Process for the Enterprise

I See Business Professionals… Using BPMN

Scott Francis — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 05:11:47 +0000

So Jim Sinur really opened a can of worms the other day with his missive on BPMN, literally calling for it to burn baby burn – nothing like a gentle start like that to initiate a moderate discussion of the finer points of BPMN. I couldn’t help but respond both within his blog as well as on our own blog. I feel like Jim is letting the business off the hook – as he puts it – they don’t care about process, and they’re too busy making money to worry about process. I think this is a cop out. There is a comment thread on Jim’s blog that I’d recommend reading for the follow up discussion, and the original “burn baby burn” statement got walked back somewhat.

But the debate didn’t stay contained there. Keith Swenson chimed in, taking advantage of the opportunity to pile on BPMN. I can’t accept the black-and-white approach he is taking to the discussion, and so of course we had a bit of back-and-forth about whether BPMN is appropriate for no one in the business (his contention) or at least some people (my contention). I was challenged to name people within the business who read or write BPMN, which was quite easy to do, because this is the kind of stuff we do every day for work. I think the comment thread on his blog, and on Jim’s, or incredibly telling.

But there was also a great post from Neil Ward-Dutton on the subject, that captures my perspective perfectly:

Or – in other words perhaps – surely it’s not too much to ask non-IT participants in BPM initiatives to take a little time to learn some fairly straightforward modelling technniques?

From our case study work here I think what Scott is saying leads to a sensible, middle-ground answer – which is, that the applicability of BPMN depends on a number of factors; saying that BPMN (especially BPMN 2.0) either is, or is not, suitable for “the business” is too simplistic and black/white. It’s like saying Cloud Computing is the future of IT. Firstly it supposes that we have to talk about BPMN as an all-or-nothing proposition; secondly it supposes that “the business” is some kind of homogeneous organisation with one set of skills, experiences and inclinations.

I literally could not have said this better myself. He goes on to make another important point I agree with:

At the same time, though, there’s significant evidence to suggest that a core subset of BPMN symbols are absolutely usable by business analysts with experience in high-level analysis and design and provide great results in terms of delivering a common language across multi-disciplinary teams. I’ve come across many BAs who know and use (aspects of) BPMN as part of their armoury. They’re not “IT people” – they have business backgrounds and they work in line-of-business departments.

Great read from Neil.

In the comments on this one, Keith takes a nice shot at my assertion that understanding just a few BPMN shapes will allow you to read someone else’s thoughts on a process, or to communicate your own basic processes to others:

Also funny is the comment that learning six (or 7) shapes means that you understand the non-trivial interactions between those shapes at run time without needing the programmer’s insight into how systems function. That would be a little like saying that learning 26 letters makes you a Shakespeare, or able to read all western European languages. (But I must avoid use of similes since this apparently is sometimes confusing.) BPMN certainly is useful is some situations, it simply isn’t useful in all situations.

For the record, I don’t find Keith’s “similes” confusing at all. I find them inaccurate, misleading, and misrepresentative. And when we turn the analogy on its head, I think that proves how pointless they are. In practice, when people read Shakespeare they’re usually in school and get help from cliff’s notes, teachers, and fellow students. Not unlike those working with business processes and BPMN … and other tools (six sigma, lean, value stream, etc. ). Once again, I’ll point out that analogies are illustrative, they simply don’t constitute proof or refutation.

Jakob Freund of Camunda commented on Keith’s blog and summed up a reasonable reader’s interpretation of both Jim’s post and Keith’s post:

I think the main problem is that in both blog posts (Jim and yours) this very important distinction between “all” business professionals and “business (process) analysts” was not made. Analysts are not programmers but very often part of a business department, therefore a subset of “business professionals”. To throw all “business professionals” in one pot judging there skills in working with BPMN (or whatever) makes a good headline, but does not say anything useful.

Furthermore, there has not been made any distinction between “creating” and “reading” BPMN diagrams, and between the extremely different grades of complexity a process diagram can bear (please excuse my bad English).

But those are exactly the parameters you always have to look at when judging modeling approaches (no matter whether they are control flow – based, grids, prosa or what ever).

I guess it just comes down to this: BPMN is quite useful. It is even useful to people most of us would consider as “business professionals”. But there are other quite useful tools in our business process management space, and there’s no reason not to use each one when appropriate. I also recommend as practical reading, this post on practical application of BPMN by Jakob on his own Camunda blog. I liked how he closed his last comment:

cheers from my customer’s office in Germany (currently introducing BPMN in a 80k-people company, and huh, it works for Business people, but it’s bloody hard work to make that happen ).

