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. )

Lately there’s been a bit of a buzz about CRM.  Not sure what caused it, but here are three thoughtful articles on the subject:

1. Derek Miers’ post on Case Management revival
2. Bruce Silver’s commentary regarding a new OMG spec RFP for Case Management.
3. Paul Vincent’s blog for Tibco, where he mentions PRR and DMN… and Case Management yet again…

I’m still waiting to see a really good case being made that Case Management requires or lends itself to different technical solutions than, say, BPM.  Having said that, I’m also sensitive to the fact that as BPM was picking up steam, many in the SOA stack community wondered why BPM wasn’t just a “feature” of SOA.  The fact that I don’t yet have the information to prove to myself that Case Management has technical requirements not addressed by BPM, does not mean that such information won’t be forthcoming.

Update: Bruce Silver has another update – apparently there was a bit of controversy about the case management proposal at OMG recently, and a little bit of blogosphere dust-up resulted.

Bruce Silver has a nice article on BPMInstitute.org about the 5 things to like about BPMN 2.0 (he doesn’t discuss the 5 things not to like – perhaps material for a future post?!).

OMG votes on the proposal in June, but the history on OMG’s voting on BPM-related standards has typically been that it takes longer than I expect for things to get finalized.  I won’t be shocked if final approval drags out a bit longer.

Interestingly, 4 of the 5 things Bruce mentions address weaknesses that at least one pureplay BPM vendor addresses already in their product (implementing more than what BPMN 1.0 spec requires).  Let’s hope there’s more than 5 things to love about BPMN 2.0 – vigorous vendor adoption would be on my wish list!

Bruce Silver put an update on the BPMN 2.0 specification he’s been participating in, and how its progressing. He pointed out a couple things that I happen to agree with, and if you do too, probably pays to be commenting on Bruce’s blog or elsewhere to help generate some public support for his commentary.

First, the focus on a different notion of “executable” BPMN – where all the attributes necessary for executing are available.  That’s not a bad notion – I don’t think anyone is necessarily “against” it.  But as Bruce points out, we need for BPMN models to conform without being executable – to support use cases for BPMN that are primarily modeling and not execution as schema-valid models (not all processes will be executed).

Its a good read, hope we can hear more about the process before the final submission (or after, as the case may be).  Participating in these efforts is tough for independent consultancies like Bruce because you don’t get paid for the work.  For a big company, the contributors may get paid to participate, or they may do it on their own time.  For independents, it hits the bottom line if the work encroaches on work-hours.  Kudos to Bruce for making the time to assist with BPMN 2.0, and I’m sure the spec will be the better for his input.

OMG has now released a schedule for exam availability for the OCEB (OMG Certified Expert in BPM) Exams.  This certification is an important step to move closer to a common understanding of what BPM is, and what it means to be an expert in BPM – two topics that have, up to this point, remained stubbornly hard to define in a way that everyone will agree with! Here’s one step in the right direction (though, I’ll grant there is room for improvement, perfect is the enemy of good, right?).

I just got an email from OMB about the schedule, but as yet I don’t see it on their website (If you are reading this, and have seen it on the OMG site, send me the link or put it in a comment, please).

OCEB Fundamental Available           Now
OCEB Business Intermediate            December 22, 2008
OCEB Technology Intermediate       January 12, 2009
OCEB Business Advanced                  January 26, 2009
OCEB Technology Advanced             February 2, 2009

The beta programs have closed, with the exception I think of the Technical Advanced exam, but the official tests are coming in on  schedule, through PearsonVUE.  Also from the email:

“OMG, in partnership with the UML Technology Institute (UTI), developed the new certification exam series to support business analysts, architects and designers building and using Business Process Modeling and Business Process Management techniques to define, improve and automate business processes. Subject Matter Experts from more than 25 companies developed the exams’ coverage and questions, while extensive beta-testing and psychometric analysis validated their final forms. The exams will be available worldwide in English; in the Asia-Pacific region they will also be made available in Japanese in the near future. In India, QAI is OMG’s official OMG Certification Program representative.”

It was a long road (more than a year in the making), and it sure is nice to see it come to light.  Congrats to all the contributors to the OCEB examinations for the hard work and persistence.

