Business of BPM: Gartner BPM Conf Day II

Today's sessions started off with a great breakfast event with Michele Cantara (VP, Gartner) talking about the BPM marketplace. Most of the rest of the day, I focused on client examples. Everyone seems to be talking about the organizational challenges of change (a lesson we should all have learned on all our other system implementations).

Gartner has decided to offer a second show in the fall in FL. This is definitely the even to be at if you want to talk with customers, hear client / prospect challenges, and meet the vendors. Most of the vendors are here with one noticeable exception - Intalio.

I will work on longer items around some specific topics of discussion, but here were my key takeaways from Day Two (while acknowledging that I am skipping the last section to blog and relax).

Gartner will be coming out with their BPMS updated magic quadrant soon. They have put 5 companies on the watch list - webmethods, EMC, Cordys, Microsoft, and SAP.
DST is currently the market leader for BPMS based on market share.
The drivers of BPMS adoption are - companies have completed other value efforts and focusing on business process, SOA, web 2.0, Six Sigma / Lean / Kaizen, and BPM extending the life of their current applications while waiting for SOA.
The inhibitors of BPMS adoption are - culture, resource shortage, and forecasted (but not existent today) disillusionment with the space.
BPMS CAGR for 2006-2011 is forecasted at 23.8%.
No single vendor can meet all your needs.
BPM is core to a process based ecosystem. (Similar to point from Day One about creating a linkage between internal and external processes.)
An enjoyable key note by Gartner VP & Fellow Daryl Plummer who has excellent stage presence. He talked about SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) and tried to make all of us business people understand without boring the technologists. (Gartner says 40% of the audience here is business.)
Business describes what their job is. Programmers describe what their systems do. A process model closes the gap.
A service in your life today includes phone, water, electricity, Google, etc. A "service" in your architecture is similar in that is an always on connection to one of your backend applications which can be "called" at anytime to perform a function. (My business interpretation of what I heard.)
Talk about event driven service (e.g., the phone rings (event) which triggers me to lift it up and access a service) versus BPM driven service (e.g., after x step call this service to get data).
Lots of talk about options being custom developed application versus BPMS. Some talk about BPM best-of-breed and putting together a virtual BPMS.
American Home Shield talked about using BPM to help them double in size and to capture and drive compliance with best practices.
Symetra Financial talked about eliminating paper processes to improve customer service with less errors and shorter cycle time. He talked about the change of address process requiring someone to pull a paper file, make the changes, capture the before and after screen images, and then return the file. (Oh my gosh! That is almost as bad as a person I met once whose job was to take letters of the printer, fold them, grab an envelope off another printer, and seal the envelope...he did this 8 hours a day.)
Symetra had huge results - 20% increase in productivity per underwriter, 30% increase in productivity per case manager, increased job satisfaction, processing time reduced by 4 days, 67% more volume without increasing staff, increased compliance, and reduced training time by using foolproof processes.
Symetra had some good lessons learned / CSFs - work with a pilot team which for them was newer employees that weren't stuck in the old process, advertise to the users about the benefits (e.g., "No more papercuts"), talk to lots of vendor references, and do a proof-of-concept.
SanDisk talked about their implementation focused on A/P. Their PO processes were too manual making authorization enforcement difficult and international paper approval processes ridiculous (e.g., paper "evaporation").
SanDisk did a 16 week implementation but smartly added on 2 months of piloting and UAT. They reduced cycle time from 3 weeks to 1 week and were able to handle 80% more volume without increasing FTEs.
SanDisk's team is 4 people - architect, administrator, and 2 business analysts.
The SanDisk person did comment that even though they automated the current state it opened up Pandora's box since the users saw the power of the system and wanted to make lots of changes.
Western Union make a great point about how they modeled the "To-Be" future state process prior to buying a tool. Once they got the tool, it identified steps that weren't necessary because the system could fully automate things that the users just assumed had to happen manually.
Epcor talked about their order to cash process which often required a "hero" to make it successful. They looked at custom development (5x) versus BPMS.
Epcor was able to drive their order to cash process form 12-16 hours to 5 hours which made it easier for everyone and increased job satisfaction. The change was hardest on the heros that enjoyed saving the day in the old manual process.
Geisinger talked about using BPM for clinical document capture, A/P, and appeals and grievances with great outcomes.

So, for those of you missing the conference, here are at least a few nuggets. Nothing earth shattering if you know the space but good reinforcement and examples.

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