The official wiki for bpmCamp 2010 is up (and the landing page has been updated accordingly).  The direct link to the wiki is www.bpmCamp.org/wiki which forwards you to a Google “Sites” wiki.  Although it arguably isn’t the best wiki product, we use a fair number of Google apps and the wiki functionality has definitely improved over time.  It also doesn’t require you to learn a wiki-fied markup language – you just have to remember to click the “Edit Page” button.

Unfortunately I don’t didn’t see a way to make the site “public” while hosting it in the bp3 subdomain.  So, if you want access drop us an email  (bpmCamp  at  bp-3.com) and I’ll get you invited pronto.  Even if you don’t think you can attend, you can participate in the wiki discussions.  There’s also a mailing list attached to the wiki that you can join (a Google Group for bpmCamp Stanford 2010).

Looking forward to getting the discussions started!  Only 59 days left…

(As Sandy points out below, you can just join the bpmCamp google group to get access to edit the wiki!)

Great article from the business insider here.  In it, John Mauldin makes a great case for optimism in the long run, despite a lot of short-term difficulties.  Its a long read but well worth it as we approach the end of 2009 and a time for reflecting on the year past.

A few choice quotes:

We live in a world of accelerating change. Things are changing at an ever-increasing pace. The world is not linear, it is curved. And we may be at the beginning of the elbow of that curve. If you assume a linear world, you are going to make less-than-optimal choices about your future, whether it is in your job or investments or life in general.

and :

A pessimist never gets in the game. A wild-eyed optimist will suffer the slings and arrows of boom and inevitable bust. Cautious optimism is the correct and most rewarding path. And that, I hope, is what you see when you read my weekly thoughts.

At BP3, we agree.  We’re in the game.  We’re trying to help.  And we have a dream we’re trying to achieve.  Maybe John Mauldin is right.

So Ishmael has a good post about the Intalio|Cloud Mashup tool.  It looks pretty cool from a technical point of view, and from an “exposing mashup capabilities to people otherwise unfamiliar with them” point of view.

I’m wondering what other BPM tools are showing off functionality like this – or what other mashup utilities can be easily plugged into existing BPM products.  If you have experience with this put a comment below or drop me a line, I’m definitely interested, and I think it would be good for more people to know about it.

Wishing a Happy Thanksgiving to all of our customers, partners, team members, and family.  We couldn’t do it without you!  We’re very thankful for all of your support, and we couldn’t do this without you.  Hope you are all getting time with family this Thanksgiving, and recharging your batteries! We’re looking forward to the home stretch in December -

- A very thankful BP3 Team

I had to laugh when I read John Reynolds’ latest post, regarding a process for solving Soduko puzzles.  My parents are avid Soduko puzzle fans, so I hope they never read this!  I’ve never been interested in the Soduko puzzle phenomenon (or crossword puzzles for that matter). So the process won’t make Soduko boring for me – but I can see how it would for anyone who previously enjoyed them.  This is a bit like video games (Pac Man anyone?) that can be reduced to a series of prescribed moves.  Of course, with video games there is still an execution element that you can screw up, but once you’ve reduced the game to “not making a mistake” it is less interesting than when you’re in “figure it out” mode.

It just seemed like the right kind of topic for the day before Thanksgiving, when there might be a lot of time on the couch after eating a bit too much turkey, and when the Soduko puzzles might be coming out…

Interesting post from ActionBase’s Jakob Ukelson, positing that we need a process warehouse to store all the process data we produce.

As he puts it:

That led me to start thinking about the notion of a process warehouse – something to akin to a data warehouse but for processes. This would seem to be the next thing up the food chain (from a business perspective) from a data warehouse. It would essentially be a system-of-record of actual business process usage in an organization. It would keep actual data on process execution (in other words not just a static process catalogue). That would provide the actual business context of data usage – valuable stuff especially in this day and age of increased regulation (and with the increased focus on Business Intelligence and Operational Excellence).

In fact, this is very much the line of thinking that led to Lombardi‘s introduction of the “Performance Server” in its BPMS- a capability for tracking interesting process data in context of the process.  It is a really powerful feature of Lombardi’s offering, and one that I’m surprised I don’t see in other vendors’ offerings.  Which also speaks to the fact that Lombardi could be pushing this message harder and investing more obviously in this key, differentiating aspect of its Teamworks suite.

