Yes, it’s true, I’m going to miss a North American Gartner BPM summit for the first time in, well, maybe forever. There’s two reasons for this: first and foremost, I’m 110% busy with time-critical client work right now, and a week in sunny San Diego just doesn’t fit into my calendar. Also, if you review [...]
In keeping with other recently-installed change agents, Elise Olding of Gartner delivered a webinar today on your first 100 days as a business process director. As she points out, you have 100 days to make some key first impressions and get things rolling, and although you may not necessarily deliver very much in that time, [...]
The fall conference season has kicked off, and I’ve already had the pleasure of attending 3 BPM conferences: the International BPM conference (academic), Appian’s first user conference (vendor), and the Gartner BPM summit (analyst). It’s rare to have 3 such different conferences crammed into 2 weeks, so I’ll sum up some of the differences that [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Last week and this week saw some very difficult choices for conference attending: I went to the International BPM conference in Milan last week, but missed Office 2.0; this week, I’m attending Appian’s user conference and Gartner’s BPM summit in Washington DC, but missing SAP’s TechEd and all my Enterprise Irregulars peeps (although I won’t [...]
I’ve been sticking close to home for the summer, but my fall lineup is about to begin. So far, I’m definitely attending the following: Business Objects Influencer Summit and SAP SME Day, August 12-13, Boston. This is an analyst/press event, not a public conference, but I’ll be blogging from there. International Conference on BPM, September [...]
I feel like I’m on the last mile of a marathon: it’s the closing keynote of the conference, and it seems like it’s been going on a long time. Gartner may have jumped the shark by moving to two North American BPM summits per year; a lot of the material is heavily recycled, making it [...]
Janelle Hill addressed the issues of what’s really new in BPM and how it can change how you do business. She starts off by discussing how BPM is different from older business process reengineering techniques: Process orientation complements functional organization, along the lines of what Rummler was discussing yesterday: processes overlay functional silos, which drives [...]
Elise Olding moderated a panel on weaving BPM into the enterprise, with Eric Abecassis, Architecture and Integration Manager with Schlumberger, Jim Boots, Enterprise Architect at Chevron, and Kevin Morgan, Program Manager at Dolby. Abecassis started with the process-related problems that they had at Schlumberger: processes had to be standardized in order to effectively manage growth [...]
This morning, I attended with David Norton’s session on integrating BPM and Agile software development methods. In BPM, we always talk about how BPM brings agility to business processes, but what facilitates that agility? Although a lot of this talk is about Agile, it’s definitely valid to look at how to apply Agile methods to [...]
Today’s sessions closed with a presentation by Dr. Geary Rummler of the Performance Design Lab on the nature of process and the value of shifting an organization to process centricity. I saw him speak at the 2006 Proforma user conference, and enjoyed it; how can you not like listening to the guy who invented swimlanes? [...]
Michele Cantera and Ben Pring talked about the compatibility of BPM and SaaS, especially in the key issue of whether process agility can be achieved with SaaS delivery models, or if that’s only suitable for standardized applications and processes. Pring’s area of expertise is SaaS, and the first part of the presentation was on the [...]
David Landry, Verizon’s Executive Director of Sales Support and Billing Systems, spoke about how they used BPM to simplify and improve Verizon’s billing process. They started with a pretty serious spaghetti mess of contract-to-billing processes: 120 different processes, disjointed legacy systems, manual processes, local variations, and a number of other factors making everything from contracts [...]
Jay Simons, VP of Marketing for BEA, presented the results of their recent research into the state of the BPM market, including a survey of 200+ BEA customers, mostly IT people but spread across vertical markets and geographies. They’ve also gathered information through their online BPM Lifecycle Assessment. I had the pleasure of collaborating with [...]