Similarly, as I was writing on the same comment thread, I was about to head in to visit my customer, which also uses BPMN to communicate broad requirements between business stakeholders and IT. Regardless of what the theory says, the practical reality is our customers’ businesses are using this stuff.

Camps in Austin Still Going Strong

Scott Francis — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:56:04 +0000

An article in the Austin-American Statesman, not long ago, posited that there was, in 2010, a dearth of ‘camps, after a flurry of them in 2008 and 2009. However, a quick followup was penned by Omar Gallaga, about the fact that ProductCamp was still going strong. Mostly, Camps are free events sponsored in someone’s corporate offices or in a bar (thus the early “barCamp” labeling), and generally only target local attendees. But these events are hard work to put on:

Paul Young, who founded ProductCamp Austin, said many events modeled after the same concept simply petered out for lack of interest or organization. “They show up, run their cycles, then die out,” Young said. “I think the reason that happens is that people are surprised for an ‘unconference’ how much coordination it actually takes to put an event on.

I think people are also surprised how difficult it is to pull off a free event!

We’re proud to be having bpmCamp in Austin as well. While we couldn’t pull it off as a free event, we are keeping it as affordable as possible, while still making the event attractive enough for people to travel to Austin to attend. We also freely admit that we need to produce some of the content up front for similar reasons, rather than doing it all on the fly – but we’ll also keep time (and rooms) available for impromptu sessions that weren’t thought of ahead of time.

If you are interested, the registration page is right here. You just need to be a Lombardi BPM practitioner to attend.

Camunda and Activiti collaborate on Activiti Cycle

Scott Francis — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:53:19 +0000

If I know Tom Baeyens, he’s pretty happy with this blog post announcing the collaboration of Activiti and Camunda on “Activiti Cycle”. Previously, Camunda had announced Camunda Fox, a set of tools to help accelerate using open source software for BPM, while pursuing business-IT alignment. Cycle has been proposed as the name for the collaborative authoring of Activiti processes, and Camunda has now become the lead developer on that feature set. This sounds like a win-win for both organizations.

Apparently BPMN is Too Hard

Scott Francis — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:47:23 +0000

Jim Sinur has thrown in the towel on BPMN in his latest post:

BPMN for business professionals is just not up to a business level of need. Some folks think that BPMN is good enough for IT and it should be good enough for business professionals. I think the former is true, but the latter is way off the mark.

BPMN really stands for “Business People May Not…understand”

IT professionals can’t really expect business folks to understand cryptic/standard formats when they really want to see a real representation of their processes with desirable icons; not engineering Icons. It’s kind of like someone saying “let them eat cake”. It is this IT arrogance that could sink BPM technologies.

Respectfully, I think Jim is letting the business off the hook. No need to learn any new skills over there on the business side, just draw something on a napkin and hope it turns into a process. Just make up any old iconography you want, no problem if no one other than you can understand it (you know, the value of standards is that more than one person or team can understand what is produced). Don’t bother to learn something that is about 10% harder than standard flowcharting (Bruce Silver has helpfully identified a subset of BPMN that is more appropriate for new-to-BPMN business users).

At a time when we’re asking IT to learn new skills and to be more business oriented, is it too much to ask Business to learn new skills to support process improvement? This isn’t unique to BPM – if the business is going to support ACM, they’re going to have to learn new tools for that as well. If the full BPMN icon set is too much for someone, use the subset that you understand and like to document your ideas, and make use of annotation. If someone shows you a diagram with more icons in it that you don’t follow, it should be straight forward to get an explanation or to look up the new notations you aren’t familiar with. While Jim may not be a fan of standardization of notation – business folks are plenty used to standards of notation (not just in BPMN). I use BPMN basic diagramming shapes to whiteboard processes for businesses all the time (literally on the whiteboard or in collaborative tools) – and they don’t have any trouble following what’s going on.

The problem isn’t that BPMN, as a notation, is too hard. It is that too many people think that BPM starts and stops with BPMN! There is so much more to managing business processes, and improving them, than BPMN. By way of comparison, think about search. Search is a highly technical subject with a very rigorous syntax. But nearly everyone can take advantage of its more simplistic forms – just typing in a few keywords into a Google search field. It doesn’t mean that they can’t understand a more complex query string when they see it, nor guess at the meaning of a phrase surrounded by quotes… nor understand the resulting page of search results (the outcome). In fact, if they find their need for search becoming more complex, they can actually endeavor to learn the more advanced forms (domain filtering, exclusion, wildcards, etc).