Jakob notes that he couldn’t find references to “process warehouse” in the literature, despite the obvious relationship to a Data Warehouse – perhaps because Lombardi decided not to position the performance server as a “data warehouse”, and because other vendors just focused on the reporting side of the equation.  And it isn’t a data warehouse in the traditional sense – but maybe it should be.  Many customers feed the data from the performance server to their data warehouse for analysis, and the data is very high quality precisely because of its close correlation to the actual executing process.

Good to see someone else in the market thinking about these issues.

Keith Swenson has a few posts on the frustrations of email these days – and after some time experimenting and a friendly nudge from me, he’s come around and tried OtherInbox.

The problem?  Too much spam, which makes email nearly useless.

The proposed solution (my take):  use an email provider that has a REALLY good spam filter.  Like Gmail.  I have a very old personal address that gets 99% spam but the occasional personal note comes through it.  I forward it through a Gmail account and as a result I see the 10 or so useful emails that show up on that email address per year.

But, Gmail only effectively filters spam.  It doesn’t help you filter merchant emails that you would like to receive, but perhaps not in the quantities that you receive them.  Only some merchants are nice enough to let you state how often you want to hear from them.  There are lots of opt-in situations where you are required to provide an email address.  You could use a single “spam email” to opt-in to all these confirmations, etc.  But then you can’t tell who gave your email address to the spammers when it does go bad, and you can’t turn it off selectively.

OtherInbox solves that problem by letting you give each merchant a unique email address that you can later turn off if it becomes an avenue for spam.  You can also use it to sign up for group mailing lists, and the like, which are more likely to get compromised than some commercial accounts.

I think between Gmail and OtherInbox, you can largely whip the spam problem.  For now…

There was a post over on Lombardi’s “Process People” blog referencing all the events they’ve attended in the Fall of 2009, from Gartner BPM Summit to Forrester’s BTF to the Gartner ITxpo. Event schedules have wound down for 2009… but its a great time to start planning to attend bpmCamp on January 28-29, 2010!

We now have a landing page up with a stable URL for bpmCamp 2010 -

http://www.bpmCamp.org (Updated link to the external url that will forward you to the right place)

This will be a stable place to find links to various bpmCamp resources, or catch the twitter feed.  Of course we’ll announce news on the blog, and you can find those articles via the bpmCamp tag.  But we thought it would be helpful to have a single link you can bookmark to keep coming back to for any announcements or updates.

Apple’s net profit from iPhone’s exceeded Nokia’s by approximately 50% ($1.6B in net for Apple, $1.1B in net for Nokia). Its the first time Apple’s net profit in phones exceeded Nokia’s, and it is a dramatic reversal. Just 7.4 million phones generated this profit for Apple. Nokia sold 108 million phones to generate its $1.1B.

The way things are headed, Nokia and others may have more volume, but Apple and RIM will have substantially all the profit.  This is similar to what’s happening in the PC world, where Apple has a stunning 90% share of computers that cost over $1000, according to NPD reports.  Meanwhile the profit is getting sucked out of the rest of the PC business by netbooks and lower cost laptops.

Meanwhile, the AppleInsider has a really interesting comparison of the business models of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phone.  It points out that while Google’s model has some advantages, there are also some disadvantages – no control over the Android brand, for one, and lack of clear accountability to fix customer issues once they have an Android phone.  AppleInsider points out that one bad Android phone can tarnish the brand – which is true of the iPhone as well, but the difference is that Apple has control over what gets released with the iPhone brand, but Google can’t exercise the same kind of control over Android derivatives.  I can’t help but think that the fragmented market of Android phones will only be an advantage if collectively the phones can evolve faster and take advantage of new technology faster than Apple’s iPhones… but so far technology adoption hasn’t been the problem – user experience has been the problem.  And it seems like Apple still has the edge there.

So, when twitter turned up mentions of a new language from Google called Go, I was sure it was a prank.  I even looked at the calendar to see if it was some kind of day worthy of pranking the Internet at large.  After I saw a few more tweets and retweets about Go, I even clicked the link to see what it took me to (honestly, try searching for “Go” sometime… you would think the people at Google would understand that a common two letter word may not be a great search term…).

So I read the FAQ on the “Go” site here.  Despite my better judgment I do like some of the conventions and minimalism they’ve adopted, such as having postfix, but not prefix notation for incrementing.  And there were a few statements that *really* hit home for me, like this one:

Another point is that a large part of the difficulty of concurrent and multi-threaded programming is memory management; as objects get passed among threads it becomes cumbersome to guarantee they become freed safely. Automatic garbage collection makes concurrent code far easier to write. Of course, implementing garbage collection in a concurrent environment is itself a challenge, but meeting it once rather than in every program helps everyone.

