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.

We’ve set our dates for bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin:  October 14-15, 2010.

Watch this space for additional announcements about bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin.

We had a great success with the original bpmCamp @ Stanford in January, this year.  We’re now ready to start the ball rolling for a bpmCamp in Austin.  We’re just at the formative stages, but we are targeting dates in October, and currently scouting locations in Austin.  We’ve also had tentative discussions with Stanford about having another bpmCamp at Stanford, but a bit later in the year 2011 (maybe even in the summer of 2011). Our goals and thought process are much the same as last time:

1. BPM Conferences are good, but BPM Conferences are (usually) too general, too big, too expensive, and stuck on platitudes because of the above.
2. bpmCamp is intimate. It was 40 people (max capacity) at Stanford.  We’ll figure out our max capacity for Austin, it might be just a tad bigger.
3. bpmCamp is specific.  We will be focused on the Lombardi Software products acquired by IBM earlier this year, and now known as IBM BPM Blueprint (aka Blueprint), and Websphere Lombardi Edition (aka Lombardi Edition aka Teamworks).  (We would welcome the chance to organize a bpmCamp for another product offering – but we need a partner to help)
4. bpmCamp is affordable.  Exact price is TBD, but it won’t break your budget.
5. bpmCamp is focused on what attendees care about.  Topics are crowd-sourced, so anyone attending can help shape the agenda.

If you’re interested in attending, watch this space, or keep an eye on posts with the tag bpmCamp. If you’re interested in sponsoring bpmCamp, we’ll have more details about that soon.

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

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

Austin’s economy has already been demonstrating a fair amount of resiliency in the last couple of years.  This week there’s been a flurry of good news for startups and entrepreneurs here.

First there’s the article from Bijoy Goswami in the Austin Business Journal, “Time has come for Austin’s entrepreneurs to make a scene.”  The ABJ has become primary source of business news for Austin business owners.  The article announces the launch of a news portal for Austin Entrepreneurs – www.abjentrepreneur.com.

Two of the first three articles:

Dachis buys third firm in 3 weeks

and

SolarBridge collects $15M in VC

Not sure how much overlap there will be with the kind of coverage we see on Austin Startup, which also focuses on entrepreneurs and startups in Austin, but it more of a blogging format.

I’ve been wondering if my generally optimistic view of the economy recovering was being influenced by being in BPM, or by being in Austin, where the recession has been “less bad” than it has been elsewhere, though it is still hurting a lot of families.  The Austin Technology Incubator had an article the other day with more evidence that Austin is a bright spot in the US economy at the moment.  (Heck, we even got our Metro Rail trains running)

I think this optimism will be spreading this year, however slowly.  I’ve been impressed with Austin’s resilience the last 10 years, and how the local economy has evolved:

Austin provides a useful lesson in how to stay on top of the innovation game. Start with an educated population (43% of Austin residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher), mix in a robust venture-capital scene (one of the best outside Silicon Valley), add a supportive community of peers (groups like Bootstrap Austin band together hundreds of entrepreneurs) and wrap all that up with a state government unafraid to throw money at companies that need a little help getting off the ground.

What I really find interesting about it, however, is how the actions of just a small collection of people have had such a big impact on the Austin economy and job market.  Some of the fastest growing employers in Austin simply didn’t exist 10 years ago.  And the startup “communities” here like Bootstrap and Capital Factory (as well as events like SXSWi) were spearheaded again by a very small group of people.  But the impacts have been broad – because these new companies, and the new communities, have grown bigger than the cadre of people who started them.  Its pretty inspiring to see the ripple effects of what people can accomplish with effort and funding that regular human beings can aspire to – and maybe that, right now, is the secret sauce in Austin: believing you can make a difference even if you’re just a “regular person”.

Congratulations to Bryan Menell for landing an interview with Fast Company about Austin’s startup ecosystem, as well as the background contributors to Austin being a great place to start a company.

I’ll boil it down to what I think matters most:

1. Great quality of life.
2. Abundant educated workforce
3. Abundant housing
4. Access to funding
5. Great ecosystem to support entrepreneurs (especially first-timers) and startups

Great quality of life is in the eye of the beholder- some like Austin for the weather (and some hate it), some like Austin for the music (and some hate the noise), some like it because it is “Weird” (and some hate the weirdness), some like the abundant water recreation (and some people prefer dry land).  Some people even like UT sports events!  (And some really really don’t)  Almost everyone likes the food in Austin.

The point is, there’s something for everyone, and usually more than one something. I think the quality of life in Austin retains people who otherwise might move: when they get laid off, when they pursue another job opportunity, etc.  In fact many people return to Austin after flirting with the Bay Area or Boston.

Bryan’s list of startups only scratched the surface.  What I find interesting about Austin is the diversity of businesses that have been started: furniture,  groceries, consumer websites, enterprise software, chips, food and beverage firms, ad firms, music venues, ticket sales, music promoters, manufacturing, biotech, batteries, green building.  And I’m still just scratching the surface still.  I think you get this diversity in Austin because of the background support for entrepreneurship, and the willingness of the workforce in Austin to bet on startups and work in them. Well that, and because you can work at a startup and then play with your band at the Saxon Pub.