So let’s all agree that there is much that must be done in the world of BPM to address businesses better, but tossing out BPMN and letting business off the hook is hardly the solution. One need look no further than a tool like IBM’s BPM Blueprint to see that you can ease the business into BPMN style notation by first having them engage in process mapping or value stream mapping. You don’t have to throw out BPMN to do this. At the first company I worked for, we used to like to quote a line from a business book: “Genius of the ‘And’” – as in, why can’t I have both a simpler mapping notation, and a more detailed process execution notation that make sense together – instead of only one or the other?

It is time for everyone to step up to the plate in BPM, not just the software vendors. BPMN is part of the answer, but only part.

Business Leaders: BPM Wants You

Scott Francis — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:53:12 +0000

The Problem

A good friend, John Reynolds, has eloquently commented on a subject near and dear to my heart: Leadership. More specifically, Project Leadership vs. Project Management:

My job lets me work with talented programmers and business people all over the world. These folks all know their jobs – the programmers know how to write good code and the business folks know how to run their business – but when you bring them together they often can’t get a project finished.

The objective of all projects is to deploy Business Solutions. Requirements grow up to be Plans, Plans grow up to be Projects, but many Projects just don’t grow up to be Solutions. Like the Energizer Bunny, these Projects just keep going and going and going… but they never get anywhere.

I blame a lack of leaders.

John has captured the essence of the problem. The projects that become successful solutions have leadership. And this is something we’ve written about quite a bit. BPM especially requires leadership because you’re asking different constituencies to play nice together, despite the fact that the changes wrought by BPM will have uneven benefits and consequences. The leader can coerce, cajole, persuade, confront… and can bring the resources and willpower to the project to get it done.

Leaders: Born or Made?

I fear that leaders are born, not made (although training certainly helps improve them). When a project is stalled, a hero can’t just “take charge” and get a project back on track. Leaders aren’t leaders without followers.

There have been many variants of this debate with regard to athletes, entrepreneurs, CEOs, leaders. I come down on the side of nurture more than nature. I’ll not deny that we are each born inheriting our own gifts, bestowed by our parents. But how we develop and hone those gifts and shore up weaknesses it what makes us the adults and professionals we grow to be.

A Solution?
How do we develop leaders? We might first ask, how do we develop heroes?

Step 1: expose your high potential team members to people you consider to be heroes. Let them work in the proximity of great contributors to learn what it means to be a great contributor. Try to awaken in them an awareness of what it is that makes the hero admirable, and an awareness that they, too, could be a “hero”. Work with them to leverage their strengths. Let them learn by following the example set by your heroes. Give them opportunities to succeed AND fail.

If I can distinguish between a hero and a leader – a good hero “leads by example” – not by consciously thinking about leading, but by doing all the things that we would want others on the team to do. They work hard, they are focused on what’s good for the team, the project, the company. They care about their colleagues and will help them.

The first step in evolving a leader from a hero, is to create self-consciousness (let me explain). We have to wake in the hero, that self-awareness that they can lead intentionally, rather than unconsciously. The key difference is intention. A leader intends to have the effect of leading others. A hero may lead others but isn’t intending to do so, and may even be alarmed and uncomortable when it happens. There is a fear of responsibility, fear of failure, fear of letting others down. If you want to foster that leader, give them the opportunity to succeed and fail. And invest in teaching what you expect from leaders, and what their team will expect. It takes a fair bit of coaching or self-awareness, but people can learn to lead. I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve seen it happen even within our own projects among the customers we work with. Soon, someone walking the path to becoming a leader, acting with intention, will learn from the feedback loop of consequences. They’re on the path.

This is important because, for BPM to continue to grow and succeed, we need a lot of leadership.

John has a few more important points to make:

What we need are Project Leads… People who command the respect of both the Business and Technical folks. We need people who have met both Business and Technical challenges in their careers, and who can show all of us “how to get there”…

That’s why we lack leaders for our projects. There simply aren’t many Business people in the world who are respected by Techies, and not many Techies in the world who are respected by Business people.

This is not by any means an easy problem to solve – but if we want success for more of our projects, we need to find more of these leaders.

