Process for the Enterprise » conferences

Nobody Cares about BPM… Or do They?

Scott Francis — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:19:07 +0000

Ian Gotts says nobody seems to care about BPM – on the basis of attending a conference (unnamed) in the USA, that was sparsely attended. He has a great picture of the room, nearly empty, that presumably he was speaking in. Of course, that picture could be taken before everyone comes in to sit down – it might not be intended to be taken for a literal head-count. But the point is clear:

I was keynote speaker at an event billed as ‘one of the USA’s most important BPM events’ – 500 attendees. Gartner gets fewer 1,000 at their US BPM Summit.

In contrast Dreamforce (image right), which is Salesforce’s PAID annual user event gets 25,000 delegates.

As I pointed out in a comment on his blog, this is a bit of apples and oranges. I don’t believe any of Gartner’s conferences have 25,000 delegates. They’re analyst-driven conferences that tend to appeal more to executives than rank and file users. Gartner’s CRM conferences aren’t attended by 25,000 people either…

On the other hand, IBM Impact was attended by north of 8000 people last year. Appian’s user conference had record attendance, as well. IBM’s other conferences have similarly large numbers of attendees (I believe the IOD conference is even bigger than Impact, for example).

Ian asks:

So what is it? Perhaps BPM has been around too long and everyone knows about it, so they don’t need to attend conferences and measuring conference attendance is misleading. But the world has moved on with technology enabling fantastic advances in operational excellence, so surely there is a need for continued education. And similarly, CRM has been around 20 years or more yet Salesforce conference attendance is still climbing.

What is it? It is vendor-focus rather than analyst focus. As I commented in his blog, these are just different audiences. The vendor conferences are more users as well as decision-makers. Users don’t generally go to analyst conferences, however. And if you’re going to your vendor’s conference- do you really need to go to one or two more analyst conferences? Probably not.

It isn’t that BPM is too broad, any more than CRM is too broad – it is just that vendor conferences are a bit more interesting than vendor-agnostic analyst conferences. And hey, the vendors usually bring in better bands and entertainment!

My experience is that BPM enthusiasm at conferences is running high – at software vendor conferences, that is – and so I find myself in disagreement with Ian on this one.

SXSW: Startup Village + Lean Startup SXSW = Value

Scott Francis — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:57:01 +0000

The highlight (for me) of last year’s SXSW-interactive conference was the Lean Startup SXSW – a whole day of planned content, mainly in one room (in the AT&T executive center) focused on the idea of “the lean startup”. Eric Ries and team did a phenomenal job bringing together a set of topics and speakers that you just normally wouldn’t get exposure to in a single day.

Leveraging the success of that forum, SXSW has created the Startup Village this year. The 4th floor of the Hilton will be converted to startup mecca. I thought the “Lean Startup SXSW” track might have gone away in favor of this modified (and bigger billing) approach. Apparently not so. Today SXSW.com announces that they’re bringing Lean Startup SXSW back – and some of the chief instigators are involved again – Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Steve Blank, 500 Startups, et al:

The Lean Startup SXSW will take place on Saturday, March 10th from 9:30am – 6:00pm at the Downtown Hilton (across from the Convention Center), and the most up-to-date agenda can be found here.

So, more central location, same Saturday location in the schedule (good call). The agenda already has enough speakers identified for me to plan my Saturday schedule.

Once again, good evidence of how SXSW adapts and co-opts good ideas from the outside. Congrats to the organizers, I’m looking forward to it.

SXSW-interactive’s Sessions are Posted

Scott Francis — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 02:42:43 +0000

SXSWi has one of the more interesting content picking processes I’ve seen for a conference. It has turned into a well-oiled machine, and it is, in my opinion, responsible for allowing SXSWi to reinvent and remain relevant (even more relevant) over time.

Recently, topics for SXSWi-2012 were released. These are the panels and sessions that were voted on by attendees or prospective attendees (although a vote isn’t the only input into the panel picking system).

If this year is like most, some additional featured speakers or top-down content will be added, in addition to a few late-selection panels to reflect any late-breaking news or changes in the world around us.