Finally, concurrency aside, garbage collection makes interfaces simpler because they don’t need to specify how memory is managed across them.

They’ve articulated a key principle of their approach - that they are solving something that is a hard problem, not because it is hard, but because it is hard and useful to the end users (other programmers).  They are faced with a choice of solving that problem once in the language (implementing good, efficient garbage collection), or implementing it myriad times in the programs written with this language (a la C and C++).  Hard problems that have a lot of re-use and benefit are worth solving.

If we look at a good BPMS, it serves some of the same function – handling parallelism, memory management, and other key software architecture concerns for the business process author – in order to allow the author to focus more clearly on solving the business problem. BPMS offerings largely have a lot of room to improve on all these fronts – but they’re still the best thing we have for a “language” that fits the “problem” (despite rules vendors’ claims to the contrary).

I’m often faced with a problem that lends itself to being solved once, well – or many times, poorly.  And often the software engineers of our world tell me “yes, but that’s hard, and not on the road map.”  A great example of this is date calculations that transparently do things like comparing, navigating timezones, calculating differences, navigating business days (and calendars), etc.  A better example is robust versioning for complex assets like business process models which include all the implementation details.

Other “features” that caught my eye in Go:

• No generic types.  No exceptions.  They admit they don’t have a good solution yet, so they don’t slap a band-aid on it.  Try not to write code that breaks.
• No type inheritance.  A type is more like an “interface” – where any object that implements the methods the type requires are, by definition, “of that type”.  This reminds me a bit of protocols in objective-C, but without the necessity of pre-defining the relationships (technically, you can define and compile-and-link later in objective-C but that’s another story).
• No overloading.  Never in the history of software engineering has a more useless and anti-performant feature been introduced at a language level.  Nice to see another language that forgoes operator overloading.

Of course, this minimalism will be tested with time – especially if the audience of Go users expands – or if the language is handed over to a standards body full of people who really have it as an interest to keep tweaking the language (a la Java and C++) – over time making it increasingly complicated.

In the meantime, I’m just happy to be pleasantly surprised that this supposed prank has some decent substance.  Did Google really need to design a new language to handle concurrency and other large-scale problems well?  I can’t say for sure, but at least once going down that road they’ve made some promising early design decisions: focusing on the key, differentiated problems their solving, and postponing or not solving areas that are not directly related.

Continuing on an economic theme within our blog, topical due to the economic challenges and BPM’s relevancy to those challenges, here’s another offering along those lines.  A recent McKinsey Quarterly article discusses a new “managed services business model” that helps both customers and employees of offshore service providers.   The thesis of the article is that the recession has created competitive pressures for the offshoring business that are starting to separate winners from losers.  Allegedly, these new winners are focusing on the quality of services rather than on the cost-per-head, focusing on collaboration with clients, and are gaining more control over outsourcing strategies.

However, out in the field in the US, I haven’t seen this separation of wheat from chaff – I see the pressure, but the manifestation of that pressure still seems to be most clear with respect to cost discussions.  Although in some cases contract language has changed to focus on deliverables rather than cost-per-head – those deliverable-based contracts are merely reinventing the wheel of the old fixed-bid-contract -putting more risk on these IT offshoring companies to deliver, or else face punitive measures from their customers.  In the short term these fixed-bid strategies will likely pay off.  But without a superior delivery capability, fixed-bid offerings that win on price over time-and-material offerings, tend to produce lower margins or negative margins – risk has simply been transferred from one party to the other, with no additional compensation.

Worse news, this transfer of risk hasn’t historically proven to increase the probability of successful projects.  And there is no reason to think the results will be different this time.

The second thesis of the article is that the winners are developing deep talent pools that global clients demand, and developing progressive techniques to manage and retain these workers.  While I’ll concede that this may be true in some areas, I have not seen evidence of this in BPM.  This isn’t just my American perspective, when I’ve had informal conversations with BPM practitioners in other countries – in Europe, South America, and the Middle East – they all tell me that they can’t imagine doing BPM well without being close to the client on a regular basis.  When I ask them how successful they’ve been at leveraging offshore talent the answers have not been promising.  The chief complaint is the lack of understanding of business, of process, and of how to manage a project with requirements that are not set in concrete for the duration of the project.

