Robert Lang of Global 360 to talk about an implementation at Carlson Marketing, a travel, meeting and event planning company. They had a lot of paper-based processes that included hand-offs between departments with complex approval processes; not only was the basic process difficult to manage, but changes to a customer proposal were difficult to execute [...]
Global 360 has a bit of revolving door with analysts: first, they hire Jim Sinur from Gartner. Then, they hire Colin Teubner from Forrester. Then, Sinur leaves. And here today at the Gartner show, which he admits is his first-ever, Teubner presented on behalf of Global 360 about putting people first in BPM. He really [...]
Having bugged out of the Agile BPM session, I arrived late to Michele Cantera’s discussion of whether software as a service is a viable option for process improvement projects. She covered off some of the same material as the SaaS and BPM session in February, but there was some new information as well. I won’t [...]
In the spirit of discouraging conference organizers from scheduling sessions that start before 9am, I boycotted the 8:15 keynote session, but showed up for the session on Agile BPM methods. Unfortunately, it appears to be a complete rerun of David Norton’s session from February, so I’m heading out to find a different session.
Daryl Plummer’s thing is SOA and dynamic applications, and he presented this afternoon on Dynamic BPM: the ability to support process change by any role, at any time, with very low latency. In other words, (m)any process participant can make changes to the process in order to suit their specific needs, just as Trefler was [...]
It’s official: Google screwed up my feed when I switched from the feeds.feedburner.com URL to feedproxy.google.com, even though it was supposed to remap seamlessly. Nice going, guys. I’ve had it confirmed by at least two people that the feed just stopped working, and they had to remove and add it again to their feed reader. [...]
At the lunch presentation today, Alan Trefler (CEO of Pegasystems) discussed how it’s necessary — and possible — to put BPM right in the hands of the business users, and let them do it themselves. There will be some IT architectural oversight and support, of course, but you just have to convince the users, Tom [...]
I arrived a bit late, transferring from the Ritz out in Tysons Corner down to the Gaylord in National Harbor (which Google Maps still thinks is a construction site), but caught the last half of the opening keynote with Janelle Hill and Michelle Cantera. They started with some of the forces affecting business, both business [...]
Samir Gulati returned for a brief wrap-up of today’s event before we headed for cocktails and the technology showcase, with Malcolm Ross describing the technical sessions that will be held over at Appian headquarters tomorrow, and Matt Calkins thanking us all for being here. There are sessions tomorrow targeted primarily at their customers, including one-on-one [...]
Chris Gardner, VP of Development at Mercer (who provide HR consulting, HR outsourcing and investment management services), presented the last session of the day; Mercer Outsourcing, with which he is affiliated, provides HR benefits administration. They rolled out their first 3 processes in April of this year, with the BPM projects involving IT, their operational [...]
I skipped out on the breakout sessions this afternoon, but am back here for Michael Melenovsky — formerly with Gartner, now senior BPM leader at Satyam — discussing how to accelerate BPM adoption through an integrated business framework: more of a methodology framework than a code framework, however. He listed the three ways in which [...]
These are my links for September 8th: Welcome to the bxModeller Website – Open source BPMN to XPDL modeler. Via Keith Swenson. SAP Network Blogs – NetWeaver BPM preview release is available for download. Too bad that their product management group didn't manage to get me a demo in the past months that I've been [...]
John Jarrett, director of BPM at AGF Trust, spoke next about their Appian implementation; they’re the trust subsidiary of AGF Management Limited, a mutual funds company in Canada — very familiar territory for me, since the system integration company that I used to run implemented about half of the mutual funds imaging and workflow systems [...]
Terry Lee, MEGA’s VP of North American operations, gave us an overview of MEGA, both in terms of their business process analysis and enterprise architecture capabilities. He stated the real reason for using a BPA tool, rather than just the modeling environment within the BPMS, is the ability to analyze the processes within a larger [...]
Pat Steinmann and Dion Beuckman of Enterprise Rent-A-Car presented on their Appian implementation; I didn’t realize that not only are they the largest rental car company in North America, but are family-owned. Steinmann is from corporate IT, and Beuckman is with an operating unit in southern California, and they talked about two independent implementations of [...]
The next presentation was from David Carpenter, Director of BPM at Archstone, a residential apartment investor and operator with about 2,600 employees. One of their main challenges was a high employee turnover rate, and the necessity to reduce the learning curve for new people. They wanted to move away from paper-based forms and manual workflow [...]
Malcolm Ross, Director of Product Management and someone who I once referred to as an über demo god, gave us an update on the Appian product. He started with their product development philosophy: flexibility ease of use comprehensive build for the future, which is how they position their web-based AJAX process modeler, in contrast with [...]
Nick Deacon, Global Head of BPM for consulting and systems integration within Nokia Siemens Networks, a global network communications services firm. The consulting and systems integration group, with a staff of 3,500-4000 and annual sales of 400M Euro, has the usual problems of managing a workforce of service providers, and were looking for a BPM [...]
Appian’s CEO was up for the only vendor executive presentation of the conference, to discuss Appian and its community of customers and partners. As a somewhat late entrant to the BPM market, they had only about 15 customers in 2004 growing to almost 80 (active) customers in 2007, and expanded from a primarily government focus [...]
Three days ago, I was in Rome — original home of the Roman Forum and the Appian Way — and now I’m at Appian Forum: Appian‘s first user conference. Samir Gulati, VP of Marketing, delivered some short opening remarks including the “Sandy Kemsley Conference Checklist”, showing how they measured up on my basic requirements for [...]