Topic areas:

Keynote Presentations at the Austin Convention Center
Featured Sessions (Austin Convention Center)
Better Tomorrow (Austin Convention Center) – a focus on economy and social issues
Book Readings (Austin Convention Center)
Branding and Marketing (Stephen F Austin hotel – which was also the site of the BP3 all-hands meeting!)
Convergence (Austin Convention Center)
Design and Development (Austin Convention Center)
Emerging (Hilton Austin – Downtown)
Future of Work (Courtyard Marriott)
Government and Global Issues (AT&T Conference Center)
Health and Education (AT&T Conference Center)
Journalism and Online Content (Sheraton Austin)
Latin America (Hilton Garden Inn)
Lifestyles and Sports (Campus TBA)
ScreenBurn and Gaming (Campus TBA)
Social Networks (Omni – Downtown)
Startup Village (Hilton Austin – Downtown)
Workshops (Radisson – Town Lake)

The biggest change I notice : moving the startup events to the Hilton (which is like ground-zero, right across the street from the Austin Convention Center), rather than having them at the AT&T Conference Center, as they did last year. Last year’s startup sessions were really high quality – and the AT&T Conference Center at UT is a fantastic facility for an event like that – but it is removed from the core action at SXSW. My guess is that there was an effort to bring this core area back to the center of the activity at SXSWi. The only downside is it will be much harder to park this year!

To anyone trying to organize a conference, I submit to you that you just haven’t seen crazy til you’ve been to SXSWi. The number of people and the logistics involved in feeding them, moving them, parking them, seating them, and providing wifi and 3g cell connectivity for their 3 connected devices is an incredible challenge. And it is impressive how well it all works.

The Startup Village has its own set of articles on SXSW’s website. This promises to be a great conference. The number of topics is overwhelming, but the organization into campuses and topic areas at least helps focus attention on the topics you care about.

As I was about to post this, I ran across Austin Startup’s coverage of the same subject. GREAT tidbits they pulled out from the schedule:

Stephen Wolfram on Computation and Its Impact on the Future. Any chance to hear him speak, I will take it.

Definitely. I look at this session as being potentially as promising as the Craig Venter session from the 2011 conference. They also pointed out panels from Dachis Group, RecycleMatch, WP Engine, and Foreca.st (local startups). Josh Baer will reprise a topic he owns: 3 Secrets to a Killer Elevator Pitch. Even this far in advance it looks like a very strong lineup.

Sandy Kemsley: Best Coverage of #IOD11 Conference

Scott Francis — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:24:14 +0000

Well, if Sandy doesn’t have the best coverage of the conference, it is by far the best coverage of the bloggers I follow.

First up: IBM Case Manager, IBM Content Manager, and IBM BPM -

Extend IBM BPM processes with content, using document and list widgets that can be integrated in a BPM application. This does not include content event processes, e.g., spawning a specific process when a document event such as check-in occurs, so is no different than integrating FileNet content into any BPMS.

Extend IBM BPM Advanced (i.e., WPS) processes with content through a WebSphere CMIS adapter into the content repository. Ditto re: any BPMS (or other system) that supports CMIS being able to integrate with FileNet content.

Invoke an IBM BPM Advanced process from an ICM case task. Assuming that this is via a web service call (since WPS allows processes to be exposed as web services), not specifically an IBM-to-IBM integration.

Next, up, transformation in the era of Big Data, perhaps a business case for “Watson”?

Some of IBM’s future of big data analytics is Watson, and Manoj Saxena presented on how Watson is being applied to healthcare – being demonstrated at IOD – as well as future applications in financial services and other industries. In healthcare, consider that medical information is doubling every five years, and about 20% of diagnoses in the US have some sort of preventable error. Using Watson as a diagnostic tool puts all healthcare information into the mix, not just what your doctor has learned (and remembers). Watson understands human speech, including puns, metaphors and other colloquial speech; it generates hypotheses based on the information that it absorbs; then it understands and learns from how the system is used. A medical diagnosis, then, can include information about symptoms and diseases, patient healthcare and treatment history, family healthcare history, and even patient lifestyle and travel choices to detect those nasty tropical bugs that your North American doctor is unlikely to know about. Watson’s not going to replace your doctor, but provide decision support during diagnosis and treatment.

And third, what’s new in IBM ECM products :

There was a question about why BPM didn’t appear in the ECM portfolio diagram, and Clayton stated that “BPM is now considered part of Case Manager”. Unlike the BPM vendors who think of ACM as a part of BPM, I think that she’s right: BPM (that is, structured process management that you would do with IBM FileNet BPM) is a functionality within ACM, not the other way around.