Unfortunately media outlets and analysts routinely over-estimate the talent to be found in faraway places that can be plugged into Global or US companies’ projects, while under-estimating the talent to be found right in these companies’ backyards.  It makes for good print, and there are a lot of executives who will make these points to the media.  But it is a lot easier to say that you’re offshoring work because you “can’t find enough talent” than it is to say that you’re offshoring the work because “local talent is more expensive”.  I’m not making a moral argument against offshoring, but I think if the discussion was more honest, some of the hype could be reduced.  There is a global shortage of talent for BPM deployments and other important work in IT and process improvement.  And the nature of the work doesn’t lend itself to being separated by great differences in time and space.

The part that I think McKinsey got right is that the competitive advantage of “cheaper labor” has nearly run its course as cheap skilled labor becomes more scarce, and as customers become more discriminating.  Jaisundar writes a parable of this problem in The Corrosion of Competitive Advantage.  After reading the narrative, Jaisundar turns to a couple of very interesting facts:

1. IT has “sharpened” (increased) differences among companies rather than reducing them.  And yet conventional wisdom is that technology renders differentiated products and services into commodities.  The conventional wisdom is wrong because the pace of change favors those organizations that can adopt and leverage technology fastest and best.
2. The competitive shakeup in the US is intense, but may only be beginning in many other economies.

There are some fantastic lessons for Indian IT service firms in this article, but many of them apply in hotly contested markets in the US as well.  The key thing is that superficial changes (blue hat, anyone?) will not win the day in the long run.  The competitive advantages that will win in the long run are the values and culture and skills that run deep in your organization, and the way you surface those attributes to your customers via core business processes that make up the “customer experience.”

I just read an article in Fortune Magazine (my favorite offline read for flights or other times when I can’t be online), in which Michael Copeland argues that we need a revamping of the computing of autos.  As he points out, GPS and voice-recognition and even bluetooth phone integration are so last decade already (hey, we’re only two months from 2010!).

He makes the case that autos need to be providing much more robust application capabilities, along with an app store for buying applications for your car.  He refers to cars as one of the most popular mobile devices (well, mobile and motive, actually).  As such, “automakers need to start acting more like consumer electronics companies if they don’t want to cede one of their last great opportunities to Apple, Research in Motion, or Google.” And then… “More screens are showing up in automobiles.  Wouldn’t it be great if those screens became home to a flood of car-appropriate applications?”

The short answer is, no.  At least, not if these applications are delivered the way in-dash navigation computers were delivered to autos over the last decade.  I recall when I bought my last car.  During a stop at the Acura dealership to check out the TSX and TL, the salesperson gave me a long pitch regarding the resale value of a car with navigation.  As I recall him saying then: “These days, people just expect a navigation system in their car.  If you’re trying to sell a used car without that navigation system in 2 years, the resale value just won’t be there as much.”  Well.  I have a different opinion.  Find a friend with a 5 year old car with a built-in navigation system.  Those systems look comical today compared to a modern Garmin or TomTom or Magellan handheld system, and they make the car look dated and unsophisticated.  Moreover, the cost even just 3 years ago was approximately $2000 for that navigation system option package.  An off-the-shelf portable GPS navigation system was barely $250 even then, and much better devices are available for similar prices now…

I think the auto computer is like the old car phones.  They were vastly overpriced, and antiquated long before the car stopped being drivable, because the pace of technology changes for cellular phones was so much faster than the pace of change for cars.  Fast forward to the 2000′s.  The pace of change in navigation systems has dramatically outpaced the change in cars.  The pace of change in phones has outpaced both the rate of change in cars *and* the rate of change of navigation systems – to the extent that if you buy an iPhone or Android phone today, it can be your navigation system.  That in-dash navigation system is already a dinosaur if you bought it yesterday, and it will only look worse as time goes on.

No, give me a car where the technology is completely transparent to me as a driver.  Bluetooth integration and voice recognition is a good example.  If it goes out of vogue, I can shut it off, and there will be no visible sign of its antiquity.  Technology to improve my driving experience is transparent to me.  A better radio (satellite or otherwise) is largely transparent as long as the interface can still be a relatively basic digital or analog display.  I once drove a BMW z4 that had this aesthetic just right – knobs instead of buttons where ever possible, and a very subtle “computer” on the instrument panel whose sole purpose was to tell me stats about mileage and maintenance.  That car’s dash will look good 20 years from now.  Had I bought that Acura TL or TSX 3 years ago, I’d no doubt be kicking myself now, because my phone does all that.  And because the GPS would soon look like Atari Pong.

