I’m in my first breakout session of the day, State of BPM – Trends and Drivers for Success: A Leading Analyst Perspective by Gartner, and although the schedule shifted slightly to accommodate overtime speakers in the breakout session, the speaker decided to just go ahead and start anyway so I have no idea who I’m listening to. He’s certainly familiar, I’m sure that I’ve seen him at a Gartner event before, but with the recent departure of Jim Sinur (and, I have heard, Michael Melenovsky), I’m not sure who’s pushing BPM at Gartner these days besides Janelle Hill, and this guy at the front of the room is definitely not her. If I can get some wifi in here, I’ll look up my coverage of the Gartner events and that will likely jog my memory. Oh, wait, I think it’s Simon Hayward, who I referred to previously as the Energizer Bunny of BPM for his high-energy flying tour of BPM at Gartner. Given that Hayward usually does high-profile keynotes, it’s interesting that he’s here doing one of five simultaneous breakout sessions — Gartner’s obviously a little thin on BPM resources these days.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen so many Gartner presentations now that this sort of state of the union address looks pretty rehashed to me. Gartner’s business process maturity model takes a starring role, as it has for the last several months; I first saw it in a webinar that I hosted with Appian and Jim Sinur last October, when it was still labelled “the road to BPM” instead of BPMM. He went on to talk about the value of BPM to enterprises, and moving from a functionally-driven to a process-driven organization, also seen in that October webinar and many other places.
His six critical success factors for a BPM project (or for that matter, any IT project):
- Strategic alignment
- Culture and leadership
- People
- Governance
- Methods
- Information Technology
In moving from implicit processes within applications to explicit processes in a cloud above the infrastructure, he sees three paths: BPM suites, process-aware middleware (he puts TIBCO in this category), and process orchestration in composite applications.
Then, the now-ubiquitous gear diagram of BPMS, with the process orchestration engine and business services repository in the middle, surrounded by the 10 necessary features and functions required to play in this market. He moved quickly through a number of other subjects, such as how BPM and SOA are orthogonal dimensions when implementing processes (nice characterization), and the complementary relationship between BPM, BI and BAM. He finished up with a slide that I’ve seen many times about assigning responsibilities between IT and business, still valid although I think that some of the responsibilities are shifting more than is indicated here.
I realize that Gartner is a draw at a conference like this, but I’m hoping to see a little more innovative material out of them soon.