I think the BPM referenced here is with respect to Filenet BPM, rather than “IBM BPM”, but this is one area where Sandy and I probably agree to disagree. I think the race between BPM and ACM was essentially over before it started. Managing a business is going to more likely be called “BPM” than “ACM” for one thing. I think BPM is going to win the war of acronyms. The go-to-market strategy is going to include “ACM” functionality in a BPM offering. This isn’t some inside-scoop at IBM, this is just my judgment on the market in general. I may be wrong, but the market will show that one way or the other in the next few years. So far, to me, it looks like the BPM firms are winning the argument.

(Which isn’t to say that ACM proponents haven’t influenced BPM product direction – they have. But my feeling all along is that it just wouldn’t be hard for BPM vendors to fast-follow ACM vendors, such as they are).

Finally, Sandy covered the IBM Filenet BPM updates:

The Process Engine (PE) was ported completely to a standard Java application, with some dramatic performance increases: 60% improvement in response time through the Java API, 70% (or more) reduction in CPU utilization, near-linear growth in CPU utilization for vertical scaling (i.e., more processes on a single server), and constant CPU utilization on horizontal scaling (e.g., twice as many processes on twice as many servers).

So… one danger I see for IBM in general in the BPM space – is focusing too much on speeds and feeds. Not that these aren’t important. They are. Especially when you have customers the size of IBM’s customers. But they also need to solve real business problems and value propositions that aren’t driven by IT metrics.

It reminds me of a conversation we had with a customer once.

US: So, what reports do you think we need to support the business’ needs? There aren’t really any business-facing reports defined yet.

THEM: I think we have all the reports we need already.

US: You do? Which reports do you already have that the business uses?

THEM: Well, the timing reports on webservice performance and user interface performance, for example.

US: hmmmmmmm. How about measuring vendor quality, vendor response time to RFPs, and pricing estimation to final-price accuracy? Might tell you who your best vendors are or how much it is costing you to work with a vendor that isn’t fulfilling your business on time.

THEM: Yeah, but the business isn’t asking for that. They really want to know how fast the webservices and UIs are running.

Needless to say, we weren’t talking to the right person, and speeds and feeds were just not the right focus. Faced with that situation, you just have to back up and regroup and find the right focal point closer to a real business problem.

Thanks for the great coverage Sandy -

In Case You Missed it: Sandy’s Coverage of Progress Revolution

Scott Francis — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:54:11 +0000

About a month ago, Sandy Kemsley attended Progress Revolution – first giving an intro-to-BPM course and then blogging about the sessions she attended. The whole series of posts is worth reading, and I thought a few highlights from her coverage might convince you to read more…

On the importance of BPM (and CEP) to Progress, from opening remarks:

In spite of Progress’ long history with their OpenEdge software development environment, it’s clear that much of their future success is based on the Apama CEP and Savvion BPM acquisitions, and the integration of these product functionalities into a comprehensive solution.

On OpenEdge development methods and how they relate to BPM:

Does the integration of BPM just relegate OpenEdge to the scripting/coding language slaved to BPM? Maybe, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of layering BPM on top of a monolithic application developed with OpenEdge, it’s about having an integrated development platform that includes BPM as a part of the toolkit. It will be interesting to see how well this message is received by the OpenEdge development community, and how long it takes to actually impact their development methods.

And, we can see that Progress took a similar approach to integrating BPM acquisitions as IBM did:

Although (Savvion) BPM Studio and the OpenEdge Architect development environment are both Eclipse-based, it doesn’t appear that they’ve been integrated in any significant manner. Similarly, there are two different servers – although a BPM process can call an OpenEdge functionality, using web services at least – and two different end-user portal environments, where the BPM server functionality can be surfaced in the OpenEdge portal.

This approach drew a lot of fire from analysts covering IBM’s integration a year in, but I don’t see the same angst in coverage of Progress-Savvion after 18 months. In fact, I’d say although Progress has the same approach it doesn’t look like they’re quite as far along implementing their strategy. I’m not saying there should be angst – I think both companies are simply taking realistic measures to integrate different product lines.

On her realization that this isn’t a BPM vendor conference, during her coverage of Dr. Ketabchi’s talk:

…which really drives home that I’m not at a BPM vendor’s conference, I’m at an application development tool vendor’s conference where they are introducing this hot new technology called BPM. This is, of course, the stage that most of the business world is at with respect to BPM understanding; I’m just so used to being in the BPM echo chamber that I rarely hear these messages unless I’m delivering them to a client.

