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

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

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

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

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

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

Why bpmCamp?

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

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

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

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

When is bpmCamp?

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

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

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

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

The Process Maverick (aka Theo Priestley) wrote a pretty interesting blog titled “Calling time on the BPM Conferences“.  In it, he points out:

In the last 6 months there’s a growing trend towards offering massive discounting or 2-for-1 deals (is this a professional meeting or a team huddle at Wal-mart ?!!) to try and attract the numbers. And it’s not working.

Lombardi pulled its famous Driven events from being physically located to purely Online now following a call from its members stating they could no longer warrant traveling and the expenses that incurred. Rumblings from the recent Spring Gartner BPM conference suggested that there was nothing new to warrant actually going. And more worryingly, a recent european conference had only 20 attendees….including the speakers ! It would seem the majority attending came from the Middle East and they understood a little about BPM and process initiatives but did they need to come all that way to learn ?

In fact, I’ve been hearing these rumblings about conferences in general, not just BPM conferences.  And there is reasonable evidence to show that BPM conferences are generally doing better than non-BPM-themed conferences (if you believe Gartner’s attendance numbers, their spring events were quite well attended).

Still, Theo’s criticisms are well-noted.  I think there is some consensus among those who regularly attend such conferences that there is not enough net-new content for a Gartner BPM Conference every 6 months, for example.  The beauty of a “Lombardi Driven” conference in past years was that it had a pull on different audiences for different reasons, and could satisfy their interests:

• Technical practitioners looking for practical help, tools, shared experiences
• Technologists looking at the road ahead, from a technical perspective, and for best practices from a technology perspective
• Business Process specialists at firms using Lombardi’s software, who wanted to get a little better understanding of the company and the products they would be employing
• Process owners looking for ideas for improvement, and inspiration and motivation to go get the budget they need to invest in their processes
• Executives looking for partners to help them expand from project to program.
• Implementation and ISV Partners looking for business opportunities
• Customers looking for help

I think what made Driven interesting was its focus on the practical. In a multi-vendor conference, not all the conversations can cross-pollinate as easily. Speakers at the more general conferences will tend to be more business centric, but perhaps at the expense of really drawing the right audience.  The format tends to be more presentation oriented than discussion (in fact, Driven was heading down that presentation/podium-focus as well, and the video-only version of Driven was completely devoid of the normal discussion that makes these events so worthy of attending).

But the real criticism of Theo’s that sticks:

“Isn’t it time the conference organisers woke up and realised that CONTENT is king and not the turnstiles?”

Yes, it is.  I propose a more barcamp-oriented solution (dare I say, crowdsourced).  Topics should be proposed by the community of attendees and presenters and voted on with feet (and web browsers).  The emphasis should be less about turning a profit from the conference, and more about breaking even, and creating value for everyone who attends, sponsors, speaks, or reads the notes later.  We have a tradition of this kind of conference in Austin, with Mr. Hurley being the driving force behind it.  I think there are some lessons to learn from this approach, that could result in a really effective BPM conference.

The News

So Oracle just bought Sun.  I didn’t think this had any real bearing on the BPM market because I couldn’t think of any BPM software that Sun has been pushing.  Dennis Byron of ebizQ confirms in his article “Does Oracle/Sun Mean It’s a Horse Race for BPM?” (registration required but it’s painless, I assure you), that Sun has already pretty well “de-emphasized the BPM-related elements in the remnants of SeeBeyond, which it acquired in 2005.” The only impact I expect the acquisition to have on BPM is that it assures that Oracle’s thought leaders will be spread even more thinly as they work hard to incorporate Sun’s many software offerings, not to mention as they try to figure out the hardware business for the first time.  BPM is such a small part of what Oracle does now, that it is hard to imagine it won’t get starved for attention inside the walls of Oracle.

The Background

This is an argument I’ve been having on-and-off with Dennis Byron of ebizQ this year, and in a  previous post on the subject,  I summarized my arguments that had been scattered across a few posts on Dennis Byron’s blog.  Dennis largely took the side of the big stack vendors, arguing that they innovate as much as the little guys (in general, and in BPM).  I took the general point of view that while stack vendors bring advantages to the table, innovation is not chief among those advantages, and that the innovation in the BPM space (and in most spaces) comes from the upstarts and smaller companies.

From the Analysts’ Mouths to…

Well, not that Gartner is the final word on everything, but their statements over the last 4 years are pretty illuminating, from my perspective (thanks to the folks at the Lombardi partner conference for bringing these front of mind):

Gartner, 2005: “Current offerings from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP provide weaker support for human workflow patterns integrated into a broader process, business-user-oriented rule definition and maintenance (for decisions, re-sourcing and flows), human collaboration, and integrated document and content flow, compared with popular pure-play vendor products [...]” – “Business Process Management: Act Strategically and Buy Tactically”, Gartner Group, June 21, 2005.

In other words, in summer of 2005, the assessment was that the stack vendors just “weren’t there yet”.  But the prevailing view was that if we just gave them another 18-24 months they’d get there.  Even the pure play vendors themselves worried greatly about growing as fast as possible during this “window of opportunity” while the stack vendors were playing catch up.

But, in 2007, what did Gartner have to say? Paraphrasing, their 2007 report noted that none of the stack vendors had a good, integrated experience for people playing a role in process improvement life cycles.  They specifically called out IBM, SAP, and Oracle on this.

Again, everyone thought, if we just wait 18-24 months, these guys will catch up.  The analysts would say it, the stack vendors said it, the pure play vendors again attacked their “window of opportunity”, worried about what would happen in 2 years when the stack vendors “caught up”.

And then in 2009,

“Products from IBM, Oracle and SAP do not yet address the ideal BPMS use case – even in vision – and this can’t be overcome by sheer marketing and sales. “ – Gartner BPMS Magic Quadrant, 2009.

Side Note: Examples of the marketing are everywhere, such as the SAP/Aris positioning here… I’m not sure if the use of punctuation and capitalization are supposed to lend credibility to the offering or just make it harder for spellchecker to check your work… but Chemical.PerformanceREADY as a product name doesn’t give me a feel-good that SAP and Aris have really gone deep in the chemical business and committed to it – the name doesn’t identify what processes are covered, and is so vague that the definition of the product could be that it runs my whole business or that it runs a background check (HR) process tuned to the chemical business.  And there’s a neat set of concentric circles that try to make standard SAP implementation sound easy.  But, having said that, at least the Aris division of SAP is beating the BPM drum whole-heartedly, which is more than we can say for most BPM-related software packages acquired by stack vendors.

So, essentially we have 4 years of reports on BPMS, and the “stack vendors” still haven’t provided a unified BPMS that really addresses the use cases that pure play vendors address. Meanwhile, pureplay vendors have shown a lot of innovation in terms of deployment scenarios (hosted, on premise, SaaS), and new software features.  If, in 2005, you put off your BPM implementations for 2 years to get the latest and greatest from the Stack Vendors, you’d still be waiting today, 4 years later, and the expected wait is…. still 2 years…

Why?

This isn’t an issue of capability. Each of the stack vendors has produced world-class software in other areas, and each of them employ a bunch of world-class engineers.  But BPMS has not received the attention, focus, and thought leadership that it requires for these vendors to be successful.  The folks making product decisions around their BPMS products may still think of BPM as a check-mark on their SOA software stack, and in any case they don’t seem to understand the incredibly broad potential of BPM (and of a BPMS). It looks to me like even the analysts (e.g. Gartner) have grown weary of the posturing of the stack vendors absent any real delivery compared with the pure play vendors.  And it isn’t lost on me that in general, all of the stack vendors have acquired pure play vendors only to see their pace of innovation stall or stop as they figure out how to integrate the new software (often in this argument, it is pointed out that since stack vendors buy pureplays, they “inherit” that innovation, but it just doesn’t work out that way in most cases).  And then because they’re often giving away the BPMS on the back of a stack SOA offering, they aren’t seeing the dollars attached to BPM that would drive them to increase their investment (self-fulfilling prophecy)…

Of course, in 18 to 24 months one of the stack vendors could surprise me and “catch up” to the pure plays (through actual engineering effort, not just by purchasing one of the existing pure plays), but I’m not holding my breath just yet.  If you want to get ROI in the next 18-24 months, go pure play, and get those projects in production.  And then see where the market is after that… and which tools make the most sense for the next leg of your process improvement journey.

So Who is Going to Win?

I don’t pretend to know who is going to win the BPM/BPMS market.  However, as a customer, I would be wary of pure play vendors that sell to stack vendors, when that stack vendor is not putting all their weight behind BPM and BPMS. If the stack vendor isn’t re-aligning their business behind BPM and expecting a significant percentage of their revenues to come from BPM, then the pure play vendor will likely suffer the fates of staffware, fuego, collaxa, and others who have been absorbed and (nearly) forgotten by the market. If you’re a pure play vendor, and you want your venture to succeed within one of these stack vendors, you need to make sure they’re really aligned with BPM – that they believe it is the future of the enterprise software business.  If they don’t, I wouldn’t have much faith that they’re really going to invest in the engineering needed to succeed.

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

During Day 1 of the conference, Lombardi confirmed their belief in something that I’ve believed for many years- that the key things holding back BPM adoption are Leadership and Talent.  Lombardi’s take on leadership was that executive leadership (C-level) is required to really foster BPM adoption in a broad way at an organization.  I think there was general agreement in the room that it is a lot easier when that is the case.  However, I wouldn’t let the rest of the organization off the hook so easily.  Obviously, as an outsider – as a vendor, or consulting firm- the people in the room need to focus on getting executive support for BPM, and even leadership of BPM initiatives.  But for insiders, within the organization, if your executives aren’t leading, and aren’t supporting, you have some work to do.  Leadership doesn’t always come from the top at organizations – it often comes from where the need is, which is a polite way of saying, it comes from people who are dealing with real problems (where the sh*t hits the fan).

Often these leaders at lower levels of the organization need help – the data and tools (ammunition) to make their case to executives, the methods and tools to manage and measure their BPM projects, and a sounding board for their efforts.  And this is just why BP3 is in this space – we think Leadership is the critical element, and we think our job is to augment those leaders with expert advice, support, tools, and assistance.

The second term Lombardi focused on was “talent”.  Of course, we’re really talking about “people who are expert enough in BPM to implement BPM.”  It isn’t truly talent (as in, the “born with it” kind) – its the combination of skill, experience, knowledge, and wisdom.  And when you’re sitting in a room full of BPM practitioners, one of the things you do is take stock of your own team and what your role in the ecosystem of partners should be.

At BP3, we’re the most experienced team on the planet for Lombardi Teamworks BPM implementations.  We have quite literally brought together some of the best and brightest in the BPM universe into one team.  And I think we can be a keystone in the strategy of helping companies develop their own BPM teams:

• A customer putting together their BPM Center of Excellence (CoE)
• A consulting firm putting together their BPM practice, or needing help in a region outside their normal operating geography
• A software company adding BPM to their portfolio, needing to augment their skills or team
• A solutions company selling a solution based on BPM software, needing more weight or heft or reach behind their deployment team.

I was encouraged to see the quality and variety of partners in attendance as it tells me we have the seeds in place for really growing the number of BPM practitioners available to the marketplace.

Update: In Day 2, Lombardi came back to the theme of the talent gap – specifically a very good chart showing the ramp of BPM projects relative to the ramp of talent to work in and on those projects, and how often customers (or partners) will hit the wall as the talent gap reaches a certain level of pain – causing delays in projects, or higher costs, or just stress for a team stretched too thin.  The more aggressive your BPM roll-out plan, the more acute the pain from this talent gap will be.  Recognizing that this can happen, of course, you can plan around it by establishing relationships with partners to help fill those staffing gaps or help accelerate knowledge acquisition in BPM.  See the above bullet list – if your firm is engaged in building a BPM competency, and your plans are aggressive, you’re going to need help from outside experts to bridge the gap – or else you’re going to have to accept a longer pipeline for delivery.

There was also an extensive discussion of Lombardi University – Lombardi’s new approach to education and certifying individuals and partners.  That’s going to take a separate post to comment on, however.

Day 1 of the Lombardi Driven Partner Conference covered a lot of ground.  Lombardi’s CEO, Rod Favaron, gave a good general update on the state of things  BPM and Lombardi.  Some clear themes emerged from the presentation and subsequent Q&A:

1. Lombardi’s confidence in its ability to capture market share, and confidence the BPM Market is growing (27% estimated CAGR by analysts from 2005 to 2011!).
2. Growth of the Blueprint footprint in terms of users and geography.
3. Market awareness thanks to great billing from Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant, and increased focus on BPM thanks to a tough economy.
4. Businesses are picking up Lombardi because of the business pressures they face- global processes with local variation (perhaps due to regulation); changing Service Level Agreements; increasing volume of process work despite no increase in revenue (due to economic circumstances).
5. Dramatically increased focus on Partner enablement (as evidenced by the gathering itself!)

The rest of the day was full of great content for partners:  customer stories, competitive positioning, partner enablement programs, etc.  Plenty of fodder for a few more posts once we’ve had time to let the data sink in and synthesize it with the other data we have.  I was impressed by the quality and variety of partners – and by how many of them we know from prior lives at other companies.  We were definitely in good company.  Looking forward to more product-focused sessions tomorrow…  More to come!

Lombardi has put up the Driven 2009 site, and announced the dates:  April 20-23, 2009.  If you’re a Lombardi customer and you haven’t attended Driven previously, I think it is well worth the trip, as most previous attendees will tell you. The format has been updated to include a few pre-conference workshops the day before the conference gets into full-swing, and to include an extra half-day at the end to accommodate the user group meeting. This year it is downtown so the experience will be a bit different than the hill-country location of 2008 (and surely the weather will be better in April!).

BP3 will be attending Driven as a partner, and we look forward to seeing you there – more details to come!