I think the right answer for Autos is technology enablement.  To the extent possible, expose APIs for interesting diagnostic information that could be displayed by third party devices or applications.  Provide a standard space on the dash that could hold a third-party or after-market device for displaying such stats. Build an upgradeable platform into your vehicles so that the parts that have a high rate of change can be inexpensively swapped out as technology improves – with the dealership network and car companies taking a slice of the revenues every time customers go through the upgrade cycles.  If you want to provide technology baked into the driving or passenger experience, make it transparent, and make it trend-friendly by doing a little future-proofing. Auto manufacturers have to remember the upgrade cycle for cars is a lot longer than for computers (9-11 years versus 2-3 years for computers and similar devices), and the designs of technology in automobiles just have to take this into account in order to preserve style and resale value down the road.

Unfortunately, if the car phones and navigation systems are any guide – when (if) we do get an App store for automobiles, it will cost $2000 for the option to make it available, and about $500 per application.  Let’s hope this time the car guys get it right! (And let’s hope the tech is transparent… otherwise we’ll see more texting-style car accidents)

There was a pretty interesting case study for process collaboration shared on the Lombardi wiki recently.  Worth a quick read.  Tools like Blueprint are going to make this kind of story increasingly common.  Mostly people think of these BPM SaaS Collaboration tools as internal consensus builders, but in this case they’re using Blueprint to create consensus outside the four walls of the company, and to communicate or broadcast information as well.

With the new notification features in Blueprint, this will be an even easier use – I get quick summary emails of changes made in processes or projects that I’m watching.  Its a quick way to keep tabs on what’s going on, and fits SEARHC’s use case perfectly.

Also, I note on Lombardi’s blog that they have two finalists in the 2009 Global BPM Excellence Awards.   Congratulations to Lombardi and their customers on the achievement.

Read a fantastic article on the business insider about leadership, as written from the perspective of two gentlemen who served in Iraq as infantry officers in the Marine Corps.

The quick highlights:

1. Respect your people, your team.  But then they go on to give actionable advice as to how to demonstrate the respect you have for your team.
2. Honor performance, and performers.  When you send the message that people don’t matter, or can’t excel, then you’ll find that no one excels.
3. Listen.  But then they go on to explain this in an eye opening way- “Listen aggressively”.
4. Know how to give an order.
5. Don’t be afraid to lead.
6. Inspect what you expect from your team.  This is a bit like the measure what you want to improve axiom of process improvement.
7. Be clear about what you want.
8. Get over yourself.  You’re not THAT great.
9. Stand by the changes you implement, to make sure that they “take”.
10. Develop subordinates who understand the same things.

Good stuff.  The anecdotes that go with these points are well worth the read. We are constantly reminding people that the biggest requirement for BPM success is leadership.  It takes leadership to effect change.  It takes leadership to get any project to the goal line.  So many of the common reasons that people cite for IT, or BPM, failures, really just boil down to leadership, experience, or both.

If you haven’t used the site, hunch, you might want to give it a look.  Its pretty interesting, as it attempts to crowdsource decisions.  Hunch also does a pretty good job of anticipating your answers to questions based on your previous answers to questions.

Recently Chris Dixon made available a blog widget which can help you understand your readership demographics a bit better (assuming the readers participate!).  I thought I’d give it a try…

Of course, I see some interesting possibilities for crowdsourcing vendor selection (BPM vendors), or philosophical debates like BPM vs. Business Rules. So I seeded a starting point, that is on Hunch now.  I need to finish adding vendors to it, and I need help from others to add more results, train the results, and add more questions!  (Anyone can login and add questions and results so please contribute! If we get enough contributions and training in, then this decision tree may have statistical significance )

Here’s the link to the BPMS decision helper…

Following up on yesterday’s announcement of bpmCamp, here are the most crucial details for bpmCamp, to answer the most obvious questions you might be asking.  There are many more details to come, and all of this information will find its way into a bpmCamp landing page soon enough.

When is bpmCamp?

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating.  We’ve selected a date for the first one:  January 28-29, 2010. Mark your calendars.

We hope to host additional bpmCamp events in the future, but this is the inaugural event. 