Great material across 7 or 8 posts! Thanks to Sandy for capturing this for those of us who couldn’t be there in person.

Forrester’s Business Process Forum 2011: Customer Engagement

Scott Francis — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 05:11:23 +0000

We’re well-overdue to comment on the Forrester BPF 2011 event, partly because we weren’t in attendance this year. To make up for lost time, we’re linking here to some of the best coverage of the event that we saw in blogging.

First, two articles by Anne Stuart on ebizQ. The first post, early returns, focuses on this year’s theme for the event, “Customer Engagement”:

“What was good enough before is not good enough today,” Derek Miers, a Forrester principal analyst, warned in one of the event’s opening sessions. And, he added, customer-engagement approaches that work right now won’t be sufficient for long; they’ll need to continue evolving to meet changing customer needs. “We almost have to rebuild the ship while we’re at sea,” he noted.

This sounds like a riff on continuous process improvement – you don’t “arrive at the destination” so much as always take a step back and see how you can improve and then refocus your efforts. The landscape is changing, so the same goals may not stay relevant over time.

Next up was a post of shorthand notes from a session about getting started with DCM.

Sandy Kemsley once again takes the honors for Most Complete Coverage of the event, with no less than 5 posts tagged accordingly. In one post, “Empowering the Customer Through Process Improvement and BPM“, she notes:

They [Nokia Siemens Networks] are a big SAP customer, but find that they use Appian BPM to fill the gaps that SAP just doesn’t do without major customization, and to bridge between different systems. They’ve implemented BPM in five major business areas with more than 22,000 users. By reusing some components but adapting to each particular business area, they’re able to roll out new systems in a matter of months. They are pushing into social capabilities to facilitate faster decision-making, and mobile platforms to better support remote users.

Wait, I thought SAP = BPM? Well, layering process on top of SAP is a common BPM deployment story. In another summary, this particular phrasing rang true for me:

Looking at processes in customer experience, we need to use Lean principles to eliminate waste from the customer viewpoint, not just the company viewpoint. We need to understand the full customer journey and all of the touchpoints that need to be managed, and ensure that the end-to-end customer processes are properly defined and orchestrated. This can lead to businesses reorganizing to eliminate business functional silos in favor of process-focused organizational models.

I think the concept of eliminating waste from the customer experience as well as from the company viewpoint is critical. All too often ill-thought process improvement exercises just “squeeze the balloon” – moving a burden from one part of the process to another, from one group to another. If the group you’re moving the process burden to is your customer, look out…

We hope to get to BPF12 next year – for some reason this one flew below the radar all year and sneaked up on us while we were busy making BPM projects happen!

Keith Swenson’s Notes from Forrester BPM Forum

Scott Francis — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:00:48 +0000

Keith has posted a summary of his notes from Forrester’s BPM Forum – great read and good insights into several topics – in particular he has a great writeup of Derek Miers’ session on designing your BPM engagement program around the customer experience:

He draws a correlation between process maturity and focus on customer experience. Maturity level 1-2 cost reduction is the top category (74%). Level 2-3 customer experience is the biggest. levels 3-4 and 4-5 customer experience remains high but value innovation becomes most important. Waste elimination remains that the same levels at all levels. The “ah-ha” moment was that if at level 2-3 you don’t focus on customer experience improvement, you will never get to level 3-5. (Survey is mostly business people, not IT – Forrester/QPC business process maturity survey)

Looks like a great day of sessions, but I agree with Keith that 7:30am is inhumane in any timezone.

SXSWi’s Content Picking Process

Scott Francis — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 05:18:02 +0000

SXSW-interactive fully exposes its process for selecting panels and sessions to attendees. I’m not sure what the genesis of this crowd-sourced way of planning content was, but the effect is remarkable. It starts with nominating ideas. Then there’s a round of voting. An expert panel also has input to the final outcome. Amazingly, it scales. Why does it work?

For one, SXSWi (SWSX interactive) is constantly being reinvented. What at one point was primarily a vehicle for bloggers to gather and share, has morphed into an event that covers a range of topics:

Blogging
Social media
Mobile tech
Startups of all stripes
Design
Freelancers
Social issues
Raising capital, venture capital, etc.
Etc.