The news this morning in Austin (besides the chill wind blowing here today) is that BMC just bought local startup Phurnace.  Additional coverage from Austin Startup and Redmonk.    There are a few friends and former colleagues over there, and I wish them well at the new firm!  There have been a flurry of IPOs and (mostly) acquisitions in Austin lately, which will hopefully presage a new round of interesting startups growing up in our town.

A funny thing happened the other day on the way to the hotel.

I’m commuting to San Francisco for a really interesting application of BPM technology to customer service scenarios for a company that doesn’t sell product – they sell an experience – a process, if you will – to both sellers and buyers of certain goods.  Just working with a company that thinks of their process as their product is refreshing enough, and makes this a very interesting project to me.

Because this project is in San Francisco, there’s really no need to have a rental car to drive around.  Its about $45/day for parking, and if you don’t mind walking a few blocks, and taking BART up from the airport, everything is essentially walking distance.  On Monday I had plans to meet up with an old friend from Stanford, who coincidentally also worked with me at our first employer, Trilogy.  With plenty of time to spare I was walking from the customer’s office to my hotel, which takes me past the headquarters of Vast, where several other friends from Austin and Trilogy work.  As I walk by, I notice an old colleague in the window, so I knocked and he invited me in and we had a great conversation about life, business, the future.  Along the way another gentleman in the office walked over and asked if we could give him some feedback on a pitch he was planning, to promote a creative-commons approach to user-data management.  And we then spent the next 30 minutes hashing out what this meant in the context of Facebook, iTunes playlists, and other types of user-generated content that, he contends, users should have the right to port, move, export, share. The next day he was headed to a conference to try out these ideas on a broader, critical audience. I was really impressed by the depth of thinking on the subject, and how well he could turn our questions into opportunities to clarify the pitch. Good stuff.

After that conversation, I headed back up to the hotel, and met my old friend for dinner.  We walked right past Vast again on the way to the restaurant, and had a good 3-hour discussion over dinner at Town Hall Restaurant (highly recommended, I might add).

I relay this story not because it is that relevant to the world of BPM, but because it touches on something immensely important – the value of your network.  The odds of me running into someone and having such an educational discourse on identity and user data management in the new world order is pretty low outside of the Bay Area.  And coming into contact with new and different ideas and perspectives is part of what makes the software scene so vital in San Francisco.  I’m convinced that at least part of that is due to the “walkability” of the city.  Although you can get similar effects in any city with good gathering spots – be it a coffee shop, a burrito joint, or a local pub.  And in South Bay, it isn’t so walkable, but there are great meet-up spots like Hobee‘s, and clusters of companies in Palo Alto or in other parts that provide this same walking-distance effect.  But it isn’t just a story about the network effect in the Bay Area.  After all, the folks I was meeting up with are transplants from my current home town, Austin.  The power of networking in software circles in Austin is pretty incredible to me.  Very small degrees of separation, and a high degree of willingness to share, cross-hire, cross-promote.  Even tighter than the Austin network, that Trilogy Alumni network is quite cohesive.

If I may offer some perspective that 15 years in the business world has given me… Building your network of valued friends, coworkers, colleagues, peers – this is part of the process of building a career.  It is so important to nurture the people you are connected to, and to be open to the opportunities, insights, and perspectives they will offer you over time.  If your old firm doesn’t have an alumni network or mailing list, start one.  I’ve been managing one of these lists for 8 years now, and the personal satisfaction has far exceeded the investment of my time.

Also, when you travel for work as much as I do, you get a chance to refresh your relationships in person, and not just over email and phone and twitter.  It is so important to take advantage of those opportunities.  Meeting with my old friends and colleagues and hearing about their lives and careers is part of what recharges me and inspires me to keep working on the vision of bp3 – “a business process company”.  It’s also part of what helps you establish place and belonging when you are away from home for too long.

I just want to take a moment to thank good friends who take time out of their lives to meet with me on short notice – or even when I just knock on their window passing by – and please allow me to return the favor and entertain you in Austin, Texas if your travels bring you our way.

Several sources have reported and commented on American Airlines‘ decision to end the Nerd Bird, an iconic flight (if ever there was such a thing) between Austin and San Jose, the respective tech capitals of Texas and California. This direct flight has tied these two tech communities together in ways that are hard to explain, but a quote from the Statesman’s article today does an admirable job if you read between the lines of these statistics:

In 1996, Fast Company magazine surveyed passengers on one Nerd Bird flight and found that 75 percent carried a laptop, 56 percent carried a pager, 52 percent carried a cell phone and 12 percent carried a personal digital assistant. Thirty-five percent said they took the flight at least once every two weeks, and 58 percent had a favorite seat.

If you take a minute to think back to your life in 1996, I think you’ll realize how remarkable these statistics are.  I was one of these laptop-toting high-tech travelers back then, but even I didn’t have a cell phone yet.  And in 1996, you might pay $1000 for 16MB (yes, MegaBytes) of RAM in your laptop… Laptops were not cheap.  I flew the route so often that I recognized the crew and pilots more often than not, and many of the passengers.  One pilot’s friendly banter got a little stale when he woke me up with the PA system to tell us that if we looked out the left side of the plane we could see the grand canyon… on a clear day.  It was cloudy.

