We are truly grateful for the opportunity to present at Impact.  It is a rare opportunity to share what you do for a living with your colleagues and peers – and I just wanted to take time out to the folks who helped us secure a speaking role for our customer, Wells Fargo’s Reid Denny.

Given our late-afternoon Wednesday time slot, I was a little worried about attendance.  About 10 minutes before start time, we had 5-6 people in the room.  By the time we started, nearly every seat was full.  Lance Gibbs kicked off our presentation, and people kept coming in … filling the room, standing in the back, and bringing in extra chairs.

My favorite part about any presentation is Q&A afterward – I wish we had a transcript from our own session.  I was surprised to see one of IBM’s BPMers in the back of the room with a Flip camera taking video of our session – certainly flattered they anticipated our session might be worth recording.  I’m not sure how well it came out in video, and how well the audio picks up, but we’ll keep everyone posted if we’re actually able to lay hands on the video or a link to it.

Finally, a few people were interested in discussing or getting a rehash of the presentation.  Of course we can’t recreate exactly what happened, but we’re including the presentation, below – and if you’re interested in voice-over or Q&A around it let me know and I’ll see if I can schedule something with you.

We heard a lot of positive feedback about the presentation, and we’d love to hear from you directly if you were able to attend – feedback is what will make us better next time!

I’ll expand on the “business driven” delivery team in another post…

The merger of two airlines has been used as an example of something BPM is not well-suited for, that ACM would be well-suited for.  I gave this argument a bit too literal a reading, based on Keith Swenson’s response (thought exercise vs. demonstration).  But having worked on quite a few BPM projects that were born of mergers (not the act of deciding to merge, but the after-affect of the merger), I found this article on the Wells Fargo and Wachovia merger to be just the kind of external, public information I was looking for to better explain my own views about how mergers happen – and the fact that there really is method (dare I say, process) to the madness.  When you are a big financial institution, or a big tech company (e.g. Cisco), you don’t do just one or two acquisitions in your history.  You might do one or two acquisitions a quarter.  Not all of them will be as big as Wachovia of course… These institutions are constantly reinventing themselves through acquisitions and spin-offs and joint ventures. Any time you do something so valuable, so often, you’ll want to understand it as a business process.

So how do you handle something massive like Trust conversions from Wachovia to Wells Fargo?

This year, Wells Fargo and Wachovia completed one of the biggest trust conversions ever; 81,000 trust accounts and $150 billion in assets were transferred to a common platform. Wells Fargo is now one of the largest U.S. trust providers in the U.S. with 233,000 accounts and $1.3 trillion in assets.

There was a big analysis effort to understand the processes operating at both firms, and to pick and choose best practices from both. After that they modeled these processes, simulated some of them, and implemented.  Some interesting ancillary benefits:

Another benefit is that the use of business process modeling helps the business and IT people communicate with each other. Instead of exchanging Word documents about requirements and technical specifications, where each side typically had trouble understanding the other, they’ve transitioned to graphical process models where both parties can look at the diagrammed process flow and exceptions. Watkins says this has saved thousands of hours of time in writing requirements documents and interpretation time for the technology developer.

So… is BPM low hanging fruit or was it hard work?  Sounds like it was hard, but valuable, work.  Is Wells Fargo really committed to BPM?

“Processes are pervasive whether you’re facing your customer or in the back office, and there’s been a recognition over the last couple of years among business leadership and IT that we should start focusing on more opportunities around process improvement, where we can leverage BPM technology we already own,” he says. “We’ve trained more than 400 people on BPM technology and technical standards like BPMN (business process modeling notation) as a common language for communicating process improvement,” he says.

Well, what do you think?