I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts from two days at SXSW-interactive…

1. Austinites don’t really know escalator protocol.  We stand on both sides of the escalator, annoying the folks from both coasts who know that you stand to the right to let the impatient blow by you on the left.  The Austin Convention Center has some very long escalators, and the traffic jams have been beauteous.
2. People will not take the time to go to another floor to find shorter food and beverage lines.  Try the 4th floor first thing in the morning – its a morgue because everyone stops at the first “Starbucks served here” sign they see – which happens to be on the first floor.
3. Unlike my experiences at every other conference I’ve ever been to, SXSW (at the Austin Convention Center at least) had power supplies everywhere.  I swear I saw one above the urinal in the Men’s bathroom.  No, not really.  But they were almost everywhere else.
4. Do not screw up a bay-area coffee snob’s coffee order.  They will not be amused.  (I love coffee, but I don’t qualify as a snob because I actually like Starbucks just fine.  If you think people who like Starbucks coffee are coffee snobs, trust me, this is a finely layered cake and Starbucks is now where near the top of the coffee snob cake).
5. People who blog about comic strips can expect to see 1000 comments in a couple of days.  There aren’t 1000 comments in the whole BP3 blog yet.  Apparently BPM is only mainstream in the eyes of Gartner and Forrester – it is not mainstream in the eyes of comic-strip readers, or anyone else you could call “mainstream”.
6. Nearly every blogging-related panelist seemed to have started blogging when computers were built with vacuum tubes.  I jest, it was only 1997 or 1998… which amounts to the same thing as far as blogging goes.  Would have been good to hear from a successful blogger who started more recently…
7. A classic quote (missed the name for attribution): “In 2002, I thought [cynically], ‘hasn’t everyone who wanted to start a blog already started one? I mean, there are literally thousands of them.” Needless to say, as he pointed out, he vastly under-estimated the number of people who wanted to start their own blogs.
8. Fun quotes: “If you think Twitter is a good substitute for a blog you weren’t a good blogger to begin with”… “Huffpo could just be tweets”… “New generation of blogging sees it as furthering your existing self.  Whereas before, it was unearthing the self you were afraid to expose” (paraphrased)…
9. Do design and platform matter? The panel says, largely: no.  “Design is 5% important. Craigslist is popular and its the worst designed site on the web.”
10. There need to be about 10 more food trailers outside to satisfy the hunger of 15,000 attendees.  Seriously.  It turns out that Austin is not just ground-zero for Migas and Breakfast Tacos, but also for the food-in-an-airstream-trailer – even good food.
11. Going to Moonshine for a 1:30pm lunch was a good call. But it was a 45-minute wait.  Food trailer was also nearly a 45 minute wait. Guess which one was better?
12. There was a running joke about how to get a million page views on a blog post, but I won’t repeat it here.
13. Top ten lists were also cited as a key driver of traffic.  Why? No one knows for sure, but it works.  Check Digg, Reddit… etc… it always seems to work.   (I wonder if a top-29 list will work?? hmmmmmmmm let’s find out).
14. Apparently it is hard to make $50k/year blogging.  I’m not sure what “hard” means in the context of blogging, but everyone nodded their head (we know hard isn’t hard like mining coal, but does “hard” mean you need to be lucky or does “hard” mean it takes many many hours of investment without much assurance of return on that investment? or something else?)
15. A Google product manager talked about link quality like it was a moral good and not just something you worry about because you want your page rank to be good and you want Google search to drive traffic.  Kind of losing sight of the fact that getting paid for linking isn’t really amoral, it just inconveniences Google’s search quality – and then Google will punish you for having paid links that aren’t marked as such with no-follow (they literally used the term payola).  The example given was that you should turn down that $1000/month someone is offering you to link to their site.  The guy next to me said (sarcastically) “yeah, that’s a problem I have.”  Right.
16. Saw a panel about “unsexy” but profitable businesses.  Great representation from local firm, uShip, among others.  If Business Process Management (BPM) consulting doesn’t qualify for unsexy, someone explain to me the looks of desperate un-interest I can generate by telling people at SXSWi what I do for a living (BPM Consulting).  Hopefully this means we’re destined for profits as well.
17. There are too many stock photo sites in the world. But that’s good, because next time I need one they won’t be too expensive (I saw 4, at least, on the exhibit floor).  There are a LOT of tools for building websites (I saw 4, at least, on the exhibit floor). Couldn’t help but wonder if they were all partnered up with stock photo sites…
18. There are too many sessions! I can’t possibly see everything I’m interested in.  But I’m glad there are so many sessions because the small sessions are the real gems.
19. The Chevy Volt actually looked kinda cool.   Kinda.
20. There’s an under-served interest in well-designed physical products at the exhibit.  DAS keyboards and blue lounge where the two that I saw, and they looked great and had good attendance the two times I looked.  Everything else was a bit too virtual.
21. The AT&T U-verse store was, unsurprisingly, unable to tell me if they serve our neighborhood yet. On the other hand, AT&T the wireless carrier seemed to hold up pretty well the first two days of SXSW.
22. @paulcarr with British accent:  “The internet is a major distraction.  I recommend you all stop using it.” In the context of this audience, that was high humor.
23. It turns out, hashtags have to be shorter than 140 characters to be useful on Twitter.  Please take note of this, SXSW organizers…
24. Apparently: “if you’re goal isn’t to make money, you’re not actually in business”.  I like the way that panelist thinks.  If I remember right, that was also @paulcarr, of Techcrunch.
25. Sushi goes quite well with Tres Leches, thankyouverymuchialwaysthoughtso.  And this is why I love Austin.
26. Pedi-cabs in Austin cost more during SXSW than any other time of the year.  Why does Austin have so many pedi-cabs?  I don’t remember them being here when I first moved to Austin, but they’re everywhere downtown now.
27. Bijoy is everywhere.
28. SXSWi men’s fashion can be summed up as converse sneakers with tshirt and jeans and a sport coat.  Fedora optional.
29. No matter how many people are here, you can still bump into your friends, and make new friends. Good seeing everyone yesterday.  If you see me looking lost today, say hi and distract me from finding the next panel room.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the conference, its quite an experience.  Really impressed with the Austin representation.

