Process 2006 Day 2

I attended many fewer sessions today since I was presenting “Web 2.0 and BPM” just after lunch, and wanted to spend the morning doing some fine-tuning — this is the first time that I’ve done it in this form, although I’ve talked and blogged about the ideas extensively. Although I sat in on Ian Gotts’ session before lunch, I have to admit that I didn’t absorb a lot.

I ended up making the last changes to my presentation about 8 minutes before show time, and it could certainly use a bit more tuning now that I’ve presented it once straight through and have an idea of what worked and didn’t work. You can find my slides here, and I’m thinking about podcasting some or all of it and making that available as well. I had some nice feedback and I’m looking forward to evolving this presentation over the next few months.

At the end of the day, Terry Schurter gave a presentation on Customer Expectation Management, based on the material in his new book. I reviewed the book for Terry before publication, and it was funny seeing the book in print, finally, with a quote from me on the front flyleaf. Following his presentation was another rather unstructured panel discussion and closing remarks, from which I ducked out early.

The conference seemed slightly less well attended than last year, although I don’t know the actual numbers from either event. I made a couple of good contacts, so definitely worth the trip. I also had a chance to visit (and stay with) my friends in London, where I earned my keep by fixing his computer and teaching them both about Web 2.0 and BPM. 🙂

I’m now off to southern France to see more friends, Nancy and David Wood: she used to be the MD for FileNet in Australia at the same time that I worked for FileNet at their corporate headquarters, then I camped out at her place for a few months when I was bumming around Australia a few years back, and now they’ve moved to the south of France. She was involved in The Process Factory startup last year, an example of BPM offered as SaaS, although she’s on to other things now.

I’ll be offline until next Tuesday when I’m back in Toronto.

4 thoughts on “Process 2006 Day 2”

  1. Hey Sandy,

    I attended your seminar this afternoon at the BPMG conference. Web 2.0 & BPM was a very interesting topic to cover but i wasnt convinced of the relevance to BPM.
    As a process analyst, i can see how the next
    generation of BPM tools that i might use will benefit from web 2.0, which you pointed out clearly. But like most of the presentations i saw over the 3 days focused far to much on Technology & Theory without giving the audience anything tangible to walk away with. Not to mention the incredibly frustrating use of the acronym “BPM” by every single speaker. It seems to mean something different to every one of the so called “gurus”

  2. Shane, thanks for your comment. Since I’m an engineer by training, sometimes I have the tendency to get too techie, so thanks for that feedback. However, much of what I was talking about is really my predictions of what will happen as Web 2.0 technologies and concepts impact BPM, so there’s not necessarily anything tangible that I could have provided at this point. As I mentioned, this is the first time that I have given this presentation in this form, and expect that the ideas need a bit more refinement.

    In the context of my presentation, “BPM” really means the systems themselves (BPMS) and the way that they are implemented. There are, of course, many other aspects to the practice of BPM, and I was covering just a narrow segment of that.

  3. Hi Sandy,

    I enjoyed your presentation and found it interesting and thought provoking. My own experience is from implementing BPM solutions in financial services. Culture will be the significant hurdle that prevents rapid adoption in the corporate environment. Centralisation, branch transformation, offshoring/nearshoring, outsourcing/rightsourcing ………. all will find it difficult to adopt the view of a folksonomy. There are still large banks that don’t allow their customer facing staff to have access to e-mail! Enough waffle, as I said an enjoyable presentation – thanks.

  4. Kevin, thanks for your comments. I completely agree that the biggest hurdles will be cultural, not technological — I mentioned that at the end of my presentation, but that could have been an entire presentation itself.

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