The balance of these topics has been shifting over time. A few years ago there weren’t really any topics on geolocation – but there were a lot of those last year. There was even a whole day focused on lean startups.

This process for selecting sessions and panels is not only a great way to engage with the community – it is a great way to let the conference evolve and adapt with the interests of attendees. It is impossible to imagine the organizers of SXSWi coming up with several thousand sessions over 5 days. But crowdsourced – it is not only possible to do, the attendees will create the content, give the presentations, mediate the discussions… SXSWi actually has to prune the content, and yet there are still time slots with 150 concurrent sessions.

All of this benefit is managed through their panel picking process. SXSWi is being reborn again as we speak, with round 1 of panel picking under way. You can get a sense for the variety in sessions just from that Austin Startup link – social media, semantic web, women in Tech, elevator pitches. And that’s a small sampling of the options.

Don’t like the sessions from last year? Nominate and vote for your own for 2012! I’ve voted, and I’m looking forward to see what makes the cut for next year.

A Process Improvement Case Study: BP3 All-Hands Meeting

Scott Francis — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 17:29:47 +0000

: Seriously? 106?!

We have a process improvement case study. Someone scheduled our all-hands meeting for BP3 in the midst of a heat wave that has set records all year long in Austin, TX.

A quick analysis was performed – corrections for the next process run were clear – schedule later in the year (October), pick a different location (Minnesota for example). But the real question is how to fix the immediate process failure. Sure the meeting itself was in the air conditioned confines of the fabulous Stephen F. Austin… but outside was an oven.

Not to worry. Process improvement yielded a sure-fire way to cool down, with a low probability of failure:

: Lake Austin to the Rescue

Sure, not everyone jumped in the lake, but many of us embraced this process improvement with gusto, as you can see.

If the lake didn’t work, we could call in reinforcements.

All-Hands Meeting: We should have done this sooner!

Scott Francis — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:44:40 +0000

So we just completed our first company all-hands meeting. Previously, the closest we’ve come was having our two co-founders meet for coffee on Sundays, and the near unanimous attendance we had at bpmCamp 2010 at Stanford University. The short version of how I feel about this: why didn’t we do this sooner?!

We included all the crucial elements of a good company meeting:

Food. We ate our way through some of Austin’s best restaurants.
Fun. We carved out time for getting out on a boat on the lake the last afternoon. But we also made time for checking out the local Austin bands playing on 6th street (a shout out to Empty-Handed Vagabonds and to the lead singer of Dysfunkshun Junkshun).
Location. We held our meetings at the historic Stephen F Austin hotel. The second floor balcony is a fantastic way to unwind and socialize after a day of business meetings, and the hotel itself oozes character and history. Often people ignore the setting of their meetings- but this stuff matters! The space you meet in affects how you think, how focused you are, how intimate the meeting feels.
Content. Sure, we reviewed important company metrics and business goals. But we also put a lot of content together individually to give everyone a chance to hear what everyone else was up to. I was really impressed with the quality of thought and content that was presented – and more impressed by the discussion that followed. I learned a lot over the two days we met – about our team as well as about the topics they discussed.
Team. Because we have a distributed organization, we have limited opportunities to gather in one place. This is a really special team we’ve put together, and getting everyone in one place just made it more obvious how good they are.
Surprise. We also had a surprise guest-appearance from Phil Gilbert, VP of BPM at IBM. The Q&A session was memorable, as his take on the BPM space.
Shirts. You’ve got to have shirts at a company meeting. We rolled out fresh polo shirts and a surprise t-shirt addition to the lineup.

Often people will ask me why they should join up with BP3 instead of contracting – or why someone else would join up instead of contracting. I guess if you don’t try it out, it is hard to understand the difference – but this sense of team, of building something bigger than any of us can do alone – it is very powerful. I think everyone in attendance could feel how special this was. You just don’t get that kind of validation and gratification as a solo artist. You don’t get this sense of family.

So we’re building a company. And investments like this are required to reinvest in community and team. To say thank you. And to give everyone a sense of the possible. Our company meeting just made it clear to our team (and to me) why we’re special. Thanks to everyone on the team!

I have been informed that “BP3 All Hands Meeting” as an operating name lacks a certain “flair”. We’ll work on branding for our event. We might just call it “Getting the Band Back Together“.