A follow-on to last May’s conference, BPM 2005, is Process 2006. I’ll be headed to London for the conference next month, but this year I’ll be speaking on the impact of Web 2.0 and social networking on BPM: mashups, tagging and more. From the abstract that I sent to Steve Towers, the conference organizer:
As Web 2.0 advances on the world, expectations for how software will behave are changing, and BPM is no exception. Although many of us from the technology side are working in the echo chamber of Web 2.0 hype, real applications are being deployed that are changing what people will accept with respect to software capabilities and usability. Flickr. Google Maps. Blogger. Del.icio.us. Newsgator. Gmail. Mashups. What do these have in common? More importantly, what can enterprise applications such as BPM learn from them, and what will they be forced to learn from them?
Specifically, I want to talk about some of the characteristics of Web 2.0 and how they will directly impact BPM within organizations: tagging, and the idea of a user-generated folksonomy for categorizing information; user-created content, including their own processes; collaboration; rich user interfaces for web-based applications; RSS feeds and similar subscription models; and lightweight integration models such as we’re starting to see with web mashups.
The conference agenda doesn’t have my session’s title (Steve suggested “Web 2.0 = BPMS 2.0 ?”) or description, but that will all get sorted eventually.
Should be fun, except for the fact that I may be unable to carry my laptop with me (and I’m unwilling to put it in checked baggage). I’m not afraid to fly, but I’m terrified of spending 7 hours on a flight with no laptop or iPod!