The Austin-American Statesman drew 44 comments to their posting online, most of them irate or reflecting disbelief.

The official line is that the route is unprofitable.  Although I don’t fly the route regularly anymore, I’ve never been on this flight and not had every seat filled.  I think the level of frustration expressed in the comments reflects the common sense most consumers would apply to this problem:  if you’re flight is full, and you’re not making money, raise your prices.  I think, instead, AA is looking at their system-wide profits and they see removing this flight as a way to increase utilization on Austin to Dallas flights that aren’t all filled to capacity, as well as Dallas to SJC flights that aren’t filled to capacity – in other words, this change is likely not about the AUS->SJC flight.  It is likely about the other network effects of the change.

But all is not lost.  While there is now no direct flight to the San Jose Airport (SJC), it seems ripe for Southwest to start running that route given that they are both the largest carrier in and out of Austin (in terms of flights and passengers), as well as the largest or second-largest carrier out of San Jose (in terms of flights and passengers).  And in the meantime, JetBlue flies a great flight between Austin and San Francisco (SFO), with 2 spacious seats on each side of the aisle, a DirecTV tv on every seat, and brand-new planes.  The only problem is that they need to add a second flight per day – currently they only run an evening flight from AUS to SFO, and a morning flight from SFO to AUS, which cuts down on travel options if you originate in Austin.

I used to fly American quite a bit out of Austin, and one of the big reasons was that they provided a lot of nonstop flights, plus the ability to get almost anywhere through DFW.  However, over the years the numer of nonstop flights offered by American actually decreased, while the total number of nonstop flights from Austin has increased (reaching a peak of 39 out-of-state nonstop destinations in 2008).  A few of those flights have been cancelled since then, so the number might be 35 or so now.

But as American has pulled back from direct flights, others have stepped up.  For example, American cancelled their direct flight to Seattle (adding 2 hours to a 4 hour flight by switching in Dallas).  But Alaska Air has picked up that route.  American cancelled direct flights to Boston when the tech bubble burst.  But nonstop flights picked up on JetBlue, using the same great Embraer jets that JetBlue flies to San Francisco.  My next trip is a nonstop flight from Austin to Baltimore on Southwest. There were reasonably priced flights on American and Continental, but they required layovers in Dallas and Houston, which add 2 hours to flight time with no extra value for the traveler.  I just believe the future of flying from Austin will be nonstop flights, and American (and Continental) are going to miss out on the growth in travel in and out of Austin by pulling back from their direct flight commitments.

There are just a few software companies in Austin that, if you worked there, will ensure that you are well-networked with most of the current software companies in Austin.  Vignette is one of them.  Everyone knows someone who worked there, and the network among Vignette alumni is pretty good. I’ve worked with a number of Vignette alumni who were top notch, including our own Greg Harley.

I first saw the mention of the acquisition on the Austin Startup blog.

SXSW (south by southwest) is in effect in Austin, from the 13th to the 22nd. The early parts of the event are dedicated to ideas and groups that have attached themselves to the original musical festival later in the week. There’s SXSWi (SXSW interactive), there’s a almost a whole week of movie screenings, there’s a BarCamp session, and too many other events to list in any one place.

OneSpot, a local Austin company, has a SXSW news widget. Unfortunately the title of this widget doesn’t conform to our page width, but I’ll still include it here for those who are interested, along with any other SXSW links that come up that look interesting. One of the things I find interesting about SXSW is that it continues to evolve, starting from pure music, then films, and then interactive (software)… and as it evolves to include more startup-related activities, it continues to reflect the ethos of Austin.

So Austin has set up a great site called the Austin City Connection.  The front page is a little tough to navigate, I have to admit, but I link to some of the pages within the site and check back periodically to see what’s changed.

One of these pages buried on this site is a map of local businesses and of local business districts where local businesses are strongly represented.  Right now that includes the districts around South 1st Street (pictured below), East 5th Street, East 6th Street, East 11th-12th streets, Guadalupe, and North Loop Blvd.  Its complete with different icons for art, automotive, health, construction, eateries, engineering, laywers, real estate, retail, service, etc.  There are a few obvious omissions still (South Congress anyone?) but I really like the treatment of each area rather than just trying to look at one map of all of Austin at once.

Buried at the bottom of the page is a set of links for “all business types”, which lets you see the whole Austin map with businesses of that type highlighted.  And sure enough if you click on Consulting, there we are in the northwest quadrant of the map, although you have to zoom in to see us because in this view we’re buried right under Red Velvet Events, which is in the same building with us:

It seems like a great investment any city can make in their community, at very little cost. By focusing on business districts, the site focuses more on the way people shop – hitting several places in one area, rather than jumping around from one area to the next. Cities do so much to promote big business (tax incentives, tax rebates), it’s nice to see the city doing something to promote local providers of all kinds