This is why, at BP3, we have tended to focus on developing our technical heroes into leaders who care about business. But we also try to make sure that they understand the value that business leadership brings to the table, so that we’re ready to embrace it when we find it within our team or within our customers’ and partners’ teams. I agree with John: not an easy problem to solve, but sometimes the ones that are worth solving aren’t easy.

“It Just Confirms I’m as Smart as I Thought I Was”

Scott Francis — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 12:48:24 +0000

So the new Forrester Wave is out. What’s that? you hadn’t heard? If not, you haven’t talked to anyone in the analyst or BPM vendor community in the last 24 hours!

As usual, there are a raft-load of vendors declaring victory:

Appian: “Appian Still Leading the Pack”

Pega: “Pegasystems ranked #1 as one of two BPM vendors that ‘lead the pack with the best overall combination of modeling, design and development features for business and technical roles driving process improvement’ “ (bonus, their article includes the image of the Wave graphic itself)

Metastorm: “Metastorm Recognized as a Leader in Business Process Management Suites Report…”

IBM has several congratulatory tweets about being in the leader quadrant, but I haven’t seen a press release yet.

Judging by the wave, I should be able to add links to Progress and Software AG press releases or blog posts by this time tomorrow.

Every one of these vendors will crow that the analysts have confirmed that they’re as smart as they thought they were – that they’re leaders (or even, “number 1″).

So, I’ll let you in on a little secret. The Wave won’t tell you which BPMS makes the most sense for you. Some of these offerings are actually so different that they rarely, if ever, compete for the same customer projects, and often corporations own more than one product because they aren’t viewed as doing the same thing. For example, Appian’s strength in SaaS means that will compete more often for SaaS deployments – the decision “to SaaS or not to SaaS” was probably made before any vendors were called. Metastorm’s strength in EA may play well with customers who are doing a lot of modeling, but for projects that are more focused on implementation, or who already own other EA tools, that offering won’t be as compelling as something more targeted at executing processes. Even Pega (apparently depicted as #1 on the Wave), isn’t as often in competition for general-purpose BPM platform purchases – they tend to be in the finals for more vertical processes, where their investment in specific templates or verticals or applications can really pay off. A friend once described Pega as more a company that sells rules- and BPM- enabled applications, rather than BPM itself (it wasn’t a criticism, my friend thought it was good strategy for the company).

Of course the meat of these things is in the written words inside the report, but it is hard to get there when there is that tasty graphic that everyone can look at. I wonder what would happen if Forrester withheld the scoring and the graphic for a couple of weeks, and just revealed the more in-depth analysis. Another interesting data point would be the number of times (that Forrester can determine) any two vendors were finalists in the same evaluation – which would allow for a 2×2 grid/heatmap that shows you who is competing with whom. I was happy to see Forrester give up on separating BPM into various different flavors of BPM – that approach never really worked for me, personally.

So everyone is happy now. But in the morning, we’ll humbly get back to work and get some processes built and deployed, and improve some processes. Which is, after all, the whole point of BPM.

Update: as expected, a few announcements today:

Software AG announces their leadership status here.

And Progress’ blog entry can be found here.

Capital Factory’s Demo Day, 2010

Scott Francis — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:15:08 +0000

Austin Startup has just run a piece on the 2nd Annual Capital Factory Demo Day:

The 2nd Capital Factory Demo Day is coming on September 8th. We will have 300 investors, press, and technology entrepreneurs in attendance to watch the launch of the 5 companies from our 2010 program. This is an invitation-only event, and we’re keeping the quality of the content and the networking as high as possible.

I went last year, and I found it interesting to witness, essentially, part of a process for bringing new companies to market. The event was surprisingly good, the startups were surprisingly good, and the discussions were pretty interesting. It sets a high bar for the second event. I think there’s no doubt that Capital Factory and the Demo Day event have been good for the Austin startup scene, though the organizers will be the first to admit that this approach isn’t for every startup, or every entrepreneur.

I plan to be there again this year, schedule willing.

CrunchBase Information

Capital Factory

Information provided by CrunchBase

Who Shall Champion Process Management?

Scott Francis — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:19:32 +0000

Ann All poses the question: “Is CIO the Right Person to Champion Process Improvement?” on the ITBusinessEdge Blog:

I’ve written about this idea several times. It’s hard to argue against the need for a chief process officer. Yetmany organizations do not designate a specific function for process improvement. What’s less clear is who is best positioned to fill this role. Vizard writes it “may be the chief operating officer or even the CIO.”

