Gartner is holding their 3rd BPM Conference right now in San Diego. There are about 1100 people here which shows the growing interest in BPM. It is a mix of companies with a certain bias towards financial services / insurance and government.
There are several things I will pull out an blog on over the next few weeks, but I thought I would share a few items from the first day.
- Interesting discussion about the shift in BPM value propositions from cost, value, and agility to process visibility and metrics to innovation.
- Lots of discussion about top down versus bottom up. Challenges with either.
- Move with companies that are doing this to go from rote processes to intracompany processes.
- Discussion about process as a competitive differentiator.
- Implications of BPM focus include enabling BPO, making SLAs easier, and forcing role definition.
- Three groupings of BPM: (1) BPM Suites (e.g., Appian, Lombardi); (2) Process aware middleware (e.g., Tibco, webmethods); and (3) process orchestration in composite applications (e.g., SAP).
- Heard an interesting presentation about an ideal future state by the founder of Pega and talked with a PBM (pharmacy benefit manager) and a MCO (managed care organization) using them.
- Had several companies tell me about their Proforma use (I was unfamiliar with them).
- Discussion about sub-processes versus end-to-end processes and the challenge of organizational change to support becoming a process centric organization.
- Some typical entry points for BPM include performance management, application integration or upgrade teams, and compliance.
- BPM enables moving from job "artists" and company heros to consistent and predictable processes.
- Rich Phillips from Maritz gave the best user presentation so far talking about their changes. A key point he made is that the typical BPM process is missing the VOC (Voice of the Customer).
- Rich also talked about linking supplier processes to corporate processes to client processes.
- One example Rich used was the ability to drive pricing changes across the company from a one year cycle to a one week cycle.
- There has been too little discussion on process design from an outside in perspective.
- Aflac made a great point that the only reason to automate is visibility.
- El Paso talked about using BPM for a new oil well process and how this got rid of paper and e-mail.
- Had an interesting discussion around User Friendly Process Modeling and all the options from stickies and whiteboards to PPT to Visio to VSM (Value Stream Mapping) to IT specific tools to BPA tools to using the BPMS modelers.
- A great kickoff activity that one company mentioned for getting users thinking about process is to have them talk about their morning process of getting to work.
- Peter Schwartz from the Global Business Network spoke. As I have always respected him, this was a treat. He talked about the future of BPM being tied to the change of customers (e.g., aging, diversification, greening, Long Tail), change of technology (e.g., spintronics, nanophotonics, plasmonics, convergence), change in competition (e.g., consolidation, innovation, new nations), and change in business (e.g., raw material costs, geo-political).
- Was introduced to the COO of Zynium (Dutch Dwight) by a consultant who said that their product has been helpful in Visio import / export for BPM.
More to come...
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