Where is the First bpmCamp? Who is the host?
Having the right host and location for any activity is crucial.  And having the right setting can really frame an event and set a backdrop for a good collaborative and rejuvenating experience.  I think that we have scored on both counts with our hosts for the inaugural bpmCamp.

I’m very proud to announce our host for bpmCamp:  Stanford University -  specifically, the Stanford SeRA BPM team. I’ve previously blogged about their potential contributions to the BPM community.  We share a vision of a more collaborative and communicative practitioner community and this is our collective attempt to initiate something that can really improve all of our efforts with BPM.

Lee and his boss Minh Nguyen are graciously donating the use of a beautiful conference setting for this event,* including A/V and wireless Internet.  We’ll send out exact location details as we get closer to the event, but our tentative location includes a fully equipped room and two fully-equipped breakout rooms.  The outdoor space surrounding is beautiful, and Stanford isn’t the kind of place that gets snow in January.  We couldn’t be happier about the location, and we couldn’t be happier about the spirit of collaboration and community our hosts and location will help foster for this event.

We’ll follow up with information about transportation logistics, hotel options, and other sundry details as we get closer to the event date, but in plenty of time to make plans with that information. Stanford has excellent transportation and lodging facilities surrounding it, so we’ll have some top notch options available to us.

*The free space is limited, however, and if we outgrow it based on interest, we’ll have to either limit attendance or explore other options on campus that will cost a bit more. Also, bpmCamp is not *sponsored* by Stanford – but Stanford is hosting the event, donating use of facilities, and Stanford BPM community members will be full participants in the event – Stanford is not endorsing the products or services of any of the sponsors or attendees of bpmCamp.

Where is the Landing Page?
The landing page for bpmCamp will be coming soon.  We’ll send out pointers to it when it is up.  In the meantime, you can keep up with announcements by following the RSS feed for the bp3 blog, or by bookmarking posts tagged with bpmCamp.

Who’s Invited to bpmCamp?
The goal is to have a high-quality gathering of people who know the products well and are looking to collaborate and exchange ideas with peers and colleagues.  We’re inviting customer / users of Lombardi products (Teamworks and Blueprint) who participate in deployments to attend, and we’re extending an invitation to Lombardi to participate as well.  If you’re a Lombardi or bp3 partner interested in attending/sponsoring the unconference / bpmCamp, please reach out to us at the email address below.  If you’re an analyst or blogger and you think bpmCamp would benefit from your attendance, contact us.  If you don’t fit any of the above descriptions but still want to attend, drop us a line with your thoughts.  All attendees will need to register, once the registration site goes live.  If you’re interested in receiving an invitation to register, send us email at the bpmCamp email address.

How to contact us:
The best way is via the bpmCamp email address:

I want to Sponsor bpmCamp – how can I help?
If you think your organization would be interested in being a sponsor for bpmCamp, please contact us at the above email address and let us know you’re interested.

How Much Does it Cost to Attend?
We do expect to charge an attendance fee, which I believe is a departure from typical unconference protocol, but we’re doing so for a couple of reasons.  First, we have limited space, and we want to make sure attendees are serious about coming.  Second, if we need to go to a larger back-up space, that may require additional expenses (which attendance fees would defray).  We have a nominal fee in mind – primarily to cover catering meals- and are in the process of proving out the budget.  As soon as that process is complete, we’ll update with pricing information.  I don’t want to publish tentative numbers, but if you need to know ballpark just drop us a line and I’ll tell you privately what our working numbers are.

What will bpmCamp Cover?
We will beat the drum for topics and themes that we think will resonate.  However, we want this conference to cover topics that YOU care about.  In particular, we want to crowd-source topics for the event so that we can make sure we cover topics that attendees really care about.  The expectation is that the setting will be ripe for interaction among attendees during the sessions – that very few of the sessions will be presentation form rather than a loosely-moderated-discussion format.  However, we think it likely that attendees will be interested in a keynote address or two with Q&A to follow.  What kinds of things are fair game, you may be asking?  How about:

• Building Teamworks Coaches with YUI or GWT?
• Actual use of Optimizer in the wild?
• How to make Teamworks scale Really Big?
• Design reviews of actual Teamworks Processes?
• Making my Waterfall organization more Agile/Iterative?
• Tools for managing BPM projects (something better than MS Project??)
• <fill in the blank!>

We’ll have room for breakout sessions to accommodate more than one interest at a time.