I think a good case can be made for the CIO. Because IT touches the entire business, the CIO has a high-level, cross-functional view of the organization shared by few other executives. IT also tends to have more hands-on experience modeling and mapping processes than other areas of the business. CIOs clearly recognize the need for process improvement. They named business process improvement their top priority for 2010 in Gartner’s annual survey.

Honestly, I’ll take anyone at the C-level or just below who is passionate about process improvement and empowered to make a difference. Having *someone* take the lead is better than no one at all. And in some organizations, which are heavy on IT to support the business, the CIO may be particularly well positioned (as his or her staff may know many of the business processes as well or better than the business folks who use the software, because the processes are already “encoded” in legacy systems).

However, Ann goes further in her post:

Samir Gulati, vice president of marketing for business process management software provider Appian, is another believer that a CIO or other senior IT executive is the right person to champion BPM throughout an organization. Business leaders tend to focus narrowly on the needs of their own divisions and opt for point solutions, he said when I interviewed him recently.

A lot of software companies prefer for BPM to be led by IT. Why? Because when it is led by IT they can go for the strategic sale: buy this software and you can apply it to all of your processes that come up! Many IT organizations look at this a bit like setting up a utility: we’re providing “electricity” (BPM), so that the business can turn on the lights, computers, etc (improve process). Its a comfortable relationship for software folks to build with IT organizations. Speeds and Feeds, features, bells and whistles. Comfortably avoiding too much discussion of business-oriented ROI. Proving that the current topic is an emerging meme, Mark McDonald of Forrester has written about this subject as well, advocated for an expanded role for the CIO:

Well because no other executive is responsible for the long term operating model and no other executive has the resources that determine company productivity in the long run. IT is now a significant source of leverage across the enterprise as information spans operational groups and fuels processes, communications connects people and processes and technology offers new service channels and methods. and throng time.

But this doesn’t mean that the CIO is the ideal candidate in most organizations to lead process improvements. First of all, the most important criteria are not which three letters make up the title. The most important criteria are specific to the person: passion, empowerment, and capability. Put another way, the most important criteria is leadership, and these three elements tie into the ability to lead an organizational change.

I believe a broader study of BPM would support the empirical data that we have at BP3 that organizations that lead BPM initiatives from the business generally yield higher ROI, tackle more processes, and roll them out more quickly. Perhaps the secret sauce is that the projects are initiated out of such a close relationship to a business need, combined with accountability to that same business organization.

Having said that, we will take leadership on process over none at all any day. And if the right person happens to be the CIO, COO, CMO, President, CEO, VP of Sales – it matters not as long as they have the passion, empowerment, and capability.

Update: Even before publishing this, Ann has added to her own thoughts on her original piece:

Of course not just any CIO can lead a BPM effort. It would have to be a CIO who is well-versed in the overall business, not one suffering from technology tunnel vision. In addition, he or she will need great communications and change management skills, since introducing BPM requires folks to make fundamental changes to the ways they work. A CIO without those skills shouldn’t be the go-to person on BPM. But guess what? A CFO or COO lacking those skills probably won’t fare any better.

Like most questions, I think there might be no one right answer to who should lead a BPM effort. lt will vary from organization to organization, depending on the skill sets of their executives.

This sounds much more in alignment with our own thinking at BP3.

bpmCamp is Back!

Scott Francis — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:56:30 +0000

bpmCamp is back, and it is coming to Austin, Texas! We’re very proud to announce that we’re holding the second bpmCamp here in Austin. Time is short – only 52 days until the event starts! It is an aggressive time frame but with urgency comes creativity. Following is the F.A.Q. with all the most important questions addressed.

F.A.Q.

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 Austin bpmCamp: October 14-15, 2010. Mark your calendars.

We hope to host additional bpmCamp events in the future. The first was at Stanford. This one, in Austin, should be special because of its proximity to ground zero of the Lombardi ecosystem (Lombardi’s headquarters was Austin, and IBM has a very large operation in Austin, including the Lombardi team). It is also the headquarters of BP3.

If you have any questions in the meantime, contact us at:
bpmCamp at bp-3.com

How Much Does it Cost to Attend?

bpmCamp Austin does not benefit from the free space that Stanford provided to the inaugural event. Still, we’ve managed to find an affordable venue with great food, and therefore the impact on event costs was reasonable. We’re charging $150 to attend the two-day conference (early-bird) from now until September 17, 2010. Regular pricing will be $200 - and the last day to register is October 7, 2010.