This isn’t particular or specific to the world of BPM conferences – there’s a general “conference malaise” going on – in which only the “best”  conferences are really tearing it up.

Outside of the BPM world, its clear that conferences like SXSW in Austin are doing just fine (and did just fine last year too, by the way).  Record attendance and a record number of panels and bands and acts is just the norm at SXSW these days (conference starts today).

But in the world of BPM, 2009 was tough for conferences, when the expectation was that people would still be attending BPM conferences due to how applicable they are to everyone’s business.  Several vendors postponed their conferences or took them virtual (Lombardi’s Driven), but the ones who waited until the fall (Appian) benefited from the beginning of the rebound in businesses planning for the future rather than businesses just living in fear of the next shoe dropping.

Sandy Kemsley has pointed out this problem with BPM conferences several times, as has Theo Priestley, and we’ve chimed in as well on the topic.  Some fresh perspectives:

• Sandy points out that 2010 looks like a rebound year for conferences.  We’ll see – Gartner’s BPM summit is in March in Las Vegas, and IBM’s “Impact” is in May – good test cases of the demand for these conferences.  Word from the London Gartner summit implied that attendance was low?  (I wasn’t there, so its second-hand to me).
• Theo Priestley and Mike Gammage hypothesize that Gartner and IQPC could merge events by 2012 – which again sounds like weakness rather than strength to me.
• Interestingly, Gammage was more encouraging about Gartner’s latest offering, while Jon Pyke’s contacts were not impressed.

Theo has a separate blog post, and while the bulk of it is about building community more broadly, at the end he makes a telling argument:

“When a sponsor at a BPM conference turns round and says he was perplexed at why there was such a low turnout given how important BPM has become according to what surveys seem to suggest the answer may be in the fact that we can’t even agree on what we’re telling clients in the first place.

For a group that practices change we’re incredibly resistant to it ourselves…..”

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: I think BPM conferences need to do a few things:

1. Localize.  Have the conference closer to the bulk of your attendees, so that more people can come without travel costs.
2. Face-to-Face.  Tele-presence and high-def video conferencing is great.  But a virtual conference is a broadcast medium.  If attendees want one-way communication they can read the book or watch the video after the fact.  If they want interaction, then you need physical presence to really encourage that.
3. Respect budgets.  Don’t make cost of attendance a barrier – keep it reasonable. For anyone traveling, travel costs should dominate their total expenses, not registration costs.
4. Crowd-source.  Leverage the community to arrive at the topics.  There’s been too much top-down sourcing of content at conferences, without soliciting feedback from potential and actual attendees.
5. Narrow the focus. The narrower the focus, the more involved the people who attend can be.  People mistakenly think you have to broaden the audience to get more people – but the point isn’t MORE – the point is BETTER.  If the event is BETTER then you’ll get more value out of your investment of time and money.

We’ve followed this philosophy for bpmCamp and it was a great success for us – the feedback has been enormously positive, with a lot of interest in repeating the event next year.  But of course, our “unconference” was limited to 40 attendees – and its easier to organize around these principles when you keep the size of the conference smaller. Still, I think there are lessons to learn for those who would put on BPM-focused events, and the biggest one is:

It’s about the audience, not about the organizer.