Who is Coming?
We’ll release information about attendees and speakers as we get closer to the event date.  Expect the bp3 team and the Stanford SeRA team to be there!

Why focus on a single vendor? Why not another BPM product? Is this a Lombardi-sponsored Event?
In short, we want the specificity and detail that we can get from a single-vendor conference, but the independence of a crowdsourced event.  bpmCamp isn’t sponsored nor endorsed by Lombardi.   We chose Lombardi products because it is the BPM suite, and community, that we have the most extensive contacts with (and because we had already decided that a single-vendor conference could be interesting).

While we’ve worked with other tools and vendors, our network is not as deep in those communities.  If you work with another software vendor or geographic location and you’d like our help to run a similar event with you, get in touch with us, perhaps we can help.

(editor’s note: bpmCamp is not affiliated with or sponsored by Lombardi.  bp3 is not acting on Lombardi’s behalf, nor is bp3 an affiliate nor subsidiary of Lombardi. )

Background: BPM Conferences Are Good…
Conferences are a great way for colleagues and peers to network, share best practices, and re-energize and re-motivate their efforts.  In particular we’ve enjoyed participating and presenting at Lombardi’s Driven conferences in the past, and at bp3 we’ve attended Lombardi Driven, Appian’s conference, OMG’s Thinktank, Gartner BPM, and Forrester BPM conferences (when we weren’t too busy with customers).  Conferences have some of the value of an off-site meeting within the company: recharging the batteries and motivating action.  But they also provide a chance to be exposed to much more diverse points of view, to out-of-the-box thinking, to new tricks of the trade, and to new market dynamics.  In smaller conferences, or small breakout sessions, real discussions break out that can really be illuminating (OMG’s Round Table format is a well-known example of formalizing this kind of small-discussion format, and it led to the six barriers to BPM Adoption at a very humorous and educational round table that I was fortunate to attend).

…but Missing the Mark.
There are just a couple of problems.  First, conferences run by Analyst firms and Conference organizers are often too expensive (especially with today’s budgets).  Second, vendor conferences are too focused on the sponsoring vendor’s messaging, and often neglect the real needs of attendees. Attendees to both types of conferences get value, but I often hear them expressing an interest in getting into more detail – moving past concept to tactics.  Moving past platitudes to showing real solutions.

Its our belief that it is just too hard to get into the specifics and details in a multi-vendor conference.  Even with respect to project methodology, the *right* approach to a project has to take into account the realities of the technology being used.  If you’re using a BPM tool that doesn’t provide rapid UI prototyping, you’ll need a different approach to your project than someone using a BPM tool that does provide rapid UI prototyping.  And that’s just one trivial example.  When we get down to sharing technical best practices, going cross-vendor just doesn’t make much sense- BPM execution level detail simply isn’t that portable.

…So What’s the Answer?
If we put together a conference that is focused on what attendees want to talk about, we’ll get more value for the dollar.  If we aren’t looking to clear a profit on the event, we can lower the investment barrier required to attend.  If we focus on a single vendor, we can focus all the way down to shared source code if it has value. To that end, we’re going to borrow from concepts pioneered by unconferences and barCamps, leveraging advice from folks who put on the SXSWi barcamp in the past.

With preamble aside, I’m very happy to announce what I believe to be a first:  a BPM unconference for BPM practitioners of a single product suite.  We’re calling it bpmCamp.

This first event is focused on users of Lombardi‘s Teamworks or Blueprint products.  We’re focusing on this community because it is the set of products and practitioner community that we have the deepest connections into, and because we want the event to be a single BPM product event for the reasons stated above.

Why bpmCamp?

We really think the BPM community/ecosystem needs events like this to foster growth, success, and maturity.  We believe maturity requires:

• technical breadth and depth
• project methodologies to support the roll-out of processes and improvements to those processes
• process improvement techniques and strategies that can actually be implemented and maintained in BPM suites

Also, we actually want to learn something new.  When we get the right  practitioners in a room, we’re going to learn from them, and help propagate those best practices into the BPM ecosystem.  We’re also going to share what we know from prior experience directly with the conference.  This cross-pollination is good for everyone.

Finally, we decided to put action behind our words.  We’ve long agitated politely for more tactical, focused topics at BPM conferences, but we’ve reached the point where it is time for us to contribute back to the community by creating an intimate event that fosters that kind of discussion.

When is bpmCamp?

