, and having some degree of choice can reduce stress levels), relatedness (categorizations of similar/different to decide who’s on your team and shares your goals), and fairness (unfairness is the same as pain, to the brain). Having higher levels of these social rewards reduces stress, and we protect against the threat of them decreasing. Change, however, can create threats in all of these domains, and you need to find offsetting rewards in one or more of these domains in order to get people thinking about the future rather than just mentally cowering in a corner.

Once a toward state is created by addressing the social reward domains, you can facilitate new connections in people’s brains by creating an environment that permits them to have insights, which starts to form those new pathways that lead to habits.

Thought-provoking talk about the neurological motivations behind change, and a good way to end the day.

Tonight, I’m off to a TIBCO customer event — as a matter of disclosure, TIBCO provided me with one of their conference passes to be here, although I paid my own travel expenses — and I’ll only have time for one or two sessions in the morning before I head for the airport.

Barbara Fackelman and Regina DeGennaro of Pershing (a BNY Mellon subsidiary providing outsourced financial transaction services) presented at Gartner BPM 2013 about their BPM initiative, as it grew from reengineering a broken process related to federal reserve exchanges — saving them $1M/year — to a BPM center of excellence (COE). As I often recommend for growing a COE, they built their COE as an offshoot of their initial project by building a reusable BPM framework along the way, then communicated that out to the rest of the organization to undercover other potential spots for process improvement.

They started to identify sub-processes and functions that are reusable across different processes, such as document rendezvous, which impacted document scanning and handling processes as well as the downstream transaction processing. With that in their portfolio, they were able to implement additional BPM projects with significant savings, making the BPM COE a very popular service inside Pershing.

Their BPM COE reports up to the executive committee, and gets input from a number of other sources internally:

• Architecture review board
• Technology prioritization committee
• Dedicated programming groups and QA
• Process owners
• Quality management office
• BPM solutions team

They have a number of key roles in the BPM COE:

• Executive sponsor
• Process owner
• Process architect
• Product owner
• Governors
• Development leads
• Quality assurance
• Product manager
• Business analyst
• Process librarian
• Metrics master (BI architect)

With all of this in place, they have a mature COE that supports process optimization and innovation, and reviews new technologies to support the enhanced vision. Interestingly, they treat their BPM COE like any other process project: having defined and implemented it, they are constantly monitoring what/how their COE is doing, and continuously optimizing it. As an outsourcing firm, their main focus is on maximizing straight-through processes, and they can measure the performance of the COE since STP is a specific mission of the COE. As they have found, nothing succeeds like success: their STP process improvements to date have led to more collaboration and projects in other areas of their organization.

They’re using a lot of homegrown stuff, plus IBM BPM and Pega; like most big financial services organizations, they are piecing together a lot of this themselves to make it work best for them.

Jean Lastowka of Electrolux and Dave Brooks of SoftwareAG presented at Gartner BPM 2013 on process intelligence and visibility; apparently, SoftwareAG chose to include a white paper that I wrote for them in the conference handouts (which I neglected to keep), so if you’re here, check out the package.

Electrolux makes home and professional appliances — best known in North America for vacuum cleaners, but they have a much broader repertoire — and were looking to do some internal alignment in order to serve customers better. To meet this goal, they established their BPM practice a week before last year’s Gartner BPM conference, established a BPM framework, did collaborative process modeling and launched a new ERP system for their new end-customer distribution channel over the next five months, then brought on SoftwareAG’s iKnow product for process visibility in October, and launched it to their business community in November.

Their BPM efforts were initially around end-to-end process mapping of the new processes in ARIS, allowing business and IT to have a shared knowledge of the processes; they are not using a BPMS to automate processes, but the processes are encapsulated in the ERP system implementation and procedural knowledge. Unfortunately, with these new processes and a new ERP system, people were still trying to manage the processes in the old ways (including Excel), causing a lot of customer dissatisfaction. iKnow allowed them to take their process models, connect up event feeds (I assume) from the ERP system (and presumably other systems), and show real-time order tracking and KPIs overlaid on the process model. This allows for predictive analytics, providing advance warning of potential lead time failures based on inventory levels, for example, and allowed them to track order trends and provide a single view of on-hand and in-transit inventory. Best of all, the visualizations — inventory displayed on a geographic map, for example, as well as real-time alerts based on KPIs — allowed the business to more easily consume the data than in the textual format that they had previously received.

This was a good example of what BPM looks like without a BPMS automation project: collaborative process modeling, processes implemented in some other system (an ERP system, in this case), then metrics and KPIs gathered and displayed relative to the process model in a dashboard, with items requiring action flagged and pushed to the appropriate people. Bracketing the ERP system with process modeling and monitoring transforms it into a process-centric BPM initiative that drives process improvement and provides actionable information.

There are a couple of vendors in this part of the BPM technology business, providing tooling to allow you to see the processes that are running in your other (non-BPMS) systems in real-time. For many organizations, this is the only option since they have core ERP, CRM and legacy systems that run their business, but that don’t provide good visualizations nor explicit process models. Process visibility is the first step to process excellence.

In the last session of day 1 at Gartner BPM 2013, I sat in on a case study by the Argentina-based Banco Supervielle, who won a Gartner excellence award for best business outcomes driven by BPM. They were experiencing poor quality of service, and having to deal with changing regulations and a complex systems integration environment. They had no process models for what they did, and were too focused on products rather than customers.

They laid out goals for their process-centric transformation: improve customer service through quality-oriented processes, including organizational changes and linking of process models to corporate strategy. They wanted to bring in innovative technologies to support this process-centric view, and strive for continuous improvement. they looked at different ways to do this: bottom-up, through more of an iterative process improvement methodology; and top-down, through complete process redesign with the processes linked to corporate strategy. Daunting as it might seem, they went with the top-down approach, similar to that described by Elise Olding earlier today from a program versus project standpoint, but also with some of the same goal-linking between processes and strategy as Betsy Burton discussed this morning. They used a combination of internal and external methodologies to help guide the program, and implemented using IBM BlueworksLive and IBM BPM.

They experienced a number of challenges:

• Change management, from the board of directors through the project team to the end users, to have them take on a process-centric view
• Anxiety control (an excellent descriptive term!) through the same levels, with the particular admonishment to not let your board of directors have lunch with the vendor sales reps since all the BoD will remember is that the vendor said “new process = 2 months”
• Sponsorship, and the necessity to get as senior a sponsor as possible in order to provide the best level of air cover
• Denial and negative influencers, often due to people not wanting to change

They had a number of results: some that they were expecting, some that they were not expecting, and some that just didn’t happen the way that they wanted. In the “expected” category were the usual items of flexibility, cost/time savings and automation, but I always find that the interesting benefits are those that were not expected. In their case, that including moving their business architecture team from a documentation role to a high-value provider; faster adoption with remote than central office users; and a single process to sell all products to all clients through all channels (a dream of all of my financial services clients). What didn’t happen on schedule was mostly the change management and adoption. It’s necessary to constantly communicate throughout the project in order to sell the ideas and the organizational change that’s required, and do everything possible to change the mind of the negative influencers or get them off the project.