For more information from bpmCamp, follow this link to our blog coverage of the bpmCamp event.  The element that I think is most crucial is the impromptu discussion that can happen in a more intimate setting.  Questions don’t wait for a microphone or a moderator – the hand goes up or the question is proposed and people can jump in and contribute.  I was really pleased with how this dynamic worked at bpmCamp and I hope we can reproduce this at other events.  I think 2010 will be a better year for conferences, but organizers need to keep in mind how to make these gatherings *more* valuable for attendees or they’re going to lose their attention next time.

Sometimes it is hard to convey the amount of experience your team has.  Sometimes it is hard to convey the positive impact you’ve made on a company you used to work for.  Sometimes it is hard to convey how much you’ve positively impacted the customer base. But at Driven 2009, Lombardi actually gave me a great way to communicate this to the folks who were there.

All in all, Lombardi walked through 18 different customer stories by my count.  These were really compelling stories of customer success, achieved value, and really deep references for Lombardi.  By the time they were done discussing the 18 customers, I realized individuals from the BP3 team had played key roles in the success of no fewer than 16 of them (often as employees or partners of Lombardi).   Peter noticed this as well.  It isn’t just pride that causes me to say that we have the most experienced team in the business.  And the quality of that experience is second-to-none.  You can’t trivially recreate the experience of being the first person to segment a Teamworks workload between user-traffic (UI) and background processing (of events, web services, and batches).  You can’t trivially recreate the experience of helping an insurance company develop common global processes that accommodate local variation across nine European countries, or helping a global manufacturer apply six sigma techniques to their process prioritization and improvement efforts.  You can’t trivially recreate the experience of starting the Lombardi On Demand Assistance program, nor being the anchor man on the team.  You can’t trivially recreate the experience of being the chief architect and advocate of BPM within your organization for over 4 years.  These are great guys to work with, and I’m barely scratching the surface.

I also found it interesting that in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, their assessment was that Lombardi customers, in general, are more mature in their thinking about process and BPM.  They don’t typically look at it as a small part of a big project, they look at it as a program, a discipline, as a way they’ll be doing business going forward.  This is actually a *significant* difference in outlook as compared to the typical BPM customer cited by others in the industry.  We take some pride at BP3 in that we helped shape the attitudes of Lombardi and our customers in the early years at Lombardi, from 2003-2007, to get customers to really think bigger and longer term, and to get Lombardi realizing the benefits of broader adoption and deeper adoption within the customer base as something more than just additional license sales.

We are equally gratified and proud to be part of creating new stories in the BPM space, helping customers achieve significant success.  We’re not resting on our laurels, on our past achievements, we’re right now working on critical-path projects for customers anyone would be proud to list as references.  And we are very thankful for their belief in us, and in our ability to help them achieve their business objectives.

Note from the editor:  Peter has been working with BP3 for the last year and prior to that was a key member of his IBM Global Services team on document management software projects.  Here’s Peter’s inaugural post to our blog, following his first BPM conference – we thought it would be a good idea to share the perspective of someone who hasn’t attended so many of these conferences already… hopefully his first, and not his last, contribution to the blog! – scott.

After the conclusion of Lombardi’s Partner Conference, my first BPM-related conference, time has come to write a blog post. Rod Favaron’s keynote got me really excited about being in the BPM space, because I learned that Business Process Management was not only a job, but also a way of life. Lombardi’s goal was very apparent, they want to become the name-brand for the BPM space, the Coke of BPM if you will. Lombardi laid out the roadmap to achieve this goal; you need a platform for communication (Blueprint), a platform for execution (Teamworks 7), and the sufficient know-how (a strong network of partners).

There is a certain level of talent gap to this latter component of the roadmap, which seems to be restricting the extensive growth of a BPM market. A market that is tailored for our current dire economic times, where companies are looking to improve their business processes, to reduce enterprise costs, and to improve enterprise workforce effectiveness. By being part of BP3, the most experienced Lombardi Teamworks implementations team, I am thrilled to get a chance and fill in this talent gap.

My confidence in BP3’s team was reassured, while Jim Rudden of Lombardi was giving us a number of client success stories, and I noticed Scott quietly nodding and acknowledging that someone from the BP3 team has been part of each story Jim mentioned.

At the end of the two day conference, I walked away knowing that there is a stellar BPM market, in which BP3 can be a key player.

- Peter

Lance Gibbs, our CEO, was at Gartner’s conference this week.  He’ll have some thoughts to share when he returns next week, but in the meantime, once again Sandy Kemsley comes through with session write-ups on her blog.

Look to this space for more from Gartner BPM conference next week!

Appian had their first user/customer forum this week, and so far the best writeups of the sessions I’ve seen are on Sandy Kemsley’s blog.  We’ll have some thoughts to share as well, but for a session-by-session low-down, this is the place to go.