We’ve selected a date for the first one:  January 28-29, 2010. Mark your calendars.

We hope to host additional bpmCamp events in the future, but this is the inaugural event, and it should be special.  Please watch this blog as we’ll put up an F.A.Q. as soon as tomorrow with more details.

If you have any questions in the meantime, contact us at:
bpmCamp Email: 

(editor’s note: bpmCamp is not affiliated with or sponsored by Lombardi.  bp3 is not acting on Lombardi’s behalf, nor is bp3 an affiliate nor subsidiary of Lombardi. )

I’ve previously written about various Google Wave blogs and the SAP Gravity Demo, and continuing on that theme, Jacob Ukelson asks whether Google Wave is good enough to become a disruptive force as a “good-enough” BPMS, on the ActionBase blog.

I think there’s no question that Google’s Wave could serve as a “good enough” BPMS for many collaborative, informal, or as-yet-unstructured processes.  It could also serve as a useful collaboration companion to structured process.  One need look no further than two examples from IT history, which are still with us in many enterprises and in many processes:

• Microsoft Excel
• IBM’s Lotus Notes
• Microsoft Sharepoint

After several years of doing “kill-the-fax” initiatives, businesses turned their attention to these other bastions of bad process – Excel, Notes, and Sharepoint.  We’ve done so many projects to replace Microsoft Excel-based processes and Lotus Notes-based processes that we’ve lost count – and often we’re brought in to save a process that is running on Sharepoint.  I wish we had kept statistics on this as it would make for interesting trending data now that we have a large enough sample size.

Google Wave, if it addresses the various security concerns for storing proprietary information outside the firewall, could very well get adopted for informal processes – especially when the participants and managers of the process have not yet come to think of it as a process.  We could refer to these as emergent processes.  Perhaps the first time you do it, you don’t know if it is a one-off or a process.  After you’ve done it a few times, you have a sense that it is process.  After you’ve done it a few thousand times, you start to wonder how you can do this process more efficiently or less often…

However, Jacob goes further than to suggest that Google Wave would disrupt these more entrenched technologies’ use as a poor man’s BPMS.  He suggests that with a few minor enhancements it could fully replace a “full fledged BPMS”.  I don’t see that happening anytime soon for a few reasons:

1. It isn’t really Google’s intent to build a BPMS.  They don’t think of the problem Wave is solving as a “process”.  As a result, they’re unlikely to take it in that direction.  I don’t think you end up with a good BPMS my accident.
2. The structured parts of process are actually useful for larger organizations that actually have that kind of structure or volume.
3. There is a lot of magic under the hood of a BPMS that wouldn’t be trivial to recreate using Wave.  Not impossible, just not trivial.  More likely is a mash-up approach like the SAP Gravity demonstration.
4. It still sits outside the firewall of the corporation, and for all too many companies, that is still a regulatory problem, not to mention a security problem, for their data.

Having said all of that, Google Wave presents itself as an alternative for collaborating on processes to email, Sharepoint, Excel, and Notes.  I also think the real disruptive threat that Wave poses in the BPM space is to vendors that focus exclusively on the unstructured, user-specified processes – these seem like the lowest hanging fruit to capture in Wave.  On the other hand, I can see Wave being fertile ground for tools that inspect your systems to find out what processes you’ve *actually* been running by inspecting the data, rather than starting with a top-down design.  These tools may have a massive new datasource to mine for their customers, assuming Google makes the data available.

A new article from TBIResearch concludes that employees are driving iPhone adoption in the enterprise.  This fits the anecdotal observations I’ve made about my own friends – that those who can choose, are largely choosing iPhones, and those who can’t, are largely using Blackberries.  Very few of my colleagues don’t have “smart phones” at this point.

TBI Research points out that this trend is important for Apple because the enterprise market is, so far, lightly penetrated by Apple and represents a huge market for their phones.  Often the “employees” driving the trend are executives that can force IT’s hand in supporting the phones.

TBI points out that the largest remaining barrier is Security.  Trumping that, in my opinion, is the utility of the iPhone and the many applications available.  If I were an industry analyst, I would tell you that there will be BPM apps available on the iPhone in 2010 (0.9 probability).

To further support that perspective, there are now reports that Apple will ship a CDMA compatible phone in late 2010.  The article makes some great arguments why Apple should be pursuing CDMA compatibility – primarily, its cheap, and it would enable them to compete for Verizon’s large customer base.