How Do I Register for bpmCamp?

Please go to: http://bpmcampaustin.eventbrite.com/ to register! ( Early Bird Rates apply until January 1, 2010).

Where is bpmCamp Austin? Who is hosting?

Having the right host for any activity is a plus. And having the right setting can really frame an event and set a backdrop for a good collaborative and rejuvenating experience. BP3 will be the hosts for the event. We’ve been working with BPM and Lombardi’s products for more than 7 years, and we’re looking forward to hosting the kind of informal conferences we always wanted to attend, right here in our home town.

We’re having our bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin event at III Forks Austin – one of Austin’s finest restaurants, but also a space that has a great historical Austin vibe to it, even while housed inside one of the more modern “Austin Architecture” buildings in town. Importantly there is a lot of informal gathering space available, as well as a main room and at least two break-out rooms. III forks has been great collaborating menu options and space with us. We’ll be a stone’s throw from Town Lake (aka Lake Lady Bird), right across the street from City Hall, and within walking distance of many restaurants and other venues. Austin itself is home to Lombardi, and the base of operations for Lombardi as a part of the larger IBM campus here.

Travel Logistics

Please refer back to this page for travel logistics.

Where is the Landing Page?

UPDATED: www.bpmCamp.org

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/Lombardi Edition and Blueprint) who participate in deployments to attend, and we’re extending an invitation to IBM/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 (there are limited sponsorship slots). 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 do I Contact the Organizers?

The best way is via the bpmCamp email address:

bpmcamp at bp-3.com

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. Please respect that we are keeping sponsorships limited to prevent over-commercializing and to make sure the sponsorship is worth something.

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??)
Incorporating A/B testing into my process
How much requirements gathering is too much?

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

Go HERE to add your ideas to the Agenda Wiki.

Who is Coming?

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

Why focus on a single vendor? Why not another BPM product? Is this a Lombardi- or IBM-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 Edition and BPM Blueprint 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.

About that Merger…

Scott Francis — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:01:19 +0000

The merger of two airlines has been used as an example of something BPM is not well-suited for, that ACM would be well-suited for. I gave this argument a bit too literal a reading, based on Keith Swenson’s response (thought exercise vs. demonstration). But having worked on quite a few BPM projects that were born of mergers (not the act of deciding to merge, but the after-affect of the merger), I found this article on the Wells Fargo and Wachovia merger to be just the kind of external, public information I was looking for to better explain my own views about how mergers happen – and the fact that there really is method (dare I say, process) to the madness. When you are a big financial institution, or a big tech company (e.g. Cisco), you don’t do just one or two acquisitions in your history. You might do one or two acquisitions a quarter. Not all of them will be as big as Wachovia of course… These institutions are constantly reinventing themselves through acquisitions and spin-offs and joint ventures. Any time you do something so valuable, so often, you’ll want to understand it as a business process.

So how do you handle something massive like Trust conversions from Wachovia to Wells Fargo?

This year, Wells Fargo and Wachovia completed one of the biggest trust conversions ever; 81,000 trust accounts and $150 billion in assets were transferred to a common platform. Wells Fargo is now one of the largest U.S. trust providers in the U.S. with 233,000 accounts and $1.3 trillion in assets.

There was a big analysis effort to understand the processes operating at both firms, and to pick and choose best practices from both. After that they modeled these processes, simulated some of them, and implemented. Some interesting ancillary benefits:

Another benefit is that the use of business process modeling helps the business and IT people communicate with each other. Instead of exchanging Word documents about requirements and technical specifications, where each side typically had trouble understanding the other, they’ve transitioned to graphical process models where both parties can look at the diagrammed process flow and exceptions. Watkins says this has saved thousands of hours of time in writing requirements documents and interpretation time for the technology developer.

So… is BPM low hanging fruit or was it hard work? Sounds like it was hard, but valuable, work. Is Wells Fargo really committed to BPM?

“Processes are pervasive whether you’re facing your customer or in the back office, and there’s been a recognition over the last couple of years among business leadership and IT that we should start focusing on more opportunities around process improvement, where we can leverage BPM technology we already own,” he says. “We’ve trained more than 400 people on BPM technology and technical standards like BPMN (business process modeling notation) as a common language for communicating process improvement,” he says.

Well, what do you think?