Here at BP3 we were fortunate enough to participate in the creation of the OMG Certified Expert in BPM (OCEB) examinations.  This is a big step for the BPM business because it starts to standardize what it means to be an expert in BPM.  Anyone will benefit from reading some of the reference material cited on the OMG site (it isn’t a complete list, but it is a great primer), and even the test itself will teach you a fair amount about BPM (trust me, you’ll run across a question you don’t know the answer to.  If you’re like me, you hit the books afterward to find out more about that corner of BPM).

One of the criticisms I’ve heard leveled at BPM in the past is that it isn’t easy to communicate what it is – a technology, a discipline, a toolset?  This certification starts to put all the parts of BPM into a context that makes sense.  These are the technical parts that you need to understand.  These are the business parts.  These are the parts that apply equally to both.

Putting these tests together isn’t easy.  All the question-writers are volunteers, and we write a lot more questions than what shows up on the test (except for you lucky beta-testers, who get to answer ALL the questions).  All the questions go through psychometrics and tech reviews and reference reviews, as well as wordsmithing edits.  The process of writing the tests was an interesting process in and of itself.  Thanks to Jon Siegel for working with everyone throughout the whole process and keeping our band of BPM experts in the fold for over a year to get this done.

If you are thinking about taking the OCEB exams and aren’t sure where to start, feel free to ask your questions here, we’ll do our best to point you in the right direction.  Its all computer-based and very easy to schedule and take the tests through the nearest PearsonVue test center.  For another post on the exam, check out Sebastien Stein’s (of Aris) post here. Also take the time to explore OMG’s OCEB home page, linked above.  It has several useful resources, not to mention listing the 25 companies that contributed expertise to the project!  I believe the fundamental exam, and the business and technical intermediate exams, have been published.  The advanced exams are now in the beta period, so we’re very close to the finish line!

Good luck with the exams!

UPDATE: there is an update here on the schedule of exams.

Phil Gilbert gave the keynote for Day 2 of the OMG BPM ThinkTank 2008 conference.  Using a combination of facts and humor, Phil made a great case for community governance intellectual property, to be developed in the near future (fall 2008?).  The key benefits were to reduce friction/drag on the overall process of chartering projects and resolving resource conflicts.  For example:  How does the integration team decide whether to allocate someone to the $500k BPM project or the $100M legacy system replacement project?  It is too easy for IT teams to simply freeze up and only tackle these huge projects and not address any of the smaller quick-benefit solutions.  On the budgeting/approval side:  chartering 1 big project has the same overhead as chartering 20 smaller projects.  To reduce the drag, one can allocate an investment to a BPM capable team, with an expected return.  Then that team can, in turn, charter projects in an expedited way.  As Phil points out, the incentives have now been flipped, such that the incentive is to ACT, rather than to veto or stall, because the goal is an outcome, not a budgetary one, but a results-oriented outcome.

This is pretty neat stuff if we can take it from philosophy to actionable framework.  In fact, it occurs to me that a good governance framework can help with several of the “effects” that act as barriers to BPM adoption (the sophomore effect, for example, and potentially the bus brake effect).

Good Q&A session afterward as well, ranging from governance to BPM and SOA playing nice together.  Phil did a great job of tying it back to these governance issues.  Looking forward to seeing the next level of detail on this… I’m not sure if its the yellow brick road but it does seem like it has some promise.  Look to phil’s blog for more details and for upcoming updates.

Round Table sessions at the conference didn’t go as expected due to the turnout.  At our new, combined table, we discarded the prescribed topics and chose our own:  talking about the barriers to successful BPM adoption.  Our table, by chance, was comprised entirely of vendors and consultants (a vendor fest).

In no particular order:

1. The Sophomore Effect. Most companies are successful with their first BPM project.  They tend to focus on something fairly attainable and have good alignment and staffing for the first project.  They get an unmitigated success, but as soon as it goes live, the team that was supposed to get all the learning about BPM and form the core of a Center of Excellence is reassigned to everyday work within the organization.  That might be back to their business units or to other applications or support functions in IT.  As a result, when the second BPM project comes along, the staff has to be re-incarnated.  Often the actors are all new, or mostly new, and you don’t get the benefit of expertise gleaned from the first project.
2. The Bowflex Coat Rack Effect.  BPM is not a pill.  Its exercise.  But companies are always looking for the quick fix.  If you want to be successful with BPM, you have to work at it, you have to have discipline, to really reap the rewards over time.  After all the biggest ROI %’s don’t come from the 1.0 release of each process, but from the point-releases – the 1.1 and 1.2 releases for example, or the 2.0 release.
3. The Used-Car Effect (or, my preference: The Little Red Wagon Effect). Often a company can’t come up with the budget to buy new software (Capex) but they have maintenance dollars that can be appropriated for other purposes.  This can end up being more expensive in the long-run, but in the short term it lets the company get going at a lower price entry point. The used car analogy is that you keep investing in keeping the used car running rather than buying a new one.  The little red wagon analogy is simply the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” theory.
4. The Bus Brake Effect. In many companies, the BPM project can be halted by almost anyone that is involved in the project.  We called this the Bus Brake Effect because everyone on a city bus can be stopped by each person pulling the brake cable at each interesection.  Making progress quickly depends on everyone on the bus withholding their right to pull the cable.  In the BPM world, this means convincing all the different parties to participate – the Compliance group, Governance, Security, Integration teams, the Line Manager in the Business, the Champion, and other Business stakeholders.  Its quite a list of people that can raise exceptions to your deployment progress, or essentially veto progress if they don’t agree to staff their responsibilities to your process.
5. The Sharepoint Effect. This is almost the opposite of the Bus Brake Effect.  Where the bus brake effect concerns too many vetos and not enough yes-votes, the Sharepoint Effect represents the unbridled proliferation of ungoverned, adhoc processes using unmanageable technology.  Sharepoint becomes a substitute for process, or a substitute for the Excel-based or Access-based processes of the past.  However, there’s no way to find the appropriate Sharepoint site for the appropriate process or process task.  The general consensus was that Sharepoint does more harm than good.  UPDATE:  Now the real worry in many big IT groups is that BPM will be another Sharepoint – leading to unrestrained anarchy of adoption by business users.  See below for solutions, but I don’t believe this is the danger that IT departments worry it will be, because of the nature of BPM installations and deployments.
6. The AA Effect. Ok this wasn’t part of our Round Table but probably should have been.  For BPM adoption, the first step is to admit you have a process problem (in some circles, we call these “problems” opportunities).  If you can’t do that, then you’re not receptive to really making the changes your business needs.

Ok, so we’ve listed the effects that act as barriers or resistance to BPM adoption.  What can we do about them?

1. The Sophomore Effect and the Bowflex effect really require similar treatment to avoid.  Preventative measures are key.  Education helps managers avoid this, but more importantly, plan for more work than the first roll-out, and staff that additional work with the same team, BEFORE the rollout.  By having the staffing plan extend to work for a 1.1 release, or extend to work on the next process immediately following, the time for people to “return to the day-to-day busines” is reduced.  The temptation is reduced as well.  And the longer these people are focused on process improvement, the less likely they are to be re-allocated. The third tactic pays off in the long run, but is not preventative – and that is to make sure you measure the process, so that you have real measurable results to communicate to the executive team and justify getting your crack team together to deliver additional results.
2. See above.
3. The Used Car Effect – the coping mechanism here is, if you can’t beat them, join them.  Sell software in ways that these corporations are prepared to buy – as a subscription, for example, or SaaS.  It may be more expensive for the customers in the long run to rent rather than buy, but in the short term they have predictable, smaller, expenses, and it becomes an ongoing budget item to plan for.  I think this is a tough one to fight head on with a customer.  If they have a certain way of funding projects, usually the best bet is to play ball with their predilections.
4. The bus brake effect – the best advice we have here is to “paint the matrix green”.  Which is a fancy way of saying, make a matrix of all the people you need to support your project or contribute to your project, and then make sure you get each of them to truly agree to do so.  You have to watch out for those who say yes, but do “no”.  But fundamentally you have to build consensus in your process/project.  Still, this is a tough one to conquer.  Lots of moving parts are required to make BPM projects a success, so I feel it is particularly susceptible to this kind of failure.
5. The Sharepoint Effect requires the company to take control of its own destiny – vendors can’t do this for them.  One of the better ideas was to have governance around creating Sharepoint portals – that you can set one up if you implement and stand up a real process associated with that portal.  But with respect to BPM, IT can manage the assets that run the processes, and the process for putting those assets into production, and still give the business the flexibility and room to breathe to create the right kind of process assets to be promoted…
6. The AA Effect.  Well, since this is just my own personal addition to the list, I’ll just tackle this one with my own opinion.  If you don’t believe you have a process problem, or you don’t believe there is much room for improvement (a gentler way of saying the same thing – because implicitly if you think you don’t have any problems, that you also have no opportunities to improve!), try doing a kaizen event, or a business process discovery session.  Establish measures for your process and see if you still feel that there aren’t opportunities for improvement.  The good news is, figuring out whether or not you have a process opportunity/problem does not require buying a lot of software and making a big infrastructure investment – it just requires bringing in an expert or consultant for a short period of time to do some discovery and size the opportunities for you…

Now, the real story is this.  All of the solutions just require one thing from an organization and its vendors:  Leadership.  I don’t mean, necessarily, upper management or “champion” when I say leadership.  I just mean leadership in its most basic form.  Someone on your team, or someone outside your team, will have to lead, to create consensus, to see these effects before they fully stop your progress and plan the path around them or through them.  Not to mention, you need an aspirational view of what you can achieve in your organization with business process improvement – and that, too, requires leadership.

Lance and I are going to be at OMG ThinkTank in October (October 6-7, 2008), and then again at OMG Think Tank in Europe (November 11-12, 2008).  Lance is hosting a Round Table on Managing Complexity, and I’ll be hosting a Round Table on how process execution is being impacted by ERP/SOA/Web2.0. This year Think Tank is going to have much more of a business focus around BPM, which is welcomed news! Not that the technical side hasn’t been very well represented — and with great content.  Nearly all of the BPM events hosted each year have technology as the center of gravity. Looking forward to seeing how this goes over. The round table sessions are without a doubt the best part of Think Tank. A round table is where you usually have about 6-10 true industry experts and/or very active BPM practioners from mainstream companies sit around a table and provide their experiences based on the topic of the RT.

Last year at the conclusion of the event, everyone agreed Think Tank should expand this vehicle as it was chock full of some great insights and collaboration. Most of the time the topic left the table and was picked up at breaks and after session get-togethers to continue the discussion. The purpose of the leader of the RT is to bring some very good knowledge and experience on the topic, but to primarily facilitate discussion; it is not a platform to monologue the content.

If you have the chance I would highly recommend considering going to Think Tank this year in either Chicago or Amsterdam. You can check out the previous year’s event here.

Last year, OMG made some significant advances in specifications in BPM-related spaces. We now have a BPMN 1.1 spec, a beta of the BPDM (Business Process Definition Metamodel) spec for data representation of BPMN models, and two interesting business-oriented models, the BMM (Business Motivation Model), and the BPMM (Business Process Maturity Model).  We have a mix of both technical and business-oriented specifications for defining business process and improving business process.

OMG is now making public its OMG Expert Certification in BPM program (OCEB), and also published the list of 25 experts who helped put the certification exam together. BP3 Played a role in both the business and the technical aspects of the fundamental exam, and we are now writing questions for the Intermediate exams. This is probably a good time to thank OMG and specifically Jon Siegel for doing such a good job organizing this effort.

BP3 got involved with the OCEB effort (OMG Certified Expert in BPM) first, because BPM is our area of primary interest as professionals. But second, certifications prior to this one tended to be software-vendor-specific, the OCEB offered the opportunity to have a more comprehensive and collaborative examination of what it means to be fundamentally qualified as a BPM professional. We also have an interest in both perspectives of BPM – business and technical – and as a team we bring both types of expertise to the table, which we thought would be a healthy perspective to lend to the working group. In talking with Janelle Hill from Gartner last year she advised that the pool of professionals truly qualified and experienced with BPM is woefully thin, to expect that trend to worsen, and that by 2011 the industry will be in dire straights unless additional professionals come into the fold and earn their stripes. This comment certainly resonated with what we know is the current state of the union. I think OMG is doing a good thing here and I hope we see more practioners enter the fray